cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Still catching up on the slices of life audio reflection, this one almost two weeks old. ALways Be ‘Poligizing for being behind? This audio recording is from January 26, the morning I left home in Strawberry Arizona, for the 220 mile express trip to Virginia.
Slices of Life 008: Leaving Arizona
I am going to miss these Big Blue Skies
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
In many ways, this was eerily similar to the day I left on my 5 month odyssey in June 2011, but also very different. At that time was unsure if I could even live the road life; would I hate it? I of course found it I could manage living out of Big Red and being mobile for few months, and that home was always in Strawberry even if I wasn’t. I know now too that if I need to I can do 500, 600, 700 miles in a day.
I reflected on my section of ds106, a class I will be teaching in person at University of Mary Washington. Last night was third session I did remotely via Skypa (a huge Arizona sky sized thanks to Jim Groom who has been present for my students, and set up the two way video liv stream)
This is far from an optimal way to teach this way; It is hard for me to see, hard to hear audio clearly via skype (especially since I had busted m laptop and was using my iPhone- students are tiny!). I cant read body language, and really I am “sort of not there”. But it was just a bridge needed to give me time to get across the country.
So far, 20 of my 25 students have their domains and wordpress blogs set up, done with minimal direction — I agree with Jim that it’s a lesson in not relying totally on the course or the teacher to provide answers, that they will need to figure out things on their own, with their pal. Half of these have already customized their themes.
Last night’s session was the discussion of Gardner Campbell’s talk on No Digital Facelift and paper on Personal Cyberinfrastructure. Stealing/borriwing/co-opting on of Gardner’s own classtoom techniques, I had asked them to think about “nuggets” within reading or video- a key sentence or phrase that grabbed their interest, curiosity as starting points for discussions. I provided Jim a few YouTube links that use the technique to point to a particular timecode to start playing, examples:
- Bag of gold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=02m50s
- Digital facelift http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=10m15s
- Little big planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=18m50s
- Small things can be meaningful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc#t=33m20s
I also had Jim show some examples of how te “bags of gold” became a bit of a viral meme last year. e.g.
Tim’s Kinetic Typography, Tom Woodward audio remix, Giulia Forsythe’s visual notes, Barbara Dieu’s video remox — in all of these, these show visual ways of drawing out different nuggets of the talk.
I tried to start with a discussion of “What is bag of gold? what does it mean to you?” … awkward silence.
But the discussion picked up next when we moved to “what is a visual facelift”.
It was interesting that students felt Gardner was advocating a total technology makeover for teaching, which got into the most active state as they debated what could and could not be taught online. I for one have not come across anyone advocating that surgery could eb taught completely online.
Class closed with an attenmt to describe what Personal Cyberinfrastructure means- asked student to read passage out loud (borrowed again technique from from Gardner):
Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but it is something more general than a tool or a resource developed for a particular project, a range of projects, or, even more broadly, for a particular discipline.
“” American Council of Learned Societies,
Our Cultural Commonwealth, 2006
We do have an archive of this class
And posts from this assignment are available at http://ds106.us/tag/pci
I then speculated what to do next week with Storytelling- introduce examples of web storytelling?
The slice closed with a personal memory of my trip return to this road in November, where I crossed the 15,000 mile mark and getting an iPod shuffled memory of my Mom, She’s a Rainbow”
Driving north from the Ponderosa Forest into the pinyon pine forest and eventual sage brush high desert terrain near Winslow, I marveled at how subtle wast this transition from forest to high plains, not clear where one begins and other ends — life is gradational
