Almost without fail, the Eminent Person Speech reigns supreme as the element of the annual project that produces – in the estimation of teachers, peers, and self-assessment – the highest quality work. While there are inevitably remarkable pieces of work contributed to various aspects of the study, whether in Night of the Notables learning centers, […]
Read more "Rising to meet the Eminent Speech"My sister brought back a picture of some graffiti in Saskatoon a few summers ago that I ran with, writing one of my first songs that has continued to grow with me in the years since, and which continues to accompany me in new musical places. I’ve played this song in my kitchen by myself, […]
Read more "Graffiti: An old song with new friends at the GSGW Fall Jam"“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the […]
Read more "Emergent Citizenship: Curriculum in the Digital Age"Jack Kerouac would be ninety-two today (March 12th), a birthday the New Republic has celebrated with a Reconsideration originally published in December of 1972. Noting a recent change in fashion that “left Kerouac’s work inert and his legend inactive,” William Crawford Woods set out to devour the scope of the author’s “one vast book” of […]
Read more "On Jack’s 92nd Birthday"I’m forever indebted to Alan Levine’s description of #IntroGuitar sometime last spring, where he included Gleneagle‘s Introduction to Guitar 11 in a list of experiments in Open Courses You Won’t Find in the New York Times, A Cheesy Edudemic Infographic, or Among Davos Champagne Sippers: In a basic hosted WordPress web site, he has […]
Read more "“…not a class that teaches guitar, but one where you can learn guitar.”"I started blogging with the TALONS class (since expanded to two) a little more than four years ago. In that time I’ve learned a great deal about the capacity for such digital publishing tools to help realize aspects of the larger purpose of schooling; part of this has come through developing my own informal network […]
Read more "Blogs as Documents of Learning"Alongside my focus this year in TALONS on the concept of engagement, I’m buoyed to read Bonnie Stewart‘s paper in the MERLOT Journal of Online Teaching and Learning which looks at MOOCs and the open course structure as “a Trojan horse for an ethos of participation and distributed expertise.” Bonnie begins with an acknowledgement of […]
Read more "Literacies of Participation | Bonnie Stewart & the MOOC as Trojan Horse"Part of my summer plans to reread a few formative books of my university years. It’s been ten years almost since I consciously “outgrew” Jack Kerouac’s singular influence on my young mind. Having long exhausted myself of his optimistic early work, I petered out through Desolation Angels and Big Sur as Jack faded into alcoholism […]
Read more "On dipping a toe…"For a formative period in my youth, I was made of books and words. Half a continent from home at the end of my adolescence, I filled the blank slate of my life in Arkansas with the stories and poetry of the literary zeitgeist of people like Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison or Douglas Coupland. Such […]
Read more "The Summer Book Project"I’ve written here before about being a ‘notebook guy,’ someone who cut my creative teeth with pen and paper and has yet to find the same intimacy in digital space that I have had with notebooks and journals going back to my teen years. This isn’t to say that I don’t do some creative thinking […]
Read more "On Keeping a Notebook"