My retinas.

These are photos of my retinas taken at Pro Eyes Optometry located in the Route 60 Walmart on July 30, 2009.

I was going a wee bit apeshit about how cool it was to see my retinas. Dr. Tanguilig (who asked me to call him Arnold) asked, “Are you a geek? You can take them with you if you have a flash drive.” I didn’t, but my girlfriend had one in her purse. Then Arnold said, “I’m a geek too” conspiratorially but mainly to cover any offense he’d made since I didn’t react when he asked if I was a geek because I was too excited at the prospect of getting copies of these photos.

The slight twisty nature of the blood vessels in my retinas indicate that I have the beginning stages of problems associated with high blood pressure. You can see in my right retina where the pressure in the hard, dark artery is sort of squishing on the softer vein. But Arnold wasn’t too worried about it.

Now I want to go to more doctors and get more pictures of what it looks like inside me.

There’s a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Across the Street from the Alamo

I had this in my notebook from our trip to the Annual Meeting in San Antonio last November. I thought I’d share it for Musical Blogs today.

---

There’s a Ripley’s Believe It or Not across the street from the Alamo. And a wax museum and a 3d motion ride.

Inside the sanctuary, I think about men standing with rifles, screaming. Thunder and shouting and the sharp smell of blood and brimstone.

I think this was probably literally their dream–that America would flow down like a glacier and cover their bones with all this bullshit.

I text message my friend Joe. I haven’t spoken to him in years. “My other hand is on the Alamo.” I rub the stone wall to get some of its dirt under my fingernails.

Joe messages me back, “So is my heart,” but I’m already walking down through the city past the Greyhound bus station, past the tranny smoking a cigarette on the curb, past the woman pacing and raving in the crosswalk, and under the Interstate–away from the tourists to where I think I might eat if I lived here.

I eat too much beef and beans and listen to the only English conversation as a waitress gets hassled by a regular about taking a ride on his motorcycle.

“I don’t even like motorcycles.”

“That’s not what you said last week.”

On the way back, I cut through a vacant lot and a burr gets stuck in my shoe lace. I bend down to get it out and it slices my thumb. As I watch the little bead of blood well up I remember that to get here I had to climb into a metal tube and hurtle through the sky for hours.

How I made my digital story.

This is the process I used to make my digital story. I hope it helps you think about how you might go about crafting yours. This will be long and rambling. It’s a reflective piece I wrote just to document what was going on while I worked on the video. 

Click here to watch the video.

My digital story started with an idea. (That sounds dumb. I’ll start over.) I was batting around a bunch of ideas for my digital story based primarily on pictures and video I already had. I figured it would be easier than trying to get new pictures and new videos. But I also wanted some experience using our new digital video equipment, and I wanted to make my experience creating my digital story as close to “from scrap” as possible. I mentioned I wanted to make a sample digital story to Jennifer Sias, and she remembered something I’d written about at a previous Writing Project function. She said I should make one about Casey, so that’s what I did.

I with the video clips. I went to where Casey lives and just walked around filming whatever I thought was interesting: Casey, cars waiting at the stoplight, panhandlers, the magic makers sign, shots of the surrounding buildings. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it all yet, but I started to brainstorm ideas while I was shooting. Here were my first notes:

I want to talk about Casey and how he looks like an old man. I want to talk about the sign that the owner put up assuring you that Casey was fine. I want to talk about the panhandlers on the corner I ended up talking to. I want to talk about the mission and the liquor store and the costume shop. I want to talk about the traffic buzzing around behind me like nothing unusual was going on while I looked at a monkey.

I had the video on the camera for a few days before I did anything else with it. Over the weekend, I knew I wanted to have my digital story finished for today, so I wrote the rough draft of the text. I wrote it quickly because I wanted it to have a loose, tossed off style like we have in our sacred writing. I wanted it to feel spontaneous. I ended up writing it on an evenvelope for guitar strings I found in a bar while I was watching my brother’s band play on Friday night. I borrowed a pen from the bartender and I took it into the corner and wrote it on the envelope. It was dark and only light by black light and I couldn’t really see what I was writing. I feel like writing in this situation helped keep this piece casual, quick, and flowing like I wanted it to feel. Plus, I wanted this project to feel fun and not like work, so I wrote it in a casual atmosphere. Also, I needed to write it while I felt like it because if I put it off I would never get around to it.

I kept the envelope in the visor for my truck from Friday to Tuesday. I brought it in to Corbly on Tuesday so I could work on my digital story after SI. I decided to post it on the Open Mic Blog on Tuesday afternoon during Tech Time at SI just to test out how the Open Mic worked. While I was posting it, I cleaned it up a little bit rewriting some of the clunkier bits. The main trouble I had was with the sentence: “Between the mission and the liquor store where bums hustle people from Chesapeake for dollars while they wait to cross the bridge there’s a shop called Magic Makers.” This sentence is clunky in the recorded piece, but on the envelope the modifiers were hoplessly misplaced and confusing. I was surprised that most of my original draft was useable. I decided to add the bit about Casey liking his back scratched because I just rememered it as I was revising.

I posted it on the Open Mic blog because I hoped someone would see it and comment real fast and give me a good idea. No one has commented yet. I am curious if anyone will. I think we need to really start doing our part to read and comment on e-Anthology posts so that we support the community.

To create the video, I used two steps.

First I recorded the audio. I used Audacity and one of the wireless LAV mics Jennifer got us for SI. I just recorded it straight into the computer while I read it from my Open Mic Blog post in another window. I trimmed off a bit of silence at the beginning and end. That was easy to do. A harder step I did was I applied some digital filters using to improve the sound quality. I wasn’t 100% happy with the raw recording, so I ran the noise reducer, EQ, and compressor plug ins. If you’re comfortable fooling around with Audacity, this might be something you’d like to try to. If not, just getting the raw recording of your voice should work fine.

My next step was to start working on my video. I found it was easy to find appropriate clips for the story since I’d written it after taking the video. The story I wrote naturally flowed from my footage, so I just matched up the images with my sentences. I was worried about this step because I thought it might take forever, but since my story was so short it didn’t take me too long at all. I didn’t try any fancy tricks. I just put video of what I was talking about over the sound file. Matching it up exactly was kind of a pain, and I think I could tighten up some of the edits. I saved the project files, so I can go back to it later if I want.

Richardson Reading Activity

Here’s the stuff that jumped out at me from the first two chapters of Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts. (Will Richardson, 2009.)

Chapter 1

“‘The original thing I wanted to do,’ Berners-Lee said, ‘was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write.’” (p. 1)

This was a statement by Tim Berners-Lee on his vision for the Internet in its early stages of development. I like this quote because it summarizes my goals for the tech portion of SI. I would like us to find ways to read/write/and collaborate on the Internet. I feel one of the most interesting experiences at SI is getting a chance to share ideas with other educators in an environment where you have the luxury of time. I hope to explore our blogs as one tool that can enable us to stay connected at the end of the summer when we return to our busy lives and classrooms.

“The world is changing around us, yet as a system, we have been very, very slow to react. Our students’ realities in terms of the way they communicate and learn are very different from our own.” (p. 5)

“[William D. Winn]: years of computer use creates children that ‘think differently from us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.’” (p. 7)

I’m not sure how much I believe this much ballyhooed idea that young people interacting with computers and other digital devices are changing their cognitive maps. I hear it from time to time, and I’m sure the research is compelling, but it just doesn’t sit right with me. I do, however, agree that nothing is more boring than a pencil-and-paper activity. This year I gave an extremely reluctant writer a pencil-and-paper writing assignment that he steadfastly refused to do. He said, quite bluntly, “I don’t write papers. I could text it to you.” Naturally I told him that was madness. But what if I didn’t? What if I’d designed writing activities for a device and situation with which he was comfortable? Could that have been a gateway for other forms of writing? Or at least made him a better text messager?

“Before you attempt to bring these technologies to your students, please be selfish about their use in your own learning practices.”

I think this is an important point to remember as we begin SI. During the Institute, you will experience a variety of different techniques and strategies. The ones that stick with you, the ones that transform your work and teaching, will be the ones you make a commitment to using. But making regular use of the things we learn (like blogging) is the only way to be ready to fully integrate them into our classrooms.

Chapter 2

“This creates a digital filing cabinet for students to archive their work and, in effect, creates a space for an online portfolio of work.” (p. 22)

I think that using your blog for an online filing cabinet of your writing is incredibly useful. I return frequently to my blogs to find pieces of things I’ve written or links I’ve shared with my class or whatever other information I’ve stuck on there.  It’s handy to have writing that is accessible and linkable from anywhere in the world. When I put something on a blog, it’s not chained to hard drive.

“And in a world that is moving more and more toward a business model of the collaborative construction of content, learning to work with far-flung collaborators is becoming an important literacy.” (p. 27)

This is the skill I’d like to work on this summer–how can we collaborate at distance? How can we stay connected as a group when we scurry back to our respective crannies of the tri-state? How can we help our students be literate in a world where increasingly your co-worker isn’t in another cubicle but maybe on another continent? Hopefully our early experiments with blogging and RSS will get us moving in that direction.

“…blogs facilitate what I think is a new form of genre that could be called ‘connective writing,’ a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed.” (p. 28)

I think Richardson’s idea of this new genre is interesting. I like the idea of a blog entry being a new animal. I initially drafted this paragraph on paper–an ancient and static publication medium limited to one user at a time (two if you’re real good buddies) and not currently supporting hyperlinks. This response to Richardson activity doesn’t really fully explore the connectability of blogging, but look what happens when you throw in some hyperlinks.

“The differences between blogging in this manner and writing as we traditionally think of it are clear: Writing stops; blogging continues…But writing becomes an ongoing process, one that is not just done for the contrived purposes of the classroom.” (p. 30)

“Blogging continues.” I like that idea. Last year, I worked with a group of students at a creative writing camp sponsored by MUWP. As part of the camp, we set up blogs for each camper. They published one piece of writing a day on their blog as part of our daily routine. Some of the campers continued updating their blogs throughout the summer. The camp ended eleven months ago. The last update to a camper’s blog was last week. She had some thoughts on the suffering of left-handed persons. I think this is a piece of writing she may never have bothered to complete, but her blog gave her a sense of audience enabling her to type it up and spin it out there for people to take a peek. This was a piece of real, authentic writing, in her voice, speaking to a concern unique to her experience, not written for any contrived purpose, but just because she had an outlet.

Experiment

My school system uses a website called WritingRoadMap2 to give students practice for the state’s writing assessment test. I was using it with my middle schoolers, and I was amazed at its ability to instantly score their essays in accordance with state writing standards.

I became curious as to what would happen if I fed it madness.

---

Prompt
Think of a local issue that is important to you. For example, how do you feel about school dress codes? Write in which you state your opinion on your chosen issue and convince people to take a similar stance. Your writing should be convincing.

---

Response

Theater Wings Are Arbitrary

Theater wings needlessly hesitate toward northern cities. Twilight makes senators thirst; however, they are unable to quench the desire for theater bloodlines. Trickling downwards, these filibusters grow angry. Senators combat this with vice and parasites, but these are inadequate prevention. Parasites worsen the scaffolding, weakening the marrow from the inside spiral. Twice now they have batted eyes at passing motor carriage underlings. Furthermore, I believe all theater wings to be not only arbitrary but also superfluous.

Initially, theater wings in northern cities take up valuable mission resources. These resources could be better expended sideways or behind the temple. Wasted temple space is sinful, and larger metropolitan areas don’t have temple resources to spare. Birds gather where theater wings are brooked and this brooking engenders fear. Mask traders garner fear since terror is common currency for their ilk. The hesitation of theater wings plays directly in their plans. Don’t support terror. Don’t support mask traders. Murder freely all false witnesses to persecution’s memory. The trading of mask belittles theaters. Wings hog resources.

On second thought, senators riddled with self-inflicted parasites cannot tumble shine the bone lesions. Bone lesions are a precursor to theater wings and are equally arbitrary. Writ large in the pages of history, bone lesions not tumble shined are an eyesore to vigilant foundlings. Trying hard to accept the fate of the senators, foundlings walk purposefully on their bone lesions. Why should foundlings feel pain that senators do not? Theater wings promote such parasitic infestation. Fight infestation by shining bone lesions. The arbitrary wings of these former theaters spread outwards into our northern cities bringing with them the worms and amoebas of plague and pestilence.

Furthermore, the inside spiral of the marrow is weakened daily by theater wings. Weak marrow cannot perpetuate truth. A central bone sponge without truth weakens the spirt and pollutes the mind’s taxation. In our cities to the north, spreading theatrical bird motion structures threaten our bone cores. Bone lesions expose the marrow, and the it is made toxic by the scraping of the wings. Spiral fractures abound in wing plagued regions. Fallen bovine dot the horizon, their marrow split in two forcing capitulation and resentment. How can society stand without marrow? Do not allow wings to rob from use our center. Decay must not be abided.

As you can clearly see, theater wings hesitate toward our society’s northern boundaries. Senators dribble parasites into their blood streams to stem the thirst this causes. Scaffolding erupts in infection. Marrow is devoured by unicellular beasts. Angry filibusters trickle inexorably downward, spiraling centerwise. All of these can be avoided if voices raise in unison and sound the clarion hollow. Will your hollow ring in unison? Will your voice lift the heavens and staunch the wings? Or will you let parasites devour the marrow and spiral inward to the core?

---

Score

Ideas And Content	4.2
Organization	4.8
Voice	4.8
Word Choice	4.3
Fluency	5.0
Conventions	5.0
Holistic Score	4.6
0	1	2	3	4	5	6

Narrative FeedbackYour score descriptions:

• Ideas And Content: Your score in Ideas And Content means your writing is on its way to being complete and detailed.
• Organization: Indicates the response is clear and logical.
• Voice: Indicates the response is engaging to readers.
• Word Choice: Indicates the word choices are clear.
• Fluency: Indicates that sentences in the response exhibit very good fluency, variety, and style.
• Conventions: Indicates the response is very successful at using conventions correctly.
• Holistic Score: Indicates that, overall, the response is proficient.

• Your response in the “Introduction – Explain the issue in general terms.” section of your essay is strong.
• Your response in the “Body – State your opinion clearly and concisely and support your opinion.” section of your essay is very strong.
• Your response in the “Conclusion” section of your essay is strong. Your essay shows a very strong use of vocabulary.

Your understanding of basic grammar and syntax is well above average.

---

I was disappointed to find that I raved only above average on a high school level.

Week 5

Ok. I skipped entries for weeks 3-4. I could say I was busy, but I was just lazy.

This happened on Friday–the afternoon of the retreat.

In the 8th grade currently, there are only two girls enrolled. They spend all day every day together travelling from class to class. You can imagine that this is, in turns, wonderful and terrible for them.  Thirteen-year-old girls are ninety-percent whim.

It’s a big deal for them to get to lay down on the tables instead of sit at the desks to do their work. It’s my main negotiating tactic. “If you’re good and doing your work, you can lay down on the tables while you do it.” It’s a small privelege, and probably not the best policy, but it works.

So, it’s the end of class and they’ve been laying on the tables across the room from each other while I make like a hummingbird walking back and forth helping them with their assignment on adjectives. Finally, they both finish and I’m taking up papers. One student says that her stomach hurts and she wants to go home. I tell her that she seems all right to me, so why doesn’t she just wait it out? The other student says that her stomach doesn’t hurt, she is just supposed to go to the Mall after school and wants to hurry up and get there.

They start to argue.

Now, it’s not a big argument. More of the “Uh huh”/”Nuh huh” variety of human discourse. I was content to just let them sort it out. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing where I needed to waste time intervening.

But after a few minutes, one student just completely blows up. Throws her books across the room and storms down to the office.

I feel terrible about this. Generally this happens about once or twice a year to me. Some kid gets in some amount of trouble because of my laissez-faire class room management style. A simple, well-timed, “It’s none of your business why she wants to go home” probably could have avoided the whole affair. Argh.

Right now, we have a little down time because we were taking a standardized field test this morning and its the garbage time between the end of the test and lunch.

I explained to one student how, genetically, two little people could produce a child of normal height. It’s always fun to draw a Punnet square, and I thought I was quite tactful in my avoidance of the word “midget” in answering his question, “How come two midgets can have a normal kid?”

(He spotted a little person while he was wandering around town after school yesterday. This seemed to weigh heavily on his mind.)

Now, everyone (including Mr. Nolte) is having a little independent computer time. One student got bored, walked up to my board and started making an idea map eerily similar to the one we’d been working on in class for our literary analysis papers for an entirely extracurricular short story he has been working on.

Do you know that feeling when you blow a soap bubble and you try to push it around with your hands a little bit so it doesn’t touch the ground and burst but you don’t want to graze it too hard because it will burst then too? I have that feeling right now while he covers more and more of my board with red marker.

Week 2

So, it’s the middle of second period. I have eight students. I have a group of three students who are doing a sayback peer response activity at the tables right behind me. I have another group of three sitting at the “teacher’s desk” (For some reason, I have a spare teacher desk in my room. The kids love to sit there whenever they have the opportunity.) reading each other’s drafts and writing down lists of questions they have for the author. Two students who were absent yesterday are in the student desk section of the room finishing the rough drafts of their memoirs. And everyone is writing. Typing right now, I’m being the noisiest one. It’s all eyes on paper and pencils scratch, scratch, scratching. Today, right now, this moment, it is a good day.

Week 1

This year I am teaching English and Reading at the Cabell County Alternative Learning Center, which is where you go in Cabell County when you are expelled from your home school. It’s my first honest-to-God contract and benefits teaching gig, and I must admit that the prospect of going to the eye doctor is quite exciting.

I teach every grade between 6 and 12, but (and this is the part where you get jealous) I currently only have 30 students. I have my seventh graders twice during the day–once for Language Arts and once for reading. Right now, there are a whopping two of them. This is amazing. We write, we read, we talk. It’s so much fun getting to give them 100% of my attention for two entire periods.

I know it won’t last. The other teacher’s say enrollment swells until our classes our around normal size by November, but for right now, these first few weeks, those boys are going to write the most kick ass memoirs possible. Because there’s no escape from Mr. Nolte when there are only three of us in the room.

Evaluation of Two Websites

Research Topic: Use of journals with content reading

I will evaluate these web sites using evaluation forms from Purdue University and the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University.

The Purdue Method
LiteracyMatters.org
http://www.literacymatters.org/content/intro.htm

Accuracy

1. Does the author cite sources used to develop the site?
   No, the author does not. They do, however, provide a wealth of links to related sites.
2. Is it possible to determine the legitimacy of these sources?
   N/A
3. Does the background of the author point to knowledge of the subject covered?
   Yes. The site is maintained by “one of the world’s leading nonprofit education and health organizations” and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
4. If the site is research based, does the author clearly identify the method of research and data gathered?
   They do provide their criteria for source evaluation here, but the site does not appear to be research-based.

Authority

1. Do you recognize the author’s name?
   I do not recognize the name of this organization, but I feel comfortable with their U.S. Department of Education and Annenberg Foundation funding.
2. If you don’t recognize the name, what kind of information is given about the author?
   See above.
3. Was the site referenced in a document you trust?
   No, it was not.

Objectivity

1. Determine what is the aim of the author or organization publishing the site.
   This is a non-profit organization designed to provide information to teachers about matters of literacy.
2. What is the purpose of the web site?
   The purpose of the web site appears to be to serve as a warehouse of links and information about various aspects of literacy and literacy development.
3. Do you trust the author or organization providing the information?
   I do.

Currency

1. Is the date clearly displayed?
   No. They do list a copyright date, but that covers 2002-2007 and I believe is not accurate for determining when specific information was published.
2. Can you determine what the date refers to?
   I cannot. I believe it is just there for legal and copyright purposes and is not intended to serve as information regarding relevancy of the information published.
3. Are the resources used by the author current?
   There are a wealth of resources linked to. The ones I was able to check out appeared current.
4. Does the page content demand routine or continual updating?
   The links would definitely need regular maintenance to stay current.
5. Do the links on the page point to the correct web sites?
   Yes.

Coverage

1. Are the topics explored on the site covered in depth?
   Each topic is covered briefly in an overview, but supplemental links are provided.
2. Are the links on this site comprehensive or used as examples?
   They are intended to be comprehensive resources.
3. On the site, are the links relevant and appropriate?
   I’ve never seen such relevant links.
4. How valuable is the information provided?
   There is a great deal of valuable information here.

The Johns Hopkins Method
Saskatchewan Education
http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/mla/read.html#respond%20

Authorship

I do not recognize this education organization. However, I found the link on the LiteracyMatters.org web site, and my analysis of that web page leads me to trust its resources. So, barring further information, I’ll consider Sasked a valid authority.

The Publishing Body

This web site is published on a server owned by the government of Canada. If you can’t trust the Canadian government, who can you trust. While I’m not sure how Canadian educational standards compare to the American, I assume they are at least comparable.

Point of View or Bias

I don’t believe this organization has a political view or bias. Perhaps I could research this topic more.

Referral to and/or Knowledge of the Literature

This document demonstrates knowledge of the content. The web site also provides a bibliography.

Accuracy or Verifiable Details

A bibliography is provided for verification.

Currency

I could not find a date for this particular page.

Included Materials

“Big Red’s” – Personal Writing
I chose this piece for inclusion in my writing portfolio because it was the sacred writing I felt most like crafting into a longer, more substantial work. During the creation of this piece, I learned you can’t just take any old thing and turn it into a poem through force of will. Maybe some pieces lend themselves naturally to a certain style. Or maybe I just need to flex my poetry muscles a little more. I also learned that it’s not the end of the world if a writing experiment doesn’t pan out. When I finished my first draft, I was frustrated. But the next morning, I realized I at least had a fascinating mistake for my e-portfolio.

“Why Didn’t I Think of That?” – Professional Writing
I chose this piece for inclusion because it focused on probably my greatest professional epiphany during Writing Project. Like my personal writing, the creation of this piece also gave me an opportunity to focus on deep revision since I began with a loose hodgepodge of ideas blurted out during sacred writing time and took the piece through several drafts as I carved it into the “finished” product presented here.

Effective Research Writing with the Multigenre Approach Demonstration
This is the piece with which I feel I most effectively used our peer response groups. Feeling a little overwhelmed at trying to tackle my demo, I started with a free writing describing my goals and questions. I then presented this free write to my writing group. Their insights helped me to revise my ideas and finalize my demo plans. Kathy’s knowledge of Bloom’s taxonomy prevented me from including a horrible misinterpretation of his ideas in my demonstration. I was able to take my refined ideas from writing group to Amy who provided even more advice and guidance as I refined and prepared my presentation.

Action Research Plan: Multigenre Research Writing
The development of this plan made me realize how much I have yet to learn about teaching. I don’t know that the multigenre approach is necessarily the best way to tackle research writing, but I think it can be a powerful tool. I look forward to reading more about multigenre papers and researched-based explanations about how and why they can be effectively used in the research curriculum.

Revision
The three pieces in this section show how I took my personal piece from free writing to final draft. Each section begins with an explanation in bold text about what conditions preceded each draft and why I made the changes I did for each version of the piece.

Reflective Practice
This section contains informal writings from a variety of sources. The first four are blog entry responses to our third space experiences. The fifth piece is a reaction to Joseph’s demo on using film in the classroom. Item six is my ethnography. The final five pieces are writings pulled from my journal and represent various writing activities we performed during Summer Institute.