Disce verum

I was supposed to go to Italy last June for research. That did not happen. (Italy had just started to open its borders to its European neighbors-- but not to the U.S. )  I spent last summer trying to re-create Italy at home, touring virtual galleries and reading my old guidebooks; ordering Florentine soap; reading Fleur Jaeggy, Cesare Pavese, and Elsa Morante; planting extra rows of San Marzano tomatoes, Rosa Bianca eggplants, and Genovese basil; and obsessively watching cooking videos on Giallo Zafferano and Italia Squisita , such as this one, "Pizza napoletana fatta in casa":  I made the featured pizza, and it wasn't that bad!--though certainly not as good as Davide Civitello's, above. I learned a new technique (never use a rolling pin!), which stuck with me through my pizza-at-home year.  Italy is open again to Americans, and I thought I would be first in line, in the American rush to go back. And when I heard the reopening news, I jumped on my computer and started...

I created and launched a website this past month. I had to. Everyone I knew was telling me, you have to have website. Even a static page. A landing page.  Some thing.  (Read more about that necessity here .) So I held out for as long as I could--years and years...lots of years--and then, one day, I just created a website.  It was no big deal, but also kind of awful .  But that's another story.  The website is made, for now--let's call it a "soft launch."  And after the soft launch, you get analytics.  Yikes. But also kind of interesting, this data.  I'm using Squarespace, because it's what I chose (?), and it works for now, and I already paid for a year.  So Squarespace it is.  Ugh, do I have to? But the analytics.  All over the place. Who are these people, I want to say. Is it possible that I know someone in Dublin? Who  could I know in Dublin, Ireland? (Why didn't I go to Trinity College junior year? How could I have turne...

Caveat emptor: I had to keep up with social media this past week for work. Five days a week, I'm on Instagram, posting a daily Insta, scrolling, liking, following, and trying to grow followers.  (It's a new responsibility, and I kind of actually love it? Is it strange to mildly loathe self-Instagramming, but love it when you're doing it for someone else??) Back to the matter at hand: Digital detoxification! I did it, I really did. Probably a bit too much? I took a week off of blogging, which got me warmed up for the full-press detox.  I took notes. I made a list:  read; write; walk; garden And here's what happened:  ✅ Reading I dug right in to George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain , which I had ordered after listening to him speak at the virtual PEN World Voices Festival. It had been sitting on my nightstand in its violet dust jacket for a couple weeks, and the detox gave me the extra hours and bandwidth to get lost in his lectures on 19th-century Russian ...

After watching this Creative Commons video , I decided to have a little fun and play around with licensing. Why not creatively donate an image to the world? I don't have any Mark Getty ambitions (or capital).  "Spectacular images [and] flexible pricing" at Getty Images. (Read: I hope this screenshot doesn't get me in trouble.) So I licensed this image, below (featured in an earlier post ):  A totally unfiltered tourist shot, and my foray into Creative Commons licensing.  Here's the license Creative Commons recommended:  I took their recommendation. (Let the reusers reuse! Let them distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this little shot as they will!) Here's what the license looks like on Pinterest: Pretty cool, huh?  It looks legit--and is legit.  And yet it feels so nice and altruistic.  What's your experience with Creative Commons? Have you used it as a student? Have you donated your images or teaching materials? What sorts of things have you chos...

At the moment, my writing space is chaotic. It's situated in a Florida room that feels very Florida: one wall is a bank of French doors and paned windows that gather all of the morning, afternoon and early evening heat. The space is tiled and has a (single) A/C vent that tries its very hardest to keep it cool (but doesn't). If it was a body, its outstretched arms would be the kitchen and garage.  It looks like a before picture, and it's looked that way all throughout the pandemic. Truth be told, even with Zoom pressure, it looks more like a before than ever. I can make it look "nicer" on Zoom with a panicked juggler's shift of its contents: wheeling a clumsy Amazon Basics white board over a bit to the north to hide a nuclear explosion of LEGOs; a pre-meeting toss of my child's life-size sea turtle floor pillow into a southwesterly off-camera corner; a forearm sweep of Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon ephemera off a table into a Trader Joe's bag and quic...

This was a hard year. Such a hard year.  Especially for a (my) seven year old, who had to endure me as her second-grade teacher, essentially.  For our entire pandemic year, I had promised her that, once there was a vaccine, and that all the adults in the house were vaccinated, I would take her to Animal Kingdom. (I am from New England--rocky little coastal towns--and went to Disney World all of two times before moving to Florida for grad school. My daughter was born in Florida, on the Emerald Coast, and is ride-or-die Florida.)  But that was the deal. Animal Kingdom. My six- and then seven-year-old daughter's pandemic carrot, or hold-out. The mom-is-your-new-teacher motivator. When the CDC released their updated mask guidance, I hesitated, then booked a stay to fulfill my year-long promise.  All was fine. It was sweaty, sticky, but quieter, less crowded. Masks were required in all indoor spaces--and were on by most everyone, save a few [ you fill in the blank here ]...

Have you ever used badges in your course design?  Fellow #EME6414ers, are you thinking about using badges (i.e., after digging into this week's reading)?  I've got to say that I'm curious to create a course around badges. And I say "around" meaningfully here, in the sense that Horstman et al (2020) discovered, or how using badges in courses "can improve program design and subsequent learner experience."  I admit that, before reading the Horstman et al, I associated badges with learner motivation. I didn't think about the broader implications of course design, and implementing a badge system as what Horstman et al call "a conceptual, organizing framework for educational programs."  It sounds like a lot of intentional work--and a lot of revision. A lot of potential design headaches. But it also sounds like a better framework than what, say, a LMS like Canvas offers with its Modules. I just did a quick google and it looks like Canvas offers a...

Days-of-the-Week Tagathon I had a lot of fun with this past week's #EME6414 Twitter Days of the Week Challenge .  Did you try it? What did you think?  What were your expectations? I can say that I was a wee bit intimidated. Somehow, Twitter intimidates me--and yet, when I get into it, it's fine. It's like jumping into a lake--opaque and cold on the outside. But then you dive in, and you warm up, and it's not just fine but rather fun.   It was kind of like a weeklong race--and really fun to search out my fellow #EME6414ers' day-of-the-week tweets. Especially fun with the push notifications turned on.  Nothing like a little social-media buzz to pick you up in the middle of a (#really) long week. I did end up tweeting some belated days-of-the-week. #FollowFriday on a Saturday morning? I had to cringe-tweet that--but off it went.

To tag or not to tag Do you freestyle? Use a dictionary? Do you have any tagging anxiety?  Do you take tagging seriously--or are you a little bit playful? Maybe even irreverent. I'm an anxious tagger--or maybe an ambivalent tagger. When I send out Instagrams on a work account, I'm a circumspect, super-cautious tagger. A conservative, barebones-minimum tagger who tries to avoid #synonymy and irreverent tagging. But for fun--i.e., with the Zara work jacket off and the sweats on, along with the veil of anonymity--I'm noticing that I'm much more fast and loose with tags. Basically, it's fun to play with tags. To create some new ones, to search out the ones flying around Twitter, and to try to jump in and see where the tag takes you.  Who knew, for example, that #WomensHistoryMonth is one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter? A month after Women's History Month, I retweeted a WHM-hashtagged story I thought was pretty amazing from the Smithsonian--a video, actually...