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Monthly Archives: January 2007

In Names We Trust

Saturday, January 27, 2007

One of the things I note about my blogging practice is that it lets/forces me to tie up various loose ends that would otherwise remain what they are – random threads of disjointed information. Sometimes I have a hard time coherently bringing them together. Like now. This post is a link-fest, and rather long. Neal [...]

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A Reading Continuum

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

“It’s important to explicitly acknowledge the downsides of any technological transformation – to “think of the underside first,” in a precautionary way.” -Bruce Sterling, in Shaping Things Bruce Shauble’s post, A Book in the Hand, raises an interesting question about reading. Bruce is wondering whether kids are missing the chance to read deeply because so [...]

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Transmediation and Visual Literacy

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Transmediation is a process of bringing meaning from one sign system to another. Transmediation is the basis of all literacy and it’s the essence of media literacy. Graphic art, sculpture, dance, music, photography, all are bearers of meaning, and each medium constrains the types of messages it can express. Every sign system has it’s own [...]

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Teaching King

Monday, January 15, 2007

I heard a report on the radio this morning about The King Center, which lead me to the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute’s Liberation Curriculum. There are lesson plans and speeches. King was such a dynamic speaker! You can listen to an excerpt of I Have Been to the Mountaintop, King’s last speech. [...]

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Exploring Naive Misconceptions

Saturday, January 13, 2007

A couple of years ago when I was teaching sixth graders, I took the kids on a science field trip to gather samples of water from a local stream so that we could gauge the water quality. We chartered a bus to take us from the mouth of our local river, the one the kids [...]

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What is Writing?

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Roland Barthes We know that a language is a corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all writers of a period. Which means that a language is a kind of natural ambience wholly pervading the writer’s expression, yet without endowing it with form or content: it is, as it were, an abstract circle of truths [...]

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Symbol Makers

Monday, January 8, 2007

When I read the statement, “it’s about the pedagogy,” with respect to technology and school, I think (sympathetically) OK, but how does that translate in practice? Chris has a list, and he asked if anyone cared to add to it. This is my elaboration on the translation. I noted several months ago that most examples [...]

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The Country

Friday, January 5, 2007

Billy Collins I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches lying around the house because the mice might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, [...]

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Commonplaces

Friday, January 5, 2007

I ran across a link to Borderland last evening that prompted an idea for something I want to try here on this edge of the internet. I read through the Watsoncommon archives, and I found this post about commonplace books in which Christopher Watson explained the genesis of his blog. He mentioned that Bruce Schauble, [...]

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What are you optimistic about?

Monday, January 1, 2007

My family celebrates New Years by going to a big fireworks celebration at the university. We stand downhill from the launch pad, close enough to hear the pyros in charge of the show yelling to each other. The explosions are a full-body sensation there, and sometimes the sparks even come down near us. We have [...]

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