Tag Archives: photography

A few thoughts on the return of Chris Hadfield to Earth

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It’s over, already?

This glorious stretch of time when everyone and everything “anyone ever knew” was being photographed, watched over, and sung to sleep by a Canadian hurtling around the planet a dozen times every day, has come to a close. But then, it seems a beginning, too.

Alan Levine marks the occasion by wondering:

How sadly strange and unique does it seem to find a public figure who inspires, yet is humble, has fun, and lights that spirit of optimism. It doe snot happen in politics, our sports figures and pop culture celebrities ring more as ego focused money chasers. Why are there so few who humbly inspire by example?

Countless times in the past few months, I’ve been moved to goosebumps, lumps in my throat, or the overwhelmed sensation that brings the unexplained tear to the eye by Twitpics, – you can see my house from here! - Soundcloud recordings, and of course, the Youtubes. And I don’t know if it’s necessarily that the idea of ‘space’ itself is so awe inspiring, or that this opportunity to behold the life and times of an astronaut has been transformative in some way that interviews and newscasts and Discovery Channel documentaries offered in the past weren’t.

Rather, an article shared by my Twitter friend Sava posits that our collective wonder at the glimpses Commander Hadfield offered us might be the result of our gathering familiarity with the near cosmos, and what this might portend for the future:

“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting,” Clay Shirky has argued, “until they get technologically boring.” The same may be said of space. As a destination — as a place, as a dream — space may be, ever so slightly, losing its former mantle of foreignness, its old patina of awe. Instead, the final frontier may now be experiencing the fate that befalls any frontier: It stops being a frontier. Its settlers come to think of it, more and more, as an extension of what they know … until it becomes, simply, all that they know. Until it becomes the most basic thing in the world: home.

Space is becoming ordinary. And that means it’s about to get really interesting.

Whatever the reason though, it has been a marvelous ride to share in, Commander Hadfield. You showed us our home planet and took us with you into space, showed us pieces of the future, and broadened the boundaries of our imaginations.

Thank you for all of that, and that which lies ahead.

Essential British Columbia

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This week, we have been beginning our study of Canadian geography and our reading of the Golden Spruce by reflecting on what we might find as the Essence of British Columbia. In setting out to learn a few other TALONS skills – image manipulation, journal writing and a few technicalities of posting different items to our blogs – each of the classes have been selecting pictures from the TALONS archives of Flickr photos and adding text from different reflections on place to make the image come to life in a more personal and powerful fashion.

Which got me to thinking this morning that I and we have friends, colleagues and classmates out there in the world beyond B.C. There are our friends in the Idea Hive, and across Canada’s north and east through my connections in recent Unplug’d conferences. There are Jabiz’ classes, and Keri-Lee’s, and Mary’s students learning in Asia, and Europe. And while it gives me a personal charge to see our own provincial home characterized in so many memorable photos and personal reflections, it makes me curious to see others’ homes brought to life in a similar manner.

In a few weeks, we will be looking at Canadian Geography in the larger sense, and it would be excellent to see some of our co-learners from across the country attempt a similar remixing of their  own or their class’ pictures. But also those of you in our international ranks: this question of place is made more tangible with diverse responses to it, and we would love to see what you think of where you call home, and what you think it means.

 

Hoitchka

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Travelling the Salish Sea

Fall Retreat Photoset on Flickr

A quick post this Monday morning to offer thanks and a massive shout-out to our TALONS friends at Sea to Sky Outdoor School, in Gibsons, British Columbia.

We’re just back from our third annual fall retreat with Wings, Owl, Moondust, River, Chinook and Goose, an invigorating experiential study in leadership, environmental education and activism, collaborative outdoor exploration and team-building which, even for the teachers, was the life-affirming September weekend we’ve come to expect from this band of merry educational pranksters working on the shores and waters of Howe Sound. Ever a work-in-progress, Sea to Sky’s Greenstar curriculum served as a vital extension of many of the TALONS program aims to cultivate knowledgable and empathetic residents of Earth Island, with their program coordinators and facilitators serving as living examples of a passion for the wonder of the outdoors tempered with a responsibility to defend the planet from its many literal and figurative pathogens and threats.

Against the backdrop of the coast range‘s jagged peaks and the blue waters of the Salish Sea, though, there were other extra-curricular aims being met, brilliantly summed up in a post (last night!) from grade ten Jeff, who writes:

Even though we all come from different schools and different backgrounds, I just wanted to show that there is one thing we all had in common – we are part of the talons family.

Because it is about family. It is about community, and learning and living together, something TALONS learners (teachers and students alike) feel passionate about, and which we are rejuvenated to find affirmed by our colleagues at Sea to Sky. A most hearty Hoitchka to them, and to the TALONS 9s and 10s who were willing to walk outside the comfort zone this weekend, and set the stage for what promises to be a marvelous year.

An Album Cover

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Screen shot 2012-06-05 at 9.57.36 PM

First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.


Not usually one for the visual assignments, I saw Jeff McClucken’s effort to capture the essence of his new band, Swiss Emigration to Russia, and succinct breakdown of how to create the album cover and went through the brief process of creating a band and finding an image.

After being introduced to the Dactyloceras lucina – a species of moth of the Brahmaeidae family found in central and west Africa – I went a little further with the image search, consulting Flickr’s the Commons under the search tag for Interesting and found my base layer, which I then uploaded into pixlr.com, an online photo editor that let me add text and diffuse the picture to give it the grainy/painting effect.

Other than not creating a square image – as I believe is one of the requirements – I also think I could have done a better job capturing the essence of my randomly generated quotation, which I’ll share in full here as a fond greeting to my camp and bunkmates, but also an acknowledgment of Camp Macguffin’s initial honeymoon period (I mean, not in Bunk X, but for the other campers):

The only thing that lasts longer than a friend’s love is the stupidity that keeps us from knowing any better. Randy K. Milholland


Unplug'd 11 – a Uniquely Canadian Educational Summit

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Unplugd11 was special and important to me [because] I had the chance to engage in rich discussion with Canadian educators. That was the first time for me that I was at a conference attended solely by Canadians. I wondered if it was the first time ever that a national conference was attended by only Canadians. We need more venues like this to bring together educators from across this great country.

Tom Fullerton

Just back from a cathartic odyssey into the heart of the Canadian North with a committed team of “people who care about education so much it hurts,” I will likely feel for some time yet as if there aren’t words to convey with dignity the continuous emotional, intellectual, and physical immersion in experience this weekend offered. Consider this a first broad stroke in the narrowing of a statement of purpose that might be deigned a manifestation of our collective minds.

For my part, it was invigorating to not only meet, but collaborate and explore the Canadian educational landscape with so many inspiring agents of educational change in – for me personally, at least – the epitome of Canadian Northern landscapes. Each encountering a unique pilgrimage into the heart of our country’s wilderness, Unplug’d brought together a collection of diverse voices in the threads of the story of Canada’s current state of education. We arrived with stories and theses from the edges of our schools, out on the boundaries of learning in our country, and in some ways the gathering served as an affirmation, and inspiration, for those working on the thin edge of Canadian educational change. In one another’s struggles, we were introduced to allies in kind; and in attempting to define the current perimeters of reform, as well as the elemental values by which each of us lives as educators and citizens, we each were refreshed with a glimpse of the hope for our collective future triumphs.

An immense thank you to Zoe, Rodd, Kelly, Alec, Darren, Dean, and Tom, as well as our hosts Todd, Martha, Topher, Alyha (sorry if that spelling is off), Xena (ditto), Greg, and Google at the Northern Edge for allowing such an experience to be realized. An innumerable thanks to each of the Unplug’d participants for sharing of themselves so completely throughout the weekend, either in the service of our stated purpose of creating the artifacts, or the engrossing conversations in between. As the beginning of the story is being written, you each have instilled in me a great hope for what is yet to come. It may be said yet that just as Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven went into Algonquin Park to discover and make record of an emerging Canadian artistic identity, so too might we have ventured into the heart of the North Woods to create a statement of the country’s educational frontier.

It was thoroughly an honour to be a part of it.

 

Sharing in whim

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I know teachers tend to throw out mixed messages, “Be open, share. Be careful, be scared.” This could be an authentic real world experience to create something beautiful with a larger group of people than those within our immediate community. (I invite other teachers to share this Flickr set and this post to see where it can go. Ask your class to leave poems, stories, haikus, comments anything. Maybe we can write a book, record an album…)

There are many things we can do with the images, the words, the connection. I hope that at least a few of you will share a few ideas in the comments below. I don’t know who will respond, but that is the beauty of sharing in whim 1, if you throw enough out there, occasionally something beautiful will come floating back.

The above photos were shared on Jabiz Raisdana’s blog with an invitation to Zach Chase‘s students to join into the fun with the proposition that if enough comments, poems, phrases and inspiration and were left on the photos, Jabiz would write them into a song that he would share for future mashup, remixes, or…?

What will you do with it? Download it. Remix it. Add your voice to it. Set it to images. Create a video. Rap it. This version is only a draft and is not even close to being “done.” Tear it up! Stones by intrepidflame

And while I mightn’t have “tore it up,” or reinvented any of what had previously been created or recorded, I sat at my kitchen counter after work on Friday, donned a set of headphones, and spent the better part of an hour adding my own voice to a project spanning both North American coasts that had gained its initial motivation and impetus from an unmet friend in Jakarta, Indonesia. In kind I offer my own addition to the project in the hopes that it inspires others to lend their own creativity, perspective, and voice to collaborative expression that would have unthinkable even five years ago (to me, anyway), but is today the sort of thing that can be accomplished on a Friday afternoon, between work and dinner.

My contribution:

Stones by Bryanjack

We’ve been talking about the benefits – personal and collective – that come with sharing a lot this week in the Talons class. Seeking an elusive objectivity in media and student reflections on the recent tumult in Egypt and across the Middle East, the class has moved past a definition of the (capital ‘T’) Truth which linearly separates Right & Wrong, or Truth & Lie, to an understanding that we can only know what we might collectively deign in shared exploration, conversation and reflection, and that this process must be ongoing.

This week we blogged, commented, argued, challenged one another, and constructed our own understanding out of the pieces of media, and truths, we could piece together in posts and a collection of quotes spanning student and journalists’ words, musical evocations, and the frozen images of photographs from halfway across the world.

Yesterday we distilled some of the more potent aspects of these expressions in a Typewith.me page that we hope to continue to shape, sculpt and share in the coming weeks, as a first experiment in working with the web as not only a research and publishing platform, but collaborative space wherein there are few, if any, limits.

We invite you (Mr. Chase’s class, Jabiz’ students, and the rest of you out there) to join in this conversation: comment on our blogs, highlight or share some words that resonate with you about the power of the collective and the human will toward freedom, or take the discussion to the next level.

Share, and be vulnerable: it may just be what we’re here for.

To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love ourselves with our whole hearts, even though there’s no guarantee; to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror when we’re wondering, “Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this, just to be able to stop and instead of catastophizing what might happen just to say, ‘I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable is to feel alive?’”

If it is true, what Liam wrote yesterday, that, “Collective will is the most powerful force in the universe,” then we are truly onto something here. Let’s keep it going.

Today, Zach Chase writes, looking back on what a week it’s been, is the day you jump in and create something.

  1. Bryan’s note: this is so the title of the book / album / movie. ↩