Something that I haven’t given as much blog attention here as I would have liked so far this semester is the vibrant community that has sprung up around our school’s Introduction to Guitar class. Having had students post their work regularly to a wiki site in past years, I wanted to incorporate some of the […]
Read more "“…totally uncharted territory.”"All the places we have been: TALONS Guitar Photoset on Flickr. There’s also some pics posted by others under the tag, TalonsGuitar. Originally posted on the Introduction to Guitar blog, as a response to the Tell the Story of Your Guitar assignment. I’ve added it here so that it can be included as a Digital Storytelling post […]
Read more "The TALONS Guitar"Many thanks to Max Cooke for inviting me to lend a voice to the Canadian Education Association‘s series on Innovation in Education, where I offered a story about the evolution of my guitar class, as inspired by retired Gleneagle drama teacher Richard Dixon. As a mode of teaching, Richard transcended innovation and went about continually inventing his classroom environment […]
Read more "CEA Guest Post: My Guitar Class is more than a Class"Jowi & a gossip of Talons We were lucky tonight at Gleneagle to be paid a visit by Jowi Taylor and his wonderful project, the Voyageur Six String Nation Guitar. After meeting Jowi this summer at the Unplug’d conference, it was a great pleasure to have him tell this Canadian story as a fundraising event […]
Read more "Gleneagle joins the Six String Nation"I wrote a few weeks ago about team-teaching a wilderness journaling activity with my TALONS colleagues along with my oft-mentioned Internet brother Jabiz Raisdana, using his poem-turned-song “Poetry is Nothing” as an introduction to a solo-walk around Hicks Lake, in Sasquatch Provincial Park. Having turned the corner here in metro-Vancouver toward fall and winter, I […]
Read more "Poetry is Nothing… in the woods."An audio gem from Saturday’s campus fire at Sea to Sky this past weekend, Owl leads the TALONS in a audience-participation version of Solar Power Blues, which he explains in the clip.
Read more "Solar Power Blues"Photo by @cogdog I arrived at Unpludg this year without a finished draft of my letter. Either out of procrastination or by an unconscious but deliberate choice, I made the journey east resolved to not panic about not having completed my draft and to try my best to remain open to the vibrations of the […]
Read more "Carrying Stones"Admittedly, this is the Casa (not Soundlab), but that is the 12 string Grant was playing in the Soundlab recordings). Originally dropped in Alan Levine’s Storybox, which I think was supposed to remain a one-stop shop for media content, Grant Potter and I recorded a bunch of songs sitting around the Soundlab kitchen table back […]
Read more "Bootlegs Volume 1: the Soundlab Sessions"You can check out the Storify tracking the Social Media progressions of the project here. In what unconsciously turned out to be a culmination of the Fall’s Learning in Public project, guitar class this spring challenged a group of individuals to create and rally around a mutually agreed-upon idea for a new kind of class […]
Read more "Looking back at the Bears Thirty Person Rock Band Project"