Whatever Happens

So much i’d love to talk and wonder about, to not let this Web 2.0 connection go, but so it goes, i know.  I did forget, however, to mention a recent NY Times article that i found interesting in terms of Lakeview’s grade reporting via our cheap version of Edline, while the county about has real-time grades posted, and a push for us to match the public school immediacy.  The article, “I Know What You Did Last Math Class” , tracks the effects of immediate grade updates.  I think the invitation of parents to take part immediately in grade reviews is destructive.  It turns school into an extension of parenting and the worst and anxious of parental ambitions and worries for their children.  School is not to authorize parenting, but to wean children into a larger world of peers and learning.  To Web 2.0, in the worst way, invite parents back into being collaborative of every day of their children’s learning is horrible!  Parents anxious in the way the article describes simply do not understand the Web 2.0 sense of learning how to learn.  Whether that is clear in the school to teach with teachers and to teach to parents and the larger community remains an open questions, like so much of Web 2.0 stuff.  There’s lots of good stuff here to talk about with students, with colleagues, with administration and parents, and into the community.  The BEST thing that this class had done is to open up this longing for conversation this way — to give the language and tools to talk about the call into collaborative learning, rather than “private” learning  in privileged ways in non-public schools.  A radical notion.  Now, how to continue to think about it, explore it, share it, and turn into a tool of radical renewal of private education, an hilarious oxymoron in the Web 2.0 world.  The cost of this, again, it seems to me is well suggested in the current Science 2.0 article in Scientific American.  Best, tho’, again have been Shelley’s offerings, urgings, proddings, and company, something i like to think of in the midst of anxious egotistic Woody Allen move, “Annie Hall”, and anxiously going along to the movie and standing in line, and in front to turn and talk was tall, to Woody’s diminutive, Marshall McLuhan, talking the ways of the medium as the message, hilarious, and freeing, too.  Shelley is the keen and clear and sly laughing McLuhan to my anxious Woody Allen. 

I’m much thankful for the company, and the laughs, and the curiosities lingering open.

I’ve yet to do the voicethread assignment for i’m waiting to see if that is available now on our school server which is considerably faster than mine at home.  In the past it was blocked in some way or other, so that’s being checked and i hope to do the voicethread soon.

Before getting into the blog questions that Shelley posed, i wanted to mention a couple of things that i found really interesting, and figure no one will read to the end of this blather of a blog, so i’m putting it in here. 

One of the nifty things about the course is simply being introduced to the Web 2.0 notion as a notion.  I already had done various collaborative things, but i didn’t know that this was somehow, well, as Shelley so nicely introduced, a Thing!  To name it allowed the disciplined exploration of parts and possibilities. 

Remarkably as well in several Tech-Ed journals in April the Web 2.0 concept was featured, so there was much to read on about.  In the May Scientific American there is a fine article, with further internet sites to explore, about the impact of Web 2.0 on scientific research.  The Web was created, as far as i can recall, precisely to promote this scientific model of the free exchange of information and collaborative research, evaluation, and more. 

Instead, of course, we’ve got YouTube.  This week Rushworth Kidder in his posting on his Ethics Newsline as The YouTube Illusion poses varieties of challenges to the explosion of information and the inability to keep up with it.  His view of things seems to me to miss some of the possibilities and realities of Web 2.0, but his view is a popular one and one i think is worth considering.  His interest in the ethical dimensions of Web 2.0 as one amongst many internet, well, Things, is something i like and commend to consider, be in conversation with. 

But back to the Scientific American article which is really more interesting to me.  The brief overview is that some, and more, scientists are posting raw data as it happens, considers of possible theories, etc. for others to see and comment on, to take part in.  This is the sort of thing that happens, ideally, in a common laboratory or in an international community of scientists working on some common problem.  On the other hand, to put stuff “out there” is to invite the unscrupulous, rewarded by patents, papers, academic positions, grant money, etc., to steal and claim these ideas and data as their own.  In spite of that obvious danger, Science 2.0 sites are expanding and are, according to the article, more productive than any other way of scientific collaboration. 

The article is interesting in itself, but it reflects back questions about the ways of Web 2.0 in education, it seems.  Our students, for the most part, are not at work on original research, whether in Faulker or fractals or fusion.  To note the few who are doesn’t change the fact that most aren’t.  So, the goal is not original thinking.  I dealt with this with my AP U.S. History students today who are anxiously preparing for the AP exam scheduled for Friday.  I told them several things about the exam, but also that relying on wit or cleverness was not a good strategy.  Nor flowery or elegant language.  Nor original ideas that go off in radical ways from the posed question that is to direct the thesis.  The test in essays is testing the ability to conform to and work within the historical method as imagined by the AP U.S. History folks.  Those are dire restrictions, and one of my most creative and interested students said, “Mr. McCann, you’re killing me!”  This is a student whose energy rose up again when i said that the end of the year Final Exam might be to do an interpretive dance expressing the essence of three Presidents.  This is a student who asked earlier in the year, trying to get a fix on remembering vividly Presidents, “What sort of soup would James Polk be?”  I don’t much like the AP Exams because they drive students like this to doubt their own ways of enacting and loving History.  She said that she has always loved history, and thought she knew it, but now she’s afraid she doesn’t.  That’s not what AP should be for, nor high school classes.  I’m hoping to cheer her own further than the dire shadow of the exam, for she loves our history and making history much more than any exam could register. 

To what extent do school and grades and competition to get into college, to get the Hope Scholarship, drive students into worrying about collaboration, about how the single student will be able to gain recognition from collaborative work?  The AP U.S. History exam is not a test or evaluation or opportunity for collaborative work.  The task of writing together in a joint blog a DBQ essay is something that is most useful for students to learn their own strengths and weaknesses, to learn from one another, to learn how actual historians learn and transform our historical understanding — but that’s not on the AP U.S. History test!  Students, and their teachers, are put in a double-bind here. 

And it’s the same double-bind that scientists are put in when deciding whether to enter the Science 2.0 world or not.  What is the reward, the accreditation, the assessment, the congratulations for work in this way?  Does someone else run off with a prior registered trademark, a possession out of the collaborative work of many into singular seizing hands?  Does the one who hated collaborative projects get the grade and the Hope Scholarship and college acceptances, while the collaborative work of other students has a more diluted grade?  Or do we grade precisely FOR the collaborative element?  And is that in the Lakeview Mission Statement and more?  The school is not up and running on a Web 2.0 basis, and is in the same sort of position as scientists considering Science 2.0.  Do the parents of private school students want to pay big bucks so that their own singular children can “collaborate”?  This is something that we’re way unclear on, even as to what that means. 

The Scientific American article brings some of these issues into focus from a different angle and is useful to consider, to help me think better about the evaluation of these Web 2.0 educational tools and means.  In the article Bill Hooker, a cancer researcher, is quoted as saying, “To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day.  That’s an immense leap forward in clarity.  In a paper, I can see what you’ve done.  But i don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work.  It’s those little details that become clear with an open (online) notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have.  It makes science more efficient.”

I love that from Hooker.  I do think that open collaboration makes learning and life itself more efficient.  I know i’m much more efficient in living more fully with the collaboration, i.e., mutual love and integration and learning from each other, of my wife, and then of my children, and with my students, and with my puppies.  And more.  And what is true here is that it is messier to live this way (from a walk with puppies in a field yesterday we had adventures with ticks last night), but it certainly is a more awake, aware, appreciative way of living.  It’s the same thing that, for me as an Episcopal priest as well as a teacher, the doctrine of the Trinity is all about.  A God getting singular top marks as God is simply not the Biblical God at all.  The Biblical God fumes and frets and fusticates, and then fails alone with the world and the people he loves, and gathers up into learning again, with God learning anew as well as the world and people.  The Bible is a great Web 2.0 document, after all. 

Again, school is laggardly to catch up with this ambition of learning collaboratively.  And that’s part of the frustration, too, of really entering into this Web 2.0 process.  That what is to be collaborative and communion learning can turn instead into a loneliness in the midst of authorized school. 

Web 2.0 is a radical opening for learning all around.  In at least some private schools, and perhaps most private schools at least some,  the mission of the school is to protect the students from “learning all around”.   The mere revolutionary means of connection changes the curriculum — or at least challenges the curriculum.  Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium Is the Message” has resurrected relevance here to consider, and it’s one that has not made its way back into curriculum again.  In some real ways Web 2.0 is not about “tools” or “Things”, it’s really about ways of learning together, and transformations in different ways. 

For me the transformative ways of learning i’ve known and loved and keep learning from include the doctrine of the Trinity, the Biblical story, Karl Marx, Poetry, Thomas Merton, on and on — just as the AP U.S. History folks are saying now that they realize their tests are bogus and so are moving in a half-a-dozen years to what they now think might be a better test of historical thinking in U.S. students and society — we’ll see what they really do.  In the meantime, of course, they keep giving their old tests and raking in the money.  It’s dreary times in AP land, telling students that the AP folks say they know they have been goofus and irrelevant for real historical studies, but it takes them, corporate folks with things to sell, a half-dozen years to “re-tool”.  And in the meantime, good luck to you, cannon-fodder, sales.  That schools turn to such to validate their curriculum is, i think, an abomination and a cheat.  And opportunities for teaching in a collaborative way wither while we wait for AP to re-tool to make yet more money.  Ugh!  All this is reflected in the Scientific American article in various ways.  It’s good to have different angles to consider 2.0 use, ambition, risk — and remembering that learning is ever a risk, not an investment, but a risk. 

Shelley’s diligent work and giving into all this course, and the one ahead and on, is an example of reckless risk given into the love of learning, a community of learning, an enormous gift of time to help and inspire the Luddite like me to take her hand and risk trying this, and then this, and…..well, all the way to this time. 

Shelley’s already off into the next course, leaving us behind, us sputtering and figuring and muddling to the end.  And i guess that’s what i’ll really miss most.  I’ll keep doing this and that in Web 2.0 stuff, and from connects i’ve made with students, with friends, with my daughter, new Web 2.0 stuff keeps coming up to try, experiment with, see what happens.  I’ve not had time, writhing along in some Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in each Thing, and then going limping on, to be in touch with all of the folks of this class company.  All that, i suppose, will end with the end of the class.  And an end of connection with Shelley, too, which i’m sorry to accept, but so it goes. 

At the beginning of things the James Stephens’s tale of Fionn Mac Cumhail saying that the Best Music in the World is The Music of What Happens”, but at the end of times i find good company in Kurt Vonnegut’s “So It Goes….”, his wry blessing.  And all of that is Web 2.0, too, in feeling and understanding  beginning and endings in company, in collaboration, in a remembering, just like we all remember in early years, faced with a test in middle school, perhaps, and what did Bottom become in his dream, in his transformation, in stumbling into the world of Web 2.0? 

Cheers and on….whatever happens 

It’s a late Saturday afternoon with the grey misting sky breaking up into blinding gold sun in thinning clouds and rifts of blue.  I’ve been reading and writing much of the day, and also giving a bath to Finn & Molly, which they really don’t like but try so hard to be so very good — a dear and trying time.  Now they’ve been given their summer trim and look, well, some naked, but their hair will grow soon enuf and i’m sure they will be happier — tho’ they weren’t in the midst of the trim. 

I find i’m waiting impatiently to get Thing 23 and “get it done”, tho’ that also makes me sad.  The timing of the course has been one now running down into the end of school, the departure of seniors i’ve known for years, the AP tests a’comin’, endless meetings, rachetted up concerns all around, and more and more — a time, that is, when it’s hard to lean back and gather up and reflect upon the course, much less plan further from it.

I’m glad to report that of my 5 BookMooch sends 3 have been received and now i have 6 points to use, a book a point to request from others.  My sending of the 5 books, 2 to one address, cost me $11.00, so if out of that i get 6-8 books sent to me free, that’s a fine bargain, if any books that i want are out there on BookMooch.  So far i haven’t found any, but i haven’t had time to look far.  Better, i suppose, would be donating my points to charitable trusts distributing books to those in prison or in other countries or whatever.  Anyway, i just wanted to note a testimony that the site seems to work. 

I haven’t had much time to go looking back through all the websites, social networks, etc., that i signed up for during the course.  RSS feeds i’ve checked now and then, and found a thing or two to tag and put away to check further when i have time……  And that’s the reality for me anyway.  I don’t have time.  It’s like how i love books, and subscribe to several free print book catalogues — i was sorry when The Common Reader catalogue up in northern NY state went out of business, for it was the best of book catalogues by far — at least of those i know.  If YOU know of a great book catalogue please let me know so i can get signed up.  Anyway, the point is that in all the book catalogues i get i love going through them with a pencil, circling this or that book, writing the page number on the cover, and have a grand time virtually shopping.  I can’t buy all these, of course, tho’ sometimes i will one or two — but most often i just put the catalogue aside, and toss in time when the time has run out.  In other words, there are infinite wonderful reads, things, wonder in this world — and, as the Edward Gorey t-shirt says, so little time. 

I’ve found the same with this course.  So many great sites, wonderful resouces, grand connections, new worlds opening, new company.  Yet time cut these things short time and again for me.  The best of it was in personal explores in terms of my puppies and my grandson.  I also had momentary fine connections with Shelley out of my frustrations, which she handled kindly every time, and then with one of my colleagues now and then in the course.  The course itself, however, demanded individual work — and given limited time, and differing computer configurations and internet connections, this took varying but always, i suspect, a good deal of time.  And at this time of year.  But, yes, i know, so it goes. 

What i’ve begun is printing out pages of Shelley’s Things and associated references to put in a notebook to return to, with internet sites noted if not clear in the version of the Things printout.  It would be a lovely thing for the dullard, tho’ not Lollard, likes of me to have a book to be able to refer to for a course like this.  So, i saw today, Shelley is recommending a Firefox homepage for the course to help along the videos and other nifty things.  My son uses Firefox in his online editing and more business, and recommended it to me, but when i tried to install Firefox on my own i had all sorts of dire warnings, confusions, shut downs, etc.  That is, it was like the angst of change with all sorts of disconnects, fears, and warning bells going off.  To be guided through this on one’s own computer would be a real boon.  Those who are internet and computer savvy don’t need this, of course, but for the likes of antediluvian me a book to turn to would be loverly.  And Shelley already did this in various cheat-sheets for this or that along the way.  I’d like a written curriculum to accompany the online course.  I find that my students who do not simply trust and go-over to internet, but who use and explore it, and anchor it in written texts to consider, revise, scribble and more, in hand and side-by-side, are, in my view, doing better critical work to learn anything at all. 

So, for me there are two issues, one of having a print copy of the course ahead (i hated, after all, having to wait for the next Thing to be posted!), and then the lack of time for the extraordinary amount of work to do, at different speeds for each of us depending on our own style of learning and our own and our school’s system of internet connection.  These are variables outside Shelley’s control, so they are not her problem.  Just as when i require internet or computer assignments of my students, and either their computer or the school system is on the blink — that’s not their fault.  But what a waste of time, so much waste of time, in disconnects, or even variable connects. 

And frustrating to me having so little time to explore, play with, see how it works, share with others, all the grand showers of wishing stars of this course. 

I mentioned that my sister, Janet, was here last week and shared her own wonder and cheers and cynicisms on internet learning, and talked about a teacher at the colloquium she was attending, Jim Mirabella, and his book, Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary!  Hilarious title, and yet i loved, too, the knee-jerk connections of a) job, b) credibility, and c) six-figure salary.  What a bogus of what we are working on in learning and teaching, and yet much what the politics of education these days promote.  Strange times.

 I prefer Robert Bly’s poem, stark and disconnected yet remembering — er, nope, i guess i can’t share that with you since the Edu-blog site insists weirdly on double-spacing if not running to the end of a line — so i’ve no poem to give you.  Sorry.  That, however, is much of the frustration of all the course — so many good things, so much to share, so much opened, and then closed down by not having the magic key, the obvious key for computer folks, but not having it as just an ordinary jill or joe with little time….and how much have we lost in not having a mentor nearby, everyday, or some book of tips — we need, after all, for this course, Web 2.0 for Dummies.  There are such books for other functions, at least as far as i can understand the descriptions — but not for teachers in this Web 2.0 world.  My sister says that Web 2.0 is actually passe, and that more is going on beyond the “.” .  How is one to keep up, or figure anything? 

There is a philosophical, or maybe merely sociological question in the frantic of CEU’s for internet accreditation.  Everything that we learn, of course, will be out of date before the opening of school next year.  Our students may know a little of this, more of this, etc.  The whole Web 2.0 is opening doors for interaction, with each other, with our students, with the world, and the confusion of all those doors wildly opening and who is responsible for what.  A student of mine, for example, earlier this year said that a plagiarism of a paper for another class had begun by my introducing a site of papers for sale or to copy.  The doors fly open and closed as in some Marx Brothers movie. 

And, of course, i do not mean that Shelley has left something out in this course.  Rather that all the riches of this course, if to be embraced and certified by the state and by our own schools needs to receive support and further resources to make what we are learning with Shelley’s introductions and cheers something to bring to our students and our classrooms and with our colleagues.  That’s not Shelley’s job, but the job and commitment of our schools — and something we need to ask of them.  Something even as small and as essetnial as time to work with all Shelley opened to us. 

For a finale let me try again Robert Bly’s poem , “Gratitude to Old Teachers”.  Well, you can see if that worked or not.  If it didn’t go look up the poem on the Library of Congress site.  Or better yet, buy Bly’s lovely book, Meditations On the Insatiable Soul. 

And then Sunday come Sunday…… 

I worked through the search and explore missions over the past weekend with my sister, a distance learning teacher and coordinator for Washington State University, here on a visit for a few days.  She introduced me to some things along the way, including the bookmooch i mentioned in the last posting, and now already five books sent off to good homes and points accumulated for me to mooch books from others if i ever have a spare moment to even ask, and also blist.com which i’ve registered for and am beginning to explore along with her, long-distance now that she’s back in Yakima.   But you might want to check out both for yourself.

Anyway, back to social networking.  I signed up for Classroom 2.0 and began poking around, following Shelley’s suggestions.  The Forums, Groups, and Tags were similar to things we’ve explored before.  Also, when looking for things of particular interest at the moment to me, whether school or personal i didn’t find much at first poking around. 

I think, however, that for this sort of Thing and networking tool you most likely have to go out on a limb, risk something, jump in and ask, or respond with bravado or curiosity or whatever, and then see what happens.  In a way it is like the BookMooch site, that you can’t ask for books until you’ve given books to others who are only able to ask from you because they’ve already given books to others.  The style of all this is dynamic — you have to jump in and then see what happens. 

Unfortunately now at the end of the year in a roil of chaos all around i’ve not time to really focus on this, engage over time in offerings and listenings and dialogues.  The timing, for me, just stinks — that is not about the course, but about my dexterity in juggling at the moment too many things. 

I have, tho’, as i said, signed up from Classroom 2.0 and hope to fill out my profile and join in further soon.  An immediate joy, tho’, was poking around in some of the videos chosen and shared, and i especially fell in love with the Medieval Help Desk.  It so absolutely accurately skewered my own sullen, pseudo-tolerant, reluctance in all these new shenanigans, like, on the video, books.  I think this could be fun to use with students next year at the beginning of the year in my history classes — about the new technology and laptops and so on, the obvious.  But then to turn it around to ask questions about using the books we will be using in the course.  To what extent, after all, are they a bit in the shoes of the reluctant monk struck bored and dumb and waiting before a book, dependent on someone else, like a teacher, to open the book?  And to what extent do they follow the “instructions” as doggedly, and minimally, as the monk in the video?  Some talk back and forth then about texts and information of all different kinds, now and in the past.  One of the texts i use comes with a CD of text and more, while another text comes with a website for interactive study — and each of these is not entirely accurate.  The connection of CD or internet sources with the print text has some slippage.  That is also part of what i want to make clear for better “reading” of print and digital and web texts of information and opinion by my students — and to learn better myself. 

A couple-three weeks ago i went to a church evening program with a presentation by a Hospice coordinator.  I went because my wife is not only a PT for the county schools but also plays harp in the hospital on a regular basis for Hospice patients.  The program was terrific, and one of the resources i came away with was a website for caregivers at www.mycarecommunity.org .  The community here offers first of all immediate help in naming, organizing, and so on one’s own caregiving.  Beyond that, tho’, there are lots of other things to connect with, to not make it up on your own, to blog, to search, to wiki, to forum, to on and on.  First, however, was the offering of registering to use a site to schedule one’s caregiving tasks, and then second, to find resources in your own community for caregiving.  In other words, the first move was to offer immediate help for caregiving. 

 The same, i suggest, might be the entry into all this Web 2.0 stuff, i.e., immediate help in doing the task of teaching.  The usual pitch, it seems to me, is that we must, as teachers, do what our students are doing, preparing them for their world ahead and so on.  What our students now are doing, of course, however “ahead” of us they are, are already behind the times — and we will not be before the times as “teachers” to teach them how to access any and every new Web 2.0 and other connections and resources. 

Actually, as teachers i do not think our primary task is to teach how to access new modes and media of information, but rather, whatever the genre, how to receive, consider, critique, and use whatever we are connecting with. 

My sister said something to me as we talked about all the course here i am involved in, and about Web 2.0, and similar connections that she works with in college and graduate and post-graduate studies — that to learn the 23 Things is to learn, well, 23 Things, even tho’ it’s multiplied by a factor of 7 or more.  But that’s not what is important.  The important thing is to learn that everything that you learn will be different in 30 seconds with a new way of learning, hearing, imagining, manipulating.  And that’s the way to learn.

That made perfect sense to me.  One of the texts i use in my AP U.S. History class is After the Fact, an exploration of different ways of “doing history”.  One of the early chapters talks about the Salem Witch Trials and how with absolutely NO new “data”, i.e., “information”, a new genre, template, platform, whatever word best gives the sense of this for Web 2.0, gave a new view of the dynamics, the causes, the results of the Salem Witch Trials when two historians tracked the pattern of accusators and accused on a late 17th century map of Salem, discovering new groupings to suggest new explanations of what was happening in the Witch Trials.  Now i know another vocabulary to describe what they were doing — they took all the information already known and then introduced new tags to the mix, and up came a new opening into understanding the Witch Trials.  There remained other tags, and no one “true”, but the discovering of new tags, just like psychedelic experiences and substances and other approaches to the accusations and the trials, produced new “clouds” of The Salem Witch Trials — clouds to make new rainfall and nourishing new understandings that keep growing beneath the arching rainbows of sorrow and wishes and learning new and responsible more. 

I suspect i’ll always be a bit shy of this social networking, for i have little patience, and also am old with limited time to share.  Still, i hope to contribute something to the collaborative work of Classroom 2.0 .  As i think i’ve said before, i don’t have a cell phone and i don’t want to be “connected” all the time, not even to those i love best and most.  I think that loving means also considered separation, and the whole “Twitter” notion seems to me horrific, and nothing i would visit upon anyone i loved.  But then i may be without imagination into this new spring world of twitters.  I’m not claiming that how i feel means anything other than that. 

Finally, i’d say that the social networking of Classroom 2.0 and much of what we’ve been doing is really terrific and fine in theory, and if one had infinite time.  I must confess that i’ve been trying to stay in touch with a mere three teachers i met and worked with several years ago at a Cambridge University summer program — and that the time to keep in touch has diminished more and more over the years, even tho’ we all wanted to stay in touch, cherished each other’s ideas and company, and so on.  Same with former students.  And, quite honestly, i would much much more love to be in touch with former students and with former colleagues than with whoever happens to show up on Classroom 2.0 or any of the other social networking sites. 

I like to be in touch with those i have been, literally, in touch with — for their voices and questions and quiet i can trust because of a time together face to face, and often with hugs, or at least sharing a cup of coffee. 

Others, of course, far beyond my mere physical touch, are far more brilliant and rich and so on than my small company of friends.  I have called those “books”, and now there are other modalities of information, conversation, etc., etc. 

It seems to me, merely for me, old fashioned, that what matters is first the connection — and only then do i care or trust to learn.  I’ve been talking in U.S. History classes lately how the critical question of the Depression was a failure of trust, the freezing of conversation, the collapse of faith — and that began again in, i think, the dense and thick and ebullient physicality of FDR, which we can still get a thin sense of in the play/movie “Annie”.  It’s amazing and remarkable that this sense of renewed ability came out of a polio victim, or in Annie, an orphan.  That’s, tho’, much of what U.S. mythical history has always  been about.  The down side of that is studying the Jim Jones and Jonestown phenomenon with my senior Religion in America seminar and how much Jones and John Winthrop’s Massachusetts had, at least potentially, in common.  I’m mentioning this because for Winthrop and the Puritans of Massachusetts and for Jones and his followers in Jonestown all depended upon a closeness, a physical presence and power felt shared.  So, there are downsides to that and dangers.

Anyway, social networking seems to me and for me thin.  My best times with this course, for example, have been when i could talk about it with someone else — in person.  I did this with some of my colleagues early on, and then with further colleagues in the grocery store — i met the other day the husband of a retired colleague taking the course who said a) he still couldn’t understand how anyone who was not retired could possibly do this course, and b) he’d been reading my blather in this blog.  That kind of connection is what cheers and tickles me.  It’s the sort of thing, like asking a student to help me embed a something or other in a blog or a wiki, and then going on to share videos, websites, etc., that keeps me going in all this. 

I think learning needs hugs.  Social-networks don’t offer much of that.  That’s why i think it is important to do all of this learning of the 23 Things, and more, to find a place to meet our students, to meet each other, to use these things, laugh at them as they do their routine crazy gambols, and stay in touch learning. 

I’m sure that is what Shelley does ever with her faculty companions, and what we’d all like to do. 

The blog assignment again — Overall impressions, curious and interesting, but not that much different from several other ways of connecting with and asking of and contributing to other folks in interest groups.  As to finding anything in groups or blogs of “value”, well, little, but i said that all before. 

As to ideas to use social networking — i honestly don’t really trust it enuf to jump in and use it.  It does not seem to me, from what i’ve explored, which is little, so i will do more, rich enough to care to share. 

So, for example, for AP U.S. History there is more, at least as i’ve found so far, via Google search than anything offered to social network share.  There is also, of course, far far more out of Google search on Toy Theatres or Travel Lit or Athanasius or Fionn and Irish Legends or, well, on and on, my regular “search” of any of the sites we’ve been sent to in the course of this course.  That is, my social networking in terms of topics are richer  by far in Google and other merely search engines.

I think what the Web 2.0 and all this course is trying to create is a trust, a credit given, to our community of teaching and learning.  To create that trust means that each of us must contribute to that trust.  And keep doing so in making new connections.

This course clearly is not about “learning something” to then be tested upon, and then go off with credentials certifying ownership of some capacity.  It is about introducing us to capacities to explore, to use with each other and with our students.  All the particular sites will soon change, be replaced, whatever.  The play is the point.  I’m not, after all, “certified” for CEU credits as a Classroom 2.0 expert, or any of the other sites i’ve signed up for and used.  I’m getting the 3 (most inaccurate for all the hours i’ve spent in this) CEU not as some expert on anything, but rather as an initiate to play with my students in this mutual learning amidst the chaos of information.  I guess the thing i’d critique about the course is the lack of critique of information and media.  Or rather, the lack of tools given to critique all the sites we have been sent to.  I’ve been re-reading in and about Thomas Aquinas of late and the clarity of categories of learning and asking and so on seem to me to be much missing in all this Web 2.0 and other internet gathering of communities. 

I guess what i mean is that in the entire course there was no site or Thing given over to criticism of the entire project.  I missed, if there was, any strict curricular bit to critique anything. 

Connie White, our local Lakeview tech leader, has given over much of her this year to developing student led programs about being beware of the internet social connections.  So all i’ve been learning is in the parentheses of our local  worry and school mission about laptops and kids and….  In other words, this is an open question at Lakeview in more ways than technology. 

Social Networking sites for learning depend on the imagine of what learning is about, who is important to learn about, to learn with — and for what purpose.  All of these questions, it seems to me, the drive for “social networking” in an disembodied web way is precisely NOT what my local school is about. 

I do not agree with that, and find it sad in a variety of local circumstances, decisions, and so on.  I figure that is the same for every teacher in every school.  Still, it makes this running down of our 2.0 class a sigh, i guess, into giving up learning new things, new ambitions of really being social networked and for all good things….and soon it’s over, and everyone will go away.  No more e-mails from Shelley, or blogs or wikis to read, to revise, to even feel guilty about not checking, as tho’ there were someone “out there” you felt responsible to listen to, to respond….to be company. 

That’s the dismay of this course and exercise, i think, that i entered in eager and had lots of fun and wondering, but like yet again all education stuff, it tumbles down into collapse, forgetting, back to writing out today my end of the year eval check off for review with my division director — nothing like the mutuality of anything social networking.  And same, as my students know, in the calamities and pretends of Zeus-zap paganism of standard and exit exams. 

This all makes me sad.  Thing 22 does, too, for it seems to me the culmination of the ambition of this course, that this is a new world of collaboration and….. It’s not just hard for me to believe, it’s even harder for me to teach, to tell and ask and wonder with my students. 

Anyway, to use Classroom 2.0 or other modalities of social networking with my students or colleagues?  - Sure if we only had time.  I do this, and other teachers do this, in various ways already, in Moodle, in e-mail, in blogs, and more.  This final asking, or nearly-final asking, of a Thing makes it more clear than before that this internet course is disjoined from actual experience of me and my colleagues.  And that’s ok, of course.  That Shelley ever said from the beginning. 

Coming around again, it’s a time to wonder free, to make of all this calamity and chaos and richness of Things into a small bundle of possibilities to try.  I wrote up my Annual Review and Goals for the year ahead, and embedded the Web 2.0 class in that. 

There are things to do and wonder, and also the end of the year to get through, cheer, and more.  Timing is bad in this conclusion of this course.

Finally, my first sense of social networking for school topics, for personal topics, is dismally anorexic.  I’m willing to jump in and see if other things come up — but not now.  In the meantime, i’ll keep up my Classroom 2.0 subscription and then see what happens.

I put together my AP U.S. History Pageflake as an added page to Shelley’s template pageflake.  I’m not sure then if everyone can see it or not, so i sent out a half dozen invites to a Pagecast, but that, too, i’m a bit foggy on til i can see it working somewhere. 

It was fun putting up this and that on the AP U.S. History page, tho’ i was frustrated in adding links.  Most of them didn’t work for my home laptop, altho’ they lit up as tho’ they were functioning.  I then had to go through and cut and paste the URL directly into the site as an alternate way to get to the link, and those seem to be mostly working.  It did take some time. 

And for this to be an interesting Pageflake, of course, i would need to update it regularly, setting up an archive of links to this or that, and replacing, for example, the Jamestown box with a similar site on Colonial Slave Rebellions or The Great Awakening, or whatever, as we move through the course.  Keeping up with all this and a large class to keep up with their experiments, postings, etc., seems to me to be likely to require more time than i’ve got, but i wanted to try this and see what happens, discussing with students what are the most interesting and useful parts of the page.  I also want to see if students find this is an improvement over, say, Moodle, or other available class sites.  It may well be that i’ve used Pageflakes here most unimaginatively, more like a class homepage than taking advantage of the varieties of flakes possible to post in kaleidoscopic whirling constellations.

As a sidenote, i’ve tried the  CueCat barcode scanner available to use with LibraryThing.  It is fast and convenient, altho’ you still have to do the tagging and organizing.  I’ve found it useful most to pull out a stack of books from a shelf and then scan them all in.  They’ll stay there til i return with more time to sort and tag. 

The other things i’ve discovered, which may have been mentioned by Shelley or someone else and i just missed it, is BookMooch , a free site for giving away books to people who want them, and thereby building up points to search for books you are looking for and receive them from people who are done with that book and happy to send it to you.  I tried giving books away at school with only moderate success.  I shudder at dropping off boxes of books to the public library, and our school library has limited shelf space, so this is an alternative to connecting books with people who are, or at least say they are, interested.  I like books to get good homes.  We’ll see what happens.

I’ve spent a couple of days now roaming around in the various flakes available on Pageflakes as presented on the rich and dizzying K12Learning2.0 page Shelley made for us to play with.  I’ve added a couple of things, moved things and then replaced them, and generally have left the site alone.  I did begin to create a page of my own added on, one for Ciaran, my grandson was the first i tried, and i had a blog connection and a picture connections and a calendar with key dates and maps of Seattle and connections to the museums and children’s places and parks in Seattle, and so on.  But i was looking for more in the way of, for example, podcasts and RSS feeds of lullabyes and children’s stories and such, but could find none, which seems weird to me.  Surely there are ongoing podcasts of stories for kids, and children’s songs, too.  I couldn’t find them via Google Reader search, tho’.  Perhaps a niche to fill when i retire with a grandfatherly voice and warble.  So that one seemed to putter out.  I did find connections to sites for making kids things and this and that, but the site was turning more into a catalog, which wasn’t what i originally had in mind, so i wiped that one out to rethink and try another day.

I also played with putting together a page for my wife and daughter and i to share for the year ahead til a projected 60th B’day trip to Greece for Candy with Sarah, my daughter, conversant in modern Greek and an annual Greek junkie and translator, as tour guide.  And there were sites to add for this and that of Greek stuff, pics, maps, customs, etc.  I tried to find a feed for Modern Greek Lessons online that could come up daily, but didn’t find one, but i’m sure there must be one or more.  Daily news from the Greek papers was another feed.  And, of course, a calendar count-down as well as quizzes and more.  But this seemed not really something we’d do and really use — for a for-once splurge, smile, and pat-on-the-head and back to “real life”.  That’s not the fault of the Pageflakes, but more of my struggle to find an appropriate bunch of stuff to make a homepage to share.

This is where, i confess, for me anyway, Shelley’s extravant page, meant only to put us onto some of the many, many and more possibilities, undid my ambition.  Will Richardson’s Darfur Pageflake was a bit discouraging as well — that is, it was so rich that anything i even started to do fell stumbling down the stairs with a crack to the noggin.  I know that’s not the intent of the models at all.  It’s my problem. 

It does seem to be a common problem, or at least daunt to deal with, for other colleagues of mine who went to the computer festival yesterday in Atlanta — that so much was presented, as is the point, after all, that what beginning we or me doesn’t know quite where to start — or that any little model of a page like Shelley’s or Will’s, what value could it be?

This is where i realized in talk with other teachers at Lakeview today that, after all, i don’t HAVE to do any of this.  I said this aloud and added that all of this is for me to teach and learn with my students the best i can in the ways of teaching and learning that i am growing in in my own style and with my particular students.  But i don’t HAVE to do any of this stuff.  Also, that any of this that i use i don’t have to wait for time to consult with a tech person at Lakeview or send out yet another call to Shelley to bail me out, point out the obvious, but that i have students handy every day who help me.  I’ve turned to some of them in this course time and again to help me through and explore further, and i love listening to them about how they use these tools and others, and show me the way into (gasp!) games that actually seek to play with simulations of important historical reasoning concepts. 

And so, as Shelley has meant and suggested all along, none of this is demanded, nor all of it — but just to see what’s there, play with it a tiny, tiny bit, and out of 23 things tried, or rather multiply that by 5-10 new things and more in each lesson, each Thing, perhaps three i’ll want to try next year, and actually do two, but i’ll also know others are out there, and can turn back to the Things and, even better, and more knowledgable and curious, to my students to learn with them this ever changing new stuff.  Some of the bloggs on some of the free sites are anxious about how long these things will be free, and when will stuff done and stored suddenly become available only for a cost, or go broke and disappear entirely.  I have wonders about this, too, so multiple connections, back-ups, and rich collaboration is the only way to keep the learning going out of all these web experiments.  The web and the programs will not endure, but relationships of learning will endure and keep growing and wondering and making new connections.  I’ve found this for myself in recent days with connections made with former students, current students, poets, and more — the carousel of learning that, somehow, seems to get further together than we ever do alone. 

So, i am in the process of making a Pageflakes page for my new AP students, registered for next year, with summer assigns, and now a page to go to for questions, forms, resources, and other preparations for the full year ahead. 

Also, i have to mention that when i went looking for a RSS feed to add to the K12 page i picked the Gilder Lehrman Institute page and their series of podcasts by historians.  I have my AP students check this site for primary documents and more.  But when i went today i discovered a new podcast by Adam I.P. Smith, a lecture given in 2006, “No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North”.  This was a great discovery, for eight years ago i was privileged to go for two weeks to study in Cambridge in the Oxbridge Program.  My time was funded by the school, and two of our students went to the program for four weeks as well.  One of those students graduated last year from King’s College in London, an undergraduate career distinguished and different because of the Oxbridge Program.  My own time was a real delight and i’ve stayed in touch with several of my fellow teachers at the program and in the U.S. History in Transatlantic Perspective Seminar.  The seminar was taught by Adam I.P. Smith, then a fellow of Sidney Sussex College where Oliver Cromwell went and where, somewhere hidden, his head is buried.  Adam was a marvellous fellow and keen on talking about “American Exceptionalism”, as well as having a keen interest in the rituals and monuments of “memory” which nations erect, choose, or disregard.  His interest and keen commentary on that in American and British terms has been very useful ever since to me in helping students get beyond textbooks and words to things and rituals and re-enactments of U.S. History.  For example, the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag is a fine thing, but also has a very politicized history, one i’ve studied some and taught some.  And just today at Lakeview we’ve got a new directive to include a ritual of Pledge of Allegiance in the first Assembly of each week.  All this comes together out of the happenstance of the assign where i found Adam Smith again, and on and on, getting in touch with him again, too. 

So, there are multiple matchings and re-connects that keep coming up for me in all of these assigns — glad serendipities, useful to me and making me full of thanks.  Not as much as for puppies, of course, but still….

When i get the AP U.S. History Pageflake done, or at least begun, for i hope to challenge students to add to it over the summer, i’ll share it with you all in a late blog.  Don’t expect much, but the point is the collaboration of the students in the summer and year ahead.  This is what i like about this sort of notion of a Pageflake for AP U.S. History.  It’s different from the many Homepages of AP U.S. History teachers around the country with posting of fabulous stuff, multiple quizzes, links galore and so on.  The Pageflake shared asks the students into thinking collaboratively, and critically, even before they’ve started the official class. 

Still, the K12 Pageflake sends me off in dizzy spirals.  Too much, too much!  And i understand the point, but still i go off into tailspins and get lost.  Giving up and then starting on my own anew, small and particular, and longing for student engagement, that’s how i want to begin in Pageflake collaboration. 

 Oh, and a p.s. from another Thing — the Six-Word Memoir site was intriguing to me, hardier and thornier than a Haiku.  I just got today the book out of the Smith Magazine and www.sixwordmemoir.com that we were directed to in some lesson.  I love the idea and am including that as part of senior final exam.  I do recommend the site and the book.  And the exercise at periodic intervals.  Watching with senior students a video of the Hajj for three particular Muslims from different countries and traditions, the discipline of the pilgrimage became clear as a stripping down of words to the essentials, like the six word memoir, like a six word confession, like a six word blessing.  The limitations are what make things rise up new, just as in a sonnet.  So many things, after all, come tumbling out of the muddling and mucking and wondering along in each and every Thing, and just like Jabberwocky some adventure happens in words and ways we don’t even understand — but we’ve met the Jabberwock and survived (snicker-snack), so there are things coming true in all of this, in all of us, beamish every one.  Ain’t it funny and surprising?  Shelley’s gift of grace. 

So, it’s a day later and i just got off the phone with my son, Chris, out in Seattle, and i had just returned from a rollicking after school stroll (me) and run (Finn & Molly) along the side meadows of Lakeview.  The puppies were extraordinarily lucky today in finding several things to roll in, the remains of an art project of a sarcophagus of shards and other artifacts dug up after a year in a cove of the meadow, and best of all an actual rabbit’s foot, intact, with a somewhat bloodied shin bone sticking out.  The puppies had also gleefully chased each other around and through puddles of red Georgia clay, so they were drying into paws, legs, and dangling tummy hairs turning into clay artifacts themselves.  Off to a rinse in the bathtub, and then up onto my lap and Chris called.  My grandson, Ciaran, was toddling about in cries of delight, coos, and other sweet hilarious sounds in the new woodchip back yard, and generally delighting in the world and his doting father.  Good times.

Candy, my wife, also had just returned from her best day ever with her rescue horse, Annie, whom she dotes on, and who is smarter and smarter and more and more responsive.  Candy tells stories of Annie like Chris tells stories of Ciaran and like i tell stories of Finn & Molly.  We’re all considerably ridiculous but happy in such tales. 

I reviewed the dreary Thing 20 blog entry i wrote yesterday and offer apologies to one and all.  I’d obliterate it if i could, but i suppose for the purposes of this class a candid record is part of the learning and nakedly showing our ups and downs.  The course requires, after all, not only collaborating with others, but in some ways the far harder work of collaborating with different parts of oneself.  So i’ll let yesterday’s dismal entry stand, but hope anyone who reads it will turn to read the follow up today.

Yesterday i was considerably dismayed by disconcerting events at Lakeview, nothing of great importance except to me, and even then, i know i was over-reacting, but i let myself feel whatever it was i felt, knowing that, like all feelings, never really ourselves, these would pass.  And so they did.  I can think about these things more clearly today and we’ll see what happens.

Yesterday, tho’, was a bad day, and mixed with many good things, so i felt much disjointed, and, alas, that tumbled into my Thing 20 blog.  I can’t believe now i rattled on about how all these 23 Things were fine enuf, but i really won’t use any of them once the class is over, and other dismissive statements.  I think really what i was saying was that once the flap that bothered me at Lakeview was past i’d just wash my hands and walk away with a sniff and snap of the fingers and be done with it all.  This, obviously, was a childish wish, tho’ i remain an enthusiast of Peter Pan, but that’s another story. 

More realistically about my working through the Thing 20 explorations in Google Docs, there’s lots here that is useful and interesting, and i obviously had great fun producing “The Finn & Molly Show” as an opening “Presentation”, altho’ i got frustated trying to include an image of a dark wood — but to my delight Shelley joined in and gave me the very picture i wanted, or even better, and carried the tale further.  I hope others will intervene, take part, and help save the puppies from Shelley’s “Giant Squid of the Forest” if you will go to The Finn and Molly Show .

Today Candy said, amidst her triumphs and delights and friendships with Annie, that she wanted to somehow keep track of working on all these new skills, and keep a brief record of when Annie did what and when, and….. So, of course, i immediately had not “the answer”, but an answer for her to try.  After a year or more of misery with AOL i finally got Candy to shift to gmail, so she has her own account, and now her own Google Docs account, too.  I suggested trying the spreadsheet and, in good Shelley fashion, said that i thought it could do what she wanted, but that Google Docs had an explanation that she could read and try out — and the best way was to poke around, keep records of what she’s doing and done in a notebook, like she’s been doing, and just enter some things in the spreadsheet, play with it, see how it works, before entering exclusive info in the system.  Once she’s got it all figured out and is using it for her tracking Annie’s learning, and her own, then i trust she’ll teach me more about it, too!  Candy’s a physical therapist now working in the school system with a nursing background, so keeping records on progress is second nature to her. 

Similarly out of the Will Richardson’s blog on Pageflakes and his example of his “Crisis in Darfur” page i passed it on to two of my senior students who are deeply moved by the crisis in Darfur and who are using their connections in Atlanta and NYC to put together a benefit night at Atlanta’s Hard Rock Cafe for Darfur, and are presenting an assembly on their project to the upper school next Monday.  The Richardson page had some stuff they already knew, but it had stuff they didn’t, too, and updating RSS feeds of all kinds that they dived into exploring.  They began talking about sharing Richardson’s page with others at school and in their larger network of friends and connections. 

Other things throughout the course i plan to incorporate into my classes next year.  A senior seminar on the elections will have no “text” other than the internet and local print and interview sources, so the ways of gathering and organizing information that has been part of this course will be essential to my seminar students come August.  Other courses, too, will draw on many of the things introduced in this course — and will work next year to learn with my students more and more, a collaboration not just among them but with them.  I know that is short-sighted, of course, and that the collaboration will go far beyond my little classroom. 

And this makes me happy because i’ve wanted to do cross-curricular stuff for years and years.  My favorite cross-curricular project came out of a collaboration with the Biology teacher and my World History class, where we both talked about Darwin and developed a joint project on choosing things to collect, each student choosing something, and then developing the collections, keeping “field data”, making accurate descriptions, developing different ways of organizing the collection with new questions posed out of each organization, and more, with final presentations that included a summary paper that brought in the Lit teacher.  That was terrific, but it was also difficult to keep going.  Some English teachers were interested, others weren’t.  When the Biology teacher retired the whole project collapsed.  The collapse of the project cross-curricular went along with new curricular demands in subject specific drives to culmination in AP Exams and calculating AP score percentages.  Sigh. 

Now suddenly the possibilities of cross-curricular collaboration is open in strikingly new ways.  Those ways need not devour class time devoted to onward-and-upward AP scores, but rather can shadow, irradiate, even halo the classroom AP curricular drive with the company of so much more in other teachers, other resources, other students, all collaborative in a way that hones the skills of asking questions, grouping and sorting information, evaluating information, etc., i.e., the primary skills of the AP U.S. History exam. 

I’ve not yet done the Pageflakes tasks of Thing 21 beyond an initial explore, but i really felt i needed to revisit and revise my glooming blog Thing 20 yesterday, and apologies all around. 

And what to do about The Giant Squid of the Forest?  Also, with my questionnaire on Fred Astaire i’ve been sorry to find that the majority opinion, so far, is that Fred Astaire is an escapist fantasy of the privileged.  Perhaps i need to rephrase the question and the responses. 

Finn as Fred Astaire and Molly as Ginger Rogers? 

First of all, of  course, DRAT that Thing 21 just leapt up, so being ahead or going on is never enuf.  Like all internet and digital stuff, it’s endless inticing on and on…., so it’s never done and ever unfolding, or suggesting that it is, selling that it is. 

But as to Thing 20:  Fun times mucking about here and there with the Google Docs, and sharing out for collaborative commentary tales of Finn & Molly, my dear puppies.  Earlier today i spoke with my dearest and best colleague, Jenni, and said i’d be inviting her into a collaborative site for us to work on together, and suggested one or two substantial things for Social Studies — but the day tumbled down and fell apart in Social Studies ambitions and teaching, so i turned instead to the tales of Finn & Molly. 

In the Google Docs the general stuff was easy enuf.  I found it impossible to figure how to “publish” a document — the instructions to turn to “Publish” were simply not available on my version of Word/Google website.  Or at least i couldn’t find it.  In the same way i could not find the “radio button” to then make and invite folks to take part in “fill out a form”.  This is the ongoing frustration with all these Things — that the versions of basic digital program, and then the version of internet program, varies for us all.  What Shelley in her instructions sees and says is, sometimes, not visible to me to work with.  And so i achieve this or that and then challenged to….sigh, go dribbling off into dismay again.  This is the way of the course as a whole, and is probably inevitable with so many involved from so many different schools and internet sites and home computer configurations.  A really good class would be an introduction, which would need to be updated constantly, to the varieties of configurations of laptop/computer programs and internet sites in configured interface, and how these play into the “instructions” for a course like this.  For all i know the course has taken vastly more time than Shelley with her own configuration and connections and so on figures any class will take.  Out of the loop i’m muddling on as best i can, at school, at home, with configurations and connections iffy at best.  This is, i admit, part of the work of the course and learning.  But it’s also MUCH more demanding and expending in time than even the extended CEU upgrade to 3 from 2 has acknowledged.  That’s not Shelley’s fault, but simply the way administrative folks think that “professionals” should learn.  This is a matter not of this course alone, but in my experience of school administration through and through.  And there is no “fault” in any of this — just, i think, an ongoing frustration of disjunction with real time learning and professional CEU’s.  The disjunct is not that Education CEU’s are ever so hard, but rather that this course is rich and useful and engaging, and takes lots more time than even the bumped up to 3 CEU’s acknowledges, while on the other hand so many Education courses are easy, so that’s a bit frustrating. 

Anyway, on to the task.  This is not my “intitial experience with Google Docs”.  I’ve used this before on my own gmail site for saving, editing, sending on, but not for collaborative work, so that’s a new thing for my gmail account for this course.  The posting of this or that form of Google Docs is much like the ordinary Word forms of encoding and offering information. 

Three or more ideas are readily available in Google Docs info sites promoted in this Thing.  Just as i chastised students who responded to questions by cutting-and-pasting bits of their digital texts, so it seems that saying how nifty it would be to use Google Docs would be mostly similar easy plagarism. 

But anyway — so, as required, Google Docs could be given to my students to do a collaborative work of trying to find a way through the thicket of the 1850’s to a way home other than Civil War.  Or, reviewing for AP U.S. History could be assigned in terms of the AP grouping topics, eg. social, intellectual, political, diplomatic, economic, and turned into a spreadsheet of sorting and organizing.  Or to view and then revise PPt presentation on the internet.  Or to work on collaborative reviews and revisions of AP essays, whether DBQ or otherwise.  Also collaborative work could be done in ongoing departmental and upper school work on defining the requirements for Honors and AP enrollment of students, and the requirements for students requests to be reconsidered for advanced studies. 

I had most fun with the tale opening out of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” of The Finn & Molly Show.  I wish i could have added musical accompaniments, and found appropriate images of the deep and dark woods.  Flikr and more were very disappointing in any generosity of images, but perhaps i was simply too impatient, which is nothing new. 

Here’s my favorite of muddling about in Google Docs, the tale of Finn & Molly , and hope you may want to jump in and join along. 

This Thing seems to me much less interesting than several previous ones.  I chalk that up to the smudge of Google imperialism.  But more likely it’s my own lack of imagination.  Still, it seems to me that this Thing is basically Word translated into Web-based Google, and that’s fine, but i figure that all of this is up in the air and in conflict, that Word/Microsoft may someday undo all our expectations, and that Google posting everything web-based may collapse as well.  None of this is trustworthy.  It’s fun to play with – but as in writing, it’s good to keep a hardcopy of anything you really want to continue to work with, remember, wrestle like Jacob’s Angel for a blessing, even if you go limping away, still, a new name.  In the hip and in not the word merely, but the paper, the material of the word, there the blessing rises, and the remembering. 

Just so, i must confess, most of the 2.0 i will rarely if ever return to.  I may well make more “Trading Cards” out of photos of puppies i love to print out and share about.  I may also make voice thread and audacity recordings for my grandson and others, too.  Making cartoons or books of pics or so on, well, perhaps for my students for a treat for the few who can get into this — and a pass for the several who, at least so far, seem mostly clueless about these programs and possiblities. 

Google Docs is a rich possibility and ever expanding — which i find dismaying.  I’d love an internet site or program that would stick with the basics, stay with the simplicities, remain, like Jesus, where the lowliest are.  That’s the thing i most dislike about the internet richness — that it is giddy on richness, and is not Jesus drunk on the least, the poor, and so on. 

Today has been a dreary day for me at school for reasons irrelevant here.  Just disappointing all around.  In a late teachers meeting i huddled in the back and re-read bits of Thomas Merton’s “Thoughts in Solitude”, including this,

“Living is not thingking.  Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us.  Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new.  Thus life is always new.”

And, “What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?”

These two are dancing about in all this course, and even more in my wondering what it is to teach at Lakeview.  So it goes….and so it also doesn’t.  Kurt Vonnegut’s latest and last and posthumous collection is a blessing otherwise.  No CEU’s or whatever, but rampant learning, wondering, teaching….learning friends, confident company in each other. 

It’s a beautiful Saturday and after returning from runs along the retreating lake shore with my puppies, and then calling them near while a predatory hawk circled above, i’m back inside enjoying the view outside my study window of tiny yellow and blue flowers in the goldengreen grass, now striped by honest-to-goodness shadows of real, tho’ tiny, leaves. 

I followed up on the podcast lesson in Evoca by installing Audacity and the link Shelley recommended to allow exporting Audacity recording in mp3 format.  I did all that and played with it some.  The recording is easy, tho’ i haven’t tried yet to play with the controls for editing.  I’m having great difficulty with the mp3 format exporting.  I managed it once after much blundering around and Audacity assured me i’d only have to find the exporting download once, which i did, but, alas, they were lying.  Today i returned to record a couple of poems by Heather McHugh and see if i could then embed the recording in a blog, but once again the Audacity could not find where the download for the mp3 export was.  I led it to the site saved on my computer, tried opening it in the same folder, and every other sort of miscegenation i could manage, but they were having nothing of it — Audacity apparently a KKK inspired site. 

On the other hand, of course, i’m sure if Shelley were here, or Liz St. Clair here at Lakeview were nearby, they’d lickity-split find the eccentricity, or perhaps simply the embarassingly obvious that i, stumbling along newbie, didn’t notice or didn’t know what it meant or what to do.  And this is one of the difficult things in this course that i run into in nearly every lesson — and i should be used to it, but it still can frustrate.  That is, that instructions assume a lot more than i know or have even imagined, and that the laptops i work on here at home and then at school are different, and thus, everything appears differently and it feels like i have to start all over again.  None of that is necessarily bad in a world of infinite time.  Alas, i haven’t such time, and spending even a smidgin’ of such time feels costly in the opportunity cost way, measured in pages of books read, in letters written, in pets and fetch and treats and kisses with my puppies, and more.  I know this is the nature of computers, the internet, and web2.0 — It’s just that in my heart of hearts my passion does not tend this way, but rather to pages in various stages of decay and wrinkle and smells of books and the soft whisper of a turned page, to clicking keyboards and scribbling words in illegible scratches, to looking forward to opening the mailbox at the foot of the driveway, or checking my box at school, rather than checking my e-mail, or just petting puppies or going for a walk hand-in-hand with Candy, my wife. 

And so, with Audacity and my frustrations today, i had imagined sharing poems and stories and so on in explores of this fine free software with whoever stumbles upon a blog like this, but for the past decade or so i’ve recorded poems and stories on audio-cassette tapes and more recently on CD’s and given as Christmas presents or for other occasions, so Audacity doesn’t make that possible in any exclusive way.  I can do that otherwise.  It’s just that it would have been nice with Audacity and the mp3 upload programs on my computer for it to have worked without sending in endless loops, it seems, of instructions, etc., rather like all those great services we can now get thanks to the wonder of online and telephone service — and then we’re sent to endless menus of this and that, and it’s hours until we find, if ever, a real person to ask a question and get a helpful answer.  So, each of these lessons would have been terrific to be doing with someone who knew how — rather like a real-life classroom experience.  However, the richness of this internet course is so much more than the updates of computer training at school in after school classes with far too often limitations on connection problems, etc. 

I’ve no answer for this, and i figure it’s just part of the muddling way of learning by trying and trying again, a Montessori sorta approach, in Web2.0, altho’ i think the interactive of this way of learning calls for more ready helpful instruction along the way.  I’ve been reluctant to bother Shelley, tho’ she may well not see it that way, for i know she is very very very busy in all this, and at Lakeview Connie has been so busy with taking Internet Safety presentations all around and hasn’t been able to help with specifics of a Thing assign, and i’ve been reluctant to ask. 

I’d like to be more helpful to others myself, but the Things that i accomplish often owe an awful lot to what i consider to be dumb luck, magic, or the kindness of the gods.  That is, if asked how to do this or that with Evoca or Audacity part of my recommendation might well include a reference to Leviticus or Hamlet or Papua New Guinea rituals of sacrificing a cock at midnight under a new moon and then sprinkling the keyboard with blood and surrounding the monitor with feathers of the cock…..and something about knucklebones…

Anyway, just muddling on.  If anyone has help to suggest on convincing my computer to let Audacity know that the mp3 export download is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be asked to dance, a sad and sorry wallflower if only Audacity had indeed some, well, audacity!  Sorry, i got lost in the metaphor and forgot the point — so, if you have suggestions, let me know.  Thanks much. 

And i do much recommend the poems of Heather McHugh all around, and those in the March 2008 issue of POETRY on pp. 508-513. 

Finn speaks.  Well, this isn’t perfect as a VoiceThread, but it’s better than the nothing i was getting after my first success with Snow Secrets.  I know this isn’t a Thing 19 topic, but that’s where i’m poking around further now.  I wonder — Is it possible to take a YouTube video with CC ok’s for using and then eliminate the sound on the video and record over with VoiceThread?  Wonderful possibilities for History if it were!  That’s my nod to a tie-in.  By the way, when writing a blog entry, saving it, and then returning to add more, i find that the up-down arrow on the side has disappeared.  Is there a way to retrieve it so i don’t have to jerry-rig an up & down by highlighting and then dragging up or down with the dismal possibility of deleting something by accident (and, yes, i have)?