Look Ma, a Learning Experience!

Seems I forgot a few elements the first time around, so consider this the Author’s way of apologizing and amending.

Visit my (very brief) about me page to learn a little bit about, well, myself. Additionally, you can follow me on twitter, flicker, soundcloud, and youtube.

You can also follow my crazy professor!

Hey @cogdog and #ds106! Leah Yegneswaran here. Looking forward to this class!

— Leah (@UMWdarlingchaos) January 15, 2013

(As far as I can tell, he’s not actually a dog.)

Also, hey, I made a thing! This is the weird part about the internet–I could link to the youtube video, link to the post I made about the youtube video, or embed the video. Let’s go with all three! yeah, too lazy for that. Let’s just embed it.

And that’s it for the edits.

***

To me it’s still alarming and astounding that the internet, and everything on it, is made of an intangible series of dots and dashes, zeros and ones, pixels and processes.

This week I carved out my own little space of intangibility by designing my own domain. This isn’t the first time I’ve had my own space on the internet–for another class, I had a space called darlingchaos.com, I think, but this year, I’m going with a cool prefix! It makes me sound much more collegiate. Totally.

After meeting my drill sergeant (Hi Alan!) I worked my way through the assignments, updating my personal twitter a bit to mesh well with my presence on umwdarlingchaos.com (same name: follow me @umwdarlingchaos) and making a soundcloud and discovering, to my surprise, that I already had a flickr as a yahoo user. Weird.

Sidebar: if this is a totally boring diary entry, I apologize, but i like listing things I’ve done. It makes me feel accomplished. Whee!

Anyways, there were some videos worthy of consideration, on the nature of art. What I really took away from the Robert Hughes video was that he had a fantastic accent, an even better sense of humour, and a great thing to say about necessary art. He basically argues that art tries to give back to adults what they lost after leaving childhood, to give the earth a sense of glory to feeling and to close the gap between you and everything else, to lend meaning… I agree wholeheartedly.

The RSA animate was of a similar vein–I seriously love those animations, go check out the one on the education paradigm (link to follow, when I find it again. I have it downloaded on my computer but not bookmarked). Anyways, RSA talked about where ideas can come from, but the style of delivery is what makes RSA my favourite. It’s engaging and energetic and kind of wacky, and keeps you really, really invested–me at least. Disruptive wonder is fantastic, says Kelli Anderson, because you get to really throw off empty rituals that mean nothing and disrupt what has become commonplace–something I hope to do!

Finally as to the rules for students and teachers, I wish there was a way to make it absolutely mandatory for everyone everywhere to read and follow them.

Don’t have much more to say, running out of time, hope I did this right, and if not chalk it up as a part of the learning process.

Ten, hut!

<3