Tell It Slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies — Emily Dickinson from Poem 1263 You never know how an author’s visit will go. But when the planets align and the minds meet, it is a … Continue reading →
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Trending: Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction was not a term many of the teens of the Eva Perry Mock Printz Book Club had heard before. But most agree that it serves a useful purpose of giving a home to all those books that refuse … Continue reading → -
Saturday in the Garden, June 27
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Dancing with Words
As I listened to the talented teen readers of the Eva Perry Mock Printz Club share their books, I couldn’t help but be impressed and inspired by how passionate they were about reading and about sharing their responses to books. … Continue reading → -
MOOCs: A Tool for Re-Imagining Our Teaching
. . . MOOCs have proven to be simply an additional learning opportunity instead of a direct challenge to higher education itself. — Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and … Continue reading → -
Our Reading Lives
The Mock Printz Club begins and so does a new year in our reading lives. Reading lives? Yes, it’s said that we only live thrice – in the actual, in our dreams, and in our books/literature. And the living we … Continue reading → -
A Change of Heart
I’m not your typical academian. Yes, that seems an oxymoron to me, too. My day job is to write and produce educational and environmental videos. At night I work as an adjunct assistant professor teaching online courses. As someone who … Continue reading → -
Opening Up
["Opening Up" by Cris for The Daily Create, August 10, 2014]/ Our DS106 Daily Create challenge on Sunday, August 10, was to take a photograph of opposites. With this class in mind, I took a shot of my right hand … Continue reading → -
Literacy to Learn
“I think that the important factor is that we get to share our knowledge with people and we get to share with them what we learned. And even though at first it was hard work, at the end it was … Continue reading → -
The Firestarter
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. — Walt Whitman, “Oh Me, Oh Life” You get the fire started (using Dave’s metaphor that Marianne and Miranda have built on). Students gather around. If things go … Continue reading → -
Rewired? Reshaped? Rhizomed?
Dave does have a way of asking questions that tend to tie our rhizomes in a knot. So “Is books making us stupid?” Of course not. We got stupid before Gutenberg. Leonard Shlain, renowned surgeon and author who was truly … Continue reading → -
Opening Up the Garden
Three inches of snow in my city will make this past week’s snowfall go down as “the Big Snow of 2014.” Seriously, we rarely see more than a dusting. So while schools (including universities) and businesses were closed, gardeners like … Continue reading → -
Painting Myself Out of the Picture
All in all, what I think I’ll take away at this point (there’s still more feedback to come from the official ClasslEvals) is that I need to design a system that gives students enough rope to explore and create and … Continue reading → -
Three Pounds of Neurons
In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what … Continue reading → -
A Teacher’s Reach: Mary Ellen and NCRA
“I touch the future.” — Christa McAuliffe Web philosopher Clay Shirky’s advice for membership associations? People want to be engaged — they want to be part of a group that does something. Newsletters and conferences don’t cut it any more … Continue reading → -
“Weird Creativity” and All: Reflections on Old Globe MOOC
“Yawn … weird creativity and very banal” — Peer Reviewer of my Week 4 assignment, Old Globe MOOC I’m a veteran of many MOOCs — from the clearly philosophically open PLENK2010 (one of the Siemens, Downes, and Cormier original “cMOOCs”) … Continue reading → -
Reframing the Life Course
The title of this course is “Old Globe” and I think the old idea and connotation of old will be be very different in ten years’ time compared to now. As a result we would be merely looking at a different life stage and how populations can come up with …
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To Imagine a Better Future: A Challenge for Coursera
Good governance does not fall from heaven. It’s not a gift. People of the country have to work on it. They have to engage and build the good government structures. — Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Wittenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, Vienna
A few weeks ago …
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Peaking Late . . .
I read somewhere that the people who are most intellectually creative in later life are experimentalists rather than conceptualists. Some people start with a clear conception of what they want to do and then execute their plan. They tend to be most intellectually creative young. Others don’t start with clear …
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Young Like Me . . .
When people joke that 60 really is the new 40, they’re kinda not kidding . . . — Sarah Kagan
When Sarah asked Herb Smith about life expectancy (Old Globe MOOC, Webcast 3), Herb explained that “we may be missing the forests for the trees” and that “functionally, we’ve …
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Being There
Getting there is half the fun; being there is all of it! – Chance (Peter Sellers), “Being There,” 1997 film When will I know that I’m “there”? Ageing may be a biological, psychological, and social process, but “being old” is … Continue reading → -
New Eyes
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust
I’ve always been drawn to the metaphor of life as a journey. In my course, “Teaching Literature for Young Adults,” inspired by Proust’s quote, we begin by reflecting on a young …
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Voyage of a Semester-Long Collaborative Project
To introduce my class to our semester-long creative activism project, I shared Candy Chang’s poignant TED speech, “Before I Die . . . ” It’s a great example of how simple creative concepts can make a big difference in the … Continue reading → -
The Challenge of Open Teaching
First steps? Perhaps none are more famous than those that Neil Armstrong made as he bounced along the lunar surface. A nine-year old Canadian watched those steps and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, a seemingly impossible challenge for someone native … Continue reading → -
What Does Creativity Look Like?
The Daily Create for today is “Capture love in a photograph. Give it a title.” For two weeks now I’ve been trying to capture creativity or at least freeze it in time for a moment so I could hold it … Continue reading → -
Twofer — Greetings to EdMOOC & Daily Create
Sharon @dwrgi gave some great advice on the EdMOOC Twitter stream: I’m sure there are many of us who feel she was tweeting directly to us. I’ve got another bit of advice — multitask or create as many “twofers” as … Continue reading → -
Creativity for Hire?
TweetI just finished my first commissioned video project. The “commissioned” aspect brought a whole perspective. It’s not that the expectations were high. The professional association to which I have belonged since I became a teacher decades ago is doing a … Continue reading → -
Sweet Music on DS106 Radio
TweetAudio Assignment 36: Create a bumper for DS 106 Radio. I had such a good time participating in the DS106 class radio productions. I think the satisfaction of making something out of nothing but a thin thought wisping through your … Continue reading → -
The Seventh Seal: Mindful, Minimalist Movie Poster
Tweet Design Assignment 43: Create a tv/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography. Inspiration I’m no Bergman connoisseur nor real film buff for that matter, but Bergman’s The Seventh Seal has a … Continue reading → -
AI and Design Theory: Before and After
TweetDesign Assignment 366: Design a film-based cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesick. I have admired Spacesick’s ingenious “I Can Read Movies” book covers and the amazing interpretations by DS106ers like Chad and Scottlo. Well, I like a challenge so … Continue reading →
ds106 in[SPIRE]
