Todd Finley, over at the English Education Prof blog, has once again pointed me to something provocative. This time, it’s another video by Michael Wesch, the cultural anthro prof who made the very cool “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video about Web 2.0. In this video, students contribute information about their practices as students, and it’s both enlightening and disturbing.
As I write this, everyone is in the computer lab figuring out ways of working in the multimodal genre(s). The conversations I’m overhearing are really interesting, and I’m anxious to see how this grand experiment will turn out. It’s pretty exciting! I’m hopeful that we’ll encounter the typical kinds of problems so that we can also figure out how to solve those things, collaboratively. I do NOT hope that we run into any “unsolvables,” but also figure that’s a little doubtful. We have a lot of resources and knowledge that’s spread around the room.
I’ve just imported the old posts from this blog (since this is a new address), just to see how it works … Sad that I’ve neglected to write in my blog for so long. I guess Twitter is my chosen form, at the moment. I’ll add a Twitterfeed next …
The first mention of oliphaunt elicits a riddle in poetic form:
Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake,
As I tramp through the grass;
Trees crack as I pass.
With horns in my mouth
I walk in the South,
Flapping big ears.
Beyond count of years
The person who recites the riddle is Samwise Gamgee, a devoted, honest, working-class hobbit in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The verse comes to mind when the possibility arises of actually seeing an oliphaunt, a creature from the cryptozoology of middle earth. Sam’s child-like wonder at encountering the mystical creature, his open and artless approach to new experiences, always reminds me of the wonder I experienced when first I cracked Tolkien’s opus in 1973, when I was a fourth-grader.
Reading The Lord of the Rings became an annual ritual for me all the way through the 1990s; I still read it once every year or two. For the longest time, it was my Christmas vacation treat; I would anticipate the opportunity of having the free time to luxuriate in the world created by Professor Tolkien’s words. But occasionally, I would begin to read at odd times of the year, often because I wanted to relive the terrifying darkness of traveling through the deserted Mines of Moria. Even had I made a conscious attempt to leave behind Middle Earth, I doubt I could have found success. I had been–to borrow a term author Neil Gaiman uses to describe his own fascination with the fantastic–infected. Infected by the idea that an author’s words can change the ways that I think, the ways that I believe, the ways that I behave.
“Oliphaunt” is what’s known as a “nonce word,” a word that is not part of any existing language yet is easily recognizable by virtue of its phonic or semantic similarities to actual words. Cultural theorist Pierre Macherey once said that literary texts operate ideologically through a mechanism similar to the nonce word. Texts create fictional realities that bear enough semblance to our own reality, how ever far separated the two may be, that as readers we filter our interpretations of the real world through the fictions we consume.
When I read Tolkien’s work as a child, I mostly wanted the adventure. Frodo, the hobbit protagonist, seemed like the most interesting character since all of the action revolved around his possession of the magical One Ring. But as an adult, my attention has been drawn more to Aragorn, a human who, in the face of a desperately uncertain future, struggles to attain a destiny shaped by his heritage, fortitude, and personal desires. Collectively, the book’s reality and the characters who inhabit it have worked ideologically to shape my own understanding of the reality I inhabit.
“Oliphaunt” may simply be a nonce word standing in for our own tusked and trunked pachyderms, but we should remember that it is also a touchstone identifying ideological connections between fiction and reality.
“D” is for deadline. We all face deadlines daily. A gift to buy for mother’s day. A report to write for a committee. A set of papers to grade and return to students. A decision to take a job, or pass up an opportunity.
Deadlines tell us more than we might like about ourselves and others. As an educator, I’m responsible for setting deadlines in the classes I teach. As an administrator, I create deadlines for people who work in the projects I oversee. In the syllabi for my classes, I come across as a stickler for punctuality, telling my students that if they turn work in past the deadline, that I’m under absolutely no obligation to read it. In reality, though, I often accept late work without much penalty.
So after I’d written this, someone else already had completed an unsolicited (but very good!) letter “D” movie, so I’m off the hook. No need to finish this one. But there’s more to come … my “O” is probably more promising. The only disappointment is that I didn’t get to the part about the etymology of “deadline,” which dates back to a literal line in Civil War prisons that, when crossed, would result in a fatal shooting. So “deadline” was once not at all a metaphorical phrase; interesting, huh?
Okay, so it’s not quite as bad as that. But I’m thinking that my “D” movie is going to be about something much on my mind at the moment: deadlines. I have student work to read by a certain time so I can issue grades. I’ve other work to complete for my writing project site by another deadline. And I have a couple of movies to make and upload by a rapidly-approaching deadline.
I stupidly recently volunteered to participate in a very cool project set up by some Writing Project friends, Kevin (from Western Mass) and Bonnie (from Hudson Valley); we’re making a collaborative “ABC” digital document. It’s a cool idea, and we’re using some exciting new technology to do it (jumpcut.com, for instance), but I’m so flippin’ busy and/or behind that I haven’t even started on my two letters (D and O, I believe). What the hell is “D” for, anyway? Dogma? Dissertation? Deputation? Disgust? Divination? Dramatization? Delicious? Del.icio.us? Debutante? Debauchery? Demogogue? Defenestration? Dolor? Demarcation? Doormat? I better pick something and start writing soon.
What about “O”? That’s definitely more challenging. Oak? Outlaw? Offering? Ostracize? Operate? Organize? Orchestrate? Open? Organic? Orafice? Overt? Osprey? Oh, bother.