Fever Dreams
Posted by Ms. Clemson in life as I know it on June 18, 2011
My brother called last night. He’s been in a hospital for the last week and a half, coming back from the brink of death one more time. Missing most of his digestive system, tumors spreading but slowed by liberal applications of chemotherapy, my brother just keeps keeping on as he has for over nine years.
But this time is different.
He talked about how crazy he had been just before he had gone in to the hospital, and while he was there. He still sounds a little crazy.
He talked about the dreams he had had, being in other worlds – worlds so compelling that he wanted to stay. These other worlds that appeared in his fever dreams began to spill over into this world so that when he dreamed of his hospital bed thatched like a tiki hut and the little man that sat next to it, when he woke the little man was still there. That was one of the odder worlds but there are others. Some of the worlds are so peaceful and beautiful that he says he wonders sometimes what good is it expending all sorts of energy and angst on this life and this world when there are so many others.
He said that the way he thinks of death is that the atoms that make up the fact of you, go into something like a river, a river that can wind its way back to the same spot so that some atoms might revisit places or people that they had been near to before in some other configuration. That’s pretty much the way I’ve always thought of it myself and I was surprised to hear someone articulate my own belief but my brother and I have always been close.
I told him it did not surprise me that he feels there are ways to slip into other worlds though. To my mind nothing could be more likely. With all the legends about portals into other worlds it beggars belief that there is nothing to it. One of these days I suppose he won’t come back. He will slip into one of those peaceful worlds and we’ll begin the process of dismantling his body into its component atoms so that they can join the great river. Maybe they’ll come back around some day.
June
Posted by Ms. Clemson in upper valley on May 30, 2011
Junebugs and a Marauder
Almost June and here’s a picture for it.
I wish I had written this
Posted by Ms. Clemson in modern times on April 1, 2011
I can’t remember now where I ran across a link to Kim Cofino’s blog. Probably a tweet from one of the education movers and shakers I follow. The post that was linked in the tweet wasn’t even this particular one. But this is a great post. First Steps Toward Becoming a 21st Century Educator.
But actually the title is a little misleading because it applies to students too, or anyone who wants to become a 21st century person.
Using Twitter
Posted by Ms. Clemson in internet on March 24, 2011
I ran across a link (in my Twitter stream where else) to a post by David Jakes. 140 Characters and Beyond: Extend Your Use of Twitter. I haven’t had time to more than scratch the surface of it, though I did play with a Twitter Fountain. I used a search for the hashtag #humanrights and played with the size a bit to make it fit the format of this theme a bit better.
When I suggested to Ms. Lord that she have a twitter stream going in her classroom during the Egyptian Revolution, this was kind of what I had in mind but I didn’t know about these visual tools that Mr. Jakes suggests using for classes or backchannel conversations: Twitterfall, Visible Tweets or the Twitter Fountain. I suggested using TweetDeck over to one side and having a news site in a browser window alongside on the Smartboard. I need to find out how that class went. I know the students all chose a few news sources to follow as well as some activists. They set up a list which they all followed, as did I. I am still a member of the list so I have to be conscious of what I tweet, though I don’t tweet much.
I am still a little uncomfortable with Twitter. It can be too much information, way too much. The morning after the protestors were overrun in the Pearl Roundabout, in Bahrain, I woke up and clicked a link to a picture. It was of a dead child, and I posted the link on this blog with a warning that it was terribly graphic. I knew intellectually, somewhere deep that children get shot every day, that terrible things happen to thousands, millions of children. But to see this picture… as a mother it hit me hard to start the day crying. I found out later that the picture was not from the night when government forces overran the camp while families were sleeping there. It was a picture of a small victim of some other conflict. I have been trying to teach students that when one posts something that turns out later to be incorrect, one should use strikethrough to own up to it, so for a few days I left the link up with a strikethrough and an explanation. But I later took it down.
So here are my personal Twitter rules, designed to keep me informed yet sane.
- Remember that lots of it is rumor. Wait until you see some confirmation in the way of links to reputable news sources before you freak out.
- Don’t click every link to photos or videos that you see. If someone says it’s graphic, it is. Make sure you can take it. I think it is better to know, to be aware that these things are happening. But it can be difficult to see.
- Don’t follow the Twitter stream when you are trying to get things done. It all could wait during the years we got our news from newspapers and it still can.
Some rules I’d follow if I was teaching with Twitter:
- All of the above, plus
- Your students are going to read some strong language. It’s real people, in some pretty stressful situations. It isn’t anything they haven’t heard, but you’ll need to think about that.
The graphic is via Wylio, a nifty service where you can search for graphics with copyright suitable for using with attribution and get an embed code which adds the correct citation. I’d love to be able to get across to students and faculty how important it is not to break copyright but it’s difficult sometimes. This site makes it super easy to do right.
Oooh, oooh, I wanted to share this really fabulous flow chart graphic from Digital Inspiration designed to help you decide whether to post a graphic from the web or not and how to cite it if so. Suitable for printing out and putting in any classroom!
Some links and signs of spring
Posted by Ms. Clemson in life as I know it, upper valley on March 16, 2011
On the way to work this morning I heard an NPR piece about Ramy Essam, the musician who was “arrested” and tortured by the army last week. I wondered if any of the 23 year olds I know are capable of saying as Ramy does now that he “still believes that there are honest people who will investigate what happened.” I have to believe that they would, when push came to shove. There is another piece about Ramy here, at The Traveller Within.
In other news, I smelled a skunk along True’s Brook Road and that’s a sure sign of spring. Also my friend Tom emailed me at work to tell me he had spotted a Red-winged Blackbird at the feeder. Yay! Hearing their trilling call is always a thrilling moment in the spring.
Weekly Roundup
Posted by Ms. Clemson in life as I know it on March 12, 2011
Let’s see…
In Egypt, protestors surrounded and occupied various branches of the State Security – finding many documents and files as well as torture equipment. Hossam Arabwy, a blogger and union activist I’ve been following saw the very cell where he’d been confined and tortured, spent the day sobbing off and on and then published pictures of all the State Security people on Flikr which then removed the pictures because of copyright violation. A musician I had last seen video of playing the guitar in Tahrir was detained and tortured by the army, previously seen as an ally to the protestors.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, there have been rumors of nerve gas used against protestors. Libyans, continue to fight against the insane Gaddafi family, while the rest of the world tries to figure out how to help or even to help at all. Saudis stayed home from their scheduled protests because everything’s just hunky-dory there.
Representative King held congressional hearings here in the US to investigate radical Islamic terrorism, hearings which did not bother calling any experts in the matter. In the past King supported Ireland’s terrorists, the I. R. A., but I guess this is different.
And there’s been a massive earthquake in Japan with an accompanying tsunami.
My brother’s lungs are slowly filling with fluid down in Florida, it seems this experimental cancer drug is nor working for him.
Chickadees have begun singing their spring mating song: “fee – beee”
So it goes…
Not revolution 2.0
Posted by Ms. Clemson in internet, media on March 5, 2011
I don’t think that online communication – Facebook, Twitter – made these revolutions happen. I am aware that many people have been working for these for years.
Wael Ghonim’s talk at TED is worth watching though. And if you haven’t heard of TED – Ideas Worth Spreading, check it out
Government by “The People”
Posted by Ms. Clemson in upper valley on March 3, 2011
In a small state like Vermont, that means you. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and at Town Meeting I asked about being on the Planning Commission. I know they’ve got three people leaving for one reason or another and they need people badly.
I’m used to thinking of myself as a good citizen because I always vote, because I go to the yearly Town Meeting, because I write letters to the editor about issues I care about, because if I really care a lot (like when we were building up to going to war with Iraq) I’ll go out and walk in the cold with a lot of other people. But I haven’t given service time to my town government and it’s a lot of work to keep a town running. I’d rather volunteer at the Historical Society, truth be known, but that’s probably why the Planning Commission needs the people. Besides, a posting on the town listserve claims there are cookies at the meetings.
I’ve heard that one should “Think Globally, Act Locally” and just as I haven’t been thinking globally, I haven’t been doing a lot of acting locally either. Not in terms of the real work. It means giving up some evenings when I’d rather just go home and lie on the couch.
Following people from far away on Twitter has really opened up my world to things I never used to think about because it’s work. It’s work to learn about other countries and stay aware of what’s happening in them. To care. It’s so much easier to not pay attention.
It’s so much easier to just go to work and come home and not bother to go spend your evening at a meeting of some town committee too but I’m beginning to think democracy takes more work than I’ve been putting into it.
