Digital Bits of Ivory

The View from Here: Dementia in Decline

Your conversation is a mish-mash of words and people who aren’t there and bursts of thought about things without context. As a bystander, I wish I knew what was going on inside your head. I think.

What it’s like—

I’m outside a house with hundreds of rooms, shutters mostly drawn, curtains half-pulled, lights on in some rooms, off in others, only a dim candle burning in a few. And there you go wandering from room to room, spending only a few minutes in each, touching a picture, or a figure — speaking to a ghost, or an old friend sitting on a high-backed chair with its back turned to me. Your face lights up, you laugh. But then the children in the next room (I can’t see them either) make you angry and you shoo them out the back door, yelling after them for making messes and missing dinner and forgetting shoes.

Now and then you see me. Sometimes you know I am me, and your face melts into sunshine as you say my name and ask after my boy. “How is the little guy?” He earns an even bigger smile, which is fine with me. He makes me feel that way too. The stars wrapped up all together in a Christmas bow couldn’t make my eyes sparkle as brightly as my little boy’s being does.

Sometimes when you see me, I’m my aunt. Other times you ask me my name, and then tell me you have a granddaughter with the same name, and isn’t it a small world? Then it’s back to your many rooms, where invisible cats and rabbits roam. Where the dead and the living congregate to discuss the news of the day, arguing and chattering about the same things we all do.

“Who has the keys?”

“Will you ever be ready to leave?”

“Are you packed yet? And do I need a jacket where we’re going?”

“What do we do now?”

A consummation devoutly to be wished

“To be or not to be?” Not a question of whether to die but how to live. Not so much the death but the contemplation of the many consummations to be had. For to be — the verb — is all of life. The ‘to be,’ the ‘I am’ - fill in the myriad things one does and is. The doing, that is life. I am - engaged, enraptured, aroused, terrified … alive. The consummation one wishes is not death. Death is a cold, hollow thing. A steel wall against which every living thought smashes and turns to dust.

Rather, it is in the contemplation of death — that final empty void — that our senses thrill to life.

Great Teaching Seminar Today - Lots of Links to Share with my Colleagues

This is really going to be a whole post of links. But there was so much info today and a bunch of great stuff that I wanted to share with many of my teaching friends that I thought I’d just post it here for now. Eventually when I have my own website set up properly I’ll have a link section, but for now I’m going to put some stuff here that might be of interest to other instructors — both at the high school and university level:

www.meograph.com — students can create multimedia presentations w/ narration, video, photos, music.

https://vialogues.com/ — another option for student-created videos; the twist is that others can insert comments throughout the video, so it encourages additional dialogue and gives the presenters a sense of audience awareness. Hence the name.

• Another GREAT use for this tool would be for video/film clips you plan to use in class — have students “annotate” the clip with comments prior to a class discussion. Then you know how well they understood what they saw and you know they watched it. It also allows a sort of pre-discussion. 

http://www.eclipsecrossword.com/ — a different way to assess vocab, concepts, whatever. Alternative quiz format. 

http://historyharvest.unl.edu/ — History Harvest is an open, digital archive of historical artifacts gathered from communities across the United States. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of History partners with institutions and individuals within highlighted communities to collect, preserve, and share their rich histories. Advanced undergraduates lead the History Harvest project and curate and digitize these artifacts and stories.

meetingwords.com — An online document creator that allows multiple users to work on documents together. Our presenter said that he liked this better than Google Docs (which does the same thing) because it highlights the edits by different users. The documents are saved online so they can be accessed from everywhere.

http://popplet.com/ — Create idea maps, which can include pictures and text (not sure about video or sound). 
 

There are several different online poll creating options. It’s really just a neat interactive (key word!) pedagogical tool/idea. A few mentioned were: www.blogpolls.com and www.surveymonkey.com

www.random.org/coins — generates a variety of coins and flips them for you; you can use during class for various activities. 

Invite guest speakers, experts, or classes into your classroom via Google Hangouts: http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/

Another great assignment idea that came out today was having students create interactive timelines. If they are online, then they can add depth, content, and compose text, add their own verbal and visual commentary, etc. Several online tools are available: http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/materials/timelines/ … Also: http://www.tiki-toki.com/ This one is beautiful and students can create individual pages for free. Like the rest of them, though, it costs $$ to do as a group. 

Alternative to Power Point Presentations: Prezi http://prezi.com/prezi-for-education/ 

Create a WordCloud from text you provide: http://www.wordle.net/ 

Awesome way to grade and comment on online projects. You can post “sticky notes” and highlight areas — all right onto the page — and save it so that only those you want to see them can see: https://www.diigo.com/ 

NYT has its own curriculum site to facilitate using it as a resource: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/

History Lessons. Silly (but probably very effective!) music videos that cover historical time periods: “History for Music Lovers” http://www.youtube.com/user/historyteachers 

Source for most of this stuff:

Dr. Bonk (Yes, that’s his real name) has a huge website with an exhaustive list of resources. It’s a bit overwhelming, but it’s loaded and multi-disciplinary. This page lists his web-links: http://www.trainingshare.com/courseWeb/123.php 

There’s more … but that’s all for now. Have fun!

When I use a fancy word in class.

professor-anonymous:

How My Chapter is Going - A Visual

Spring Break - The Re-re-remix