March 2007 Archives

So I'm just back from a wonderful trip to Switzerland - in body anyway, but I think I may have left my heart in the Alps.  Anyway, I'm still processing my time there (both literally and figuratively), but have started to post some pics and movies.  Will add to the list as I go:

pics from Basel (3.13.07)  (and new! 3.15.07)
pics from Colmar (France) (3.14.07)
pics from Andermatt (3.16.07)
pics on the Glacier Express (3.16.07)
pics from Zermatt and Gornergrat (3.17.07)

movie of Matterhorn, Dufourspitze and glaciers as taken from observation deck in Gornergrat, 3089 m (3.17.07)
movie of me waving from the observation deck in Gornergrat (look, ma! I'm in the Alps!) (3.17.07)
movie of beginning of hike between Rotenboden and Riffelberg stations on the Gornergrat rack railway (3.17.07)
movie of the Gornergrat train in action, heading back down the mountain (3.17.07)

I know that we've all seen more than our fair share of funny and/or bizarre sp@m messages, but I just have to share one that caught my eye this morning.  The subject line: What Would Jesus Wiki?  The contents: how to make bigger a certain male organ.  Ha!

In composing my previous post, I intended to link to my old edublog (alterego.manilasites.com) - the first blog I wrote, which was dedicated to recording and thinking about the cool new technologies I came across in my web surfing.  But the operation is timing out, in web speak, and I'm pretty sure that means that my blog no longer exists.  Which is most definitely a bummer, since for the first couple years of my professional career, it was one nexus for conversations with other people interested in the then-new concept of blogs in education (including Will Richardson, Anne Davis, Peter Ford, Sebastian Fiedler...).   The experience of being part of a far-flung group of smart, energetic people really made me feel like a legitimate member of a knowledgable, professional community - which was really important for me, just out of college and desperately trying to feel like I belonged in the professional world.

And now that it's gone, it's kind of weird.  Maybe some of my old colleagues still have links to my edublog on their blogs, and perhaps someone decides to wander on over to mine... and finds it not there.  If the blog is the artifact that legitimated my participation in this community, and it's no longer there, it's almost as if I were never part of the community at all - can't prove it, can I?   Where does the value lie, in the connections with the people or in the blog itself? Odd.

On a meta-level, I've just realized that my writing this post is, in a way, to preserve those connections, to say "I was there!"  Funny.

Back in the day, when I was still a "civilian" (instead of a grad student), part of my job was to keep up with new and cool things going on in technology, and to think about these cool things in the context of college education.  (Yes, essentially I got paid to surf the web.  Sigh.  The good ol' days...)

Anyway, now that I'm a grad student, my job is to consume and think about an incredible amount of theory.  Although I'm ostensibly in a technology program, struggling my way through the theory leaves precious little time and energy for keeping up with the cool new technologies.

But!  this is where working with actual students (college, in my case) and classes comes in handy.  As any self-respecting researcher knows, it's all about what we can learn from our participants (and not just about our participants as data... although this is sometimes a hard distinction to remember).  Anyway, long story short - one of the classes that I'm working with (not for diss, on another project) is in the process of exploring YTMND (You're the Man, Dog).  From a social technology standpoint, a fascinating example of memes (and in some serendipitous synchronicity, one of the classes I'm working with for my diss is reading about memes in Dawkins this week).  From a literacies standpoint, a fascinating example of multimodality and intertextuality.  I would loooove to interview some of these folks about their creative decisions.  Read the Wikipedia entry to get up to speed, and then check out the Batman fad - original and one of the spinoffs.  Holy funny and creative, Batman!