This week I've decided to go out on a limb and share a piece of my own creative writing...

Procreation

By Christina Andrade

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The conscious decision to spawn another life form was, if I may share in confidence, quite alien to me. First there is the nine month surrender of one’s body to an alien creature who uses your bladder as a trampoline, causes the exponential expansion of your waistline and has the gall to insist its host abstain from drinking beer! The (inevitable) ensuing initiation into motherhood will rival that of the most notorious fraternities. You will be forced into the handling of diapers filled with abominations that could rival nuclear waste. You will be serenaded with relentless wails- cries which burrow into your ears and pound on your eardrums with the voraciousness of a drug-fueled, heavy-metal superstar. The creature will always be hungry. You will one day find yourself blowing raspberries on your husband’s cheek in the grocery store because you have come that far from reality. You will never, ever, hear the words “thank you.” And yet, you will be filled with a love so profound and expansive you will wonder what it was you did with your life before this creature entered it.  I found it so nice; I’ve done it twice.

Social Media, Networked Learning & Digital Identity

I chose to watch the archived lecture on Social Media, Networked Learning & Digital Identity from Oct. 18, 2011. I chose this particular lecture because my digital identity is something I have become more and more concerned about. Like many people in my generation, I jumped straight on the Myspace.com bandwagon (7 or more years ago now?). Like many college students, for me it was exciting tool to share with the world just how much you were drinking. As adulthood and responsibility loom ever-closer on my horizon, I am more and more aware and cautious of my digital face.

Dr. Alec Couros openned his lecture with a quote that I believe will stick with me for a good, long while: “Google is the new business card”.  As you can imagine, this represents the truth of the times that anything can (and will) be Googled.   

I expected the lecture to be a cautionary of tool warning its observers to cover their digital backs, so to speak. I was wrong. Instead Dr. Couros shared his passion for sharing. A buzzword of the lecture was “openness”. Which I think is exemplified by the following quote from the William and Floretta Hewlett Foundation:

“Open Education is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide and extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.”

In short, knowledge should be free! Couros says our society “commodified” knowledge. Knowledge was protected but has become liberated by the openness of the web.

University education, until the very recent past has represented a form of “commodified” knowledge. You must be a paying student to receive the knowledge. These days, MIT and Stanford are opening up this knowledge. Aside from knowledge, Dr. Couros broke down the reason people attend universities into 4 categories: content, degrees, social life, support. He then layered all of the websites that are filling these needs today (from Yahoo! Answers for support, Wikipedia for content, to Twitter for social life). Degrees, he says, are the last things holding us to universities. And he predicts there will be a way around this in the near future as well. An interesting thought.

Additionally, he talked about “The Barbra Streisand Effect” which basically cautions that the more you try to suppress something, the more it comes out. Again the message: open, open, open.

In the end, Dr. Couros did touch on some cautionary tales of oversharing personally hurting people professionally (he mentioned a Georgian teacher who was suspended for having a photo of herself with beer and wine on a European vacation). His advice for combating this issue can best be summed up by a quote shared from Seth Godin “Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff.” I seem to remember this very advice coming from a certain EDUC 578 professor earlier this semester ;).

I’d like to end this blog with advice from Dr. Couros that weaves together everything I have been learning this semester. He said we have to overcome the inner 2-year-old in you that screams “mine, mine, mine!” If you have read my prior blog posts, you would see that this has been a personal goal I set for myself this semester. Thanks to a former teacher who flipped my world upside down by saying that your value comes not from the knowledge you keep but the knowledge you share, I have made it my goal to fight the screaming toddler in me that wants to own my ideas. This is why I am in the process of creating Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook. In hopes that I can share back just a bit of what the society has shared with me through the web.

B.Y.O.G.

This week our Learning and Technology class was given a “hall pass” of sorts by our incredibly progressive-minded professor, Jeff Heil. All he asked was that we allocate the time we would have usually spent on school work to something driven by passion. I’ll admit--at risk of being called a wanker by my (Australian) husband-- I spent the week cultivating my fledgling relationship with God.

Like many of my acquaintances and even my next-door neighbor, God and I met on the yoga mat. I started yoga a few years ago, not in search of trendy, new age enlightenment but because I had heard about a thing called Bikram which was all the rage for torching calories (literally, it’s 108 degrees in there). My introduction to God came as an added bonus.

From time to time, usually after a particularly intense yoga sessions, I lie in Savasana and we chat. Mostly God will listen to my fears and insecurities then surrounds them with a space so immense that they seem to disappear.  Both me and my problems become so reassuringly small that we fit neatly into the palm of God’s hand.

My God is not your average intimidating man-with-a-long-white-beard apparition. She is surprisingly approachable. Before this week I would be abashed to admit that she is, in fact, just an older version of myself--only cooler, calmer, and infinitely more secure. She knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that everything is going to be alright.

I’ve always harbored an unspoken guilt about my mind’s incredibly narcissistic incantation of the divine spirit. What would God think if I admitted my megalomania? This week I decided it was time to come clean, let God have at me for this gross act of vanity. Wednesday evening, as I settled into a deep Savasana, I waited for God to come to me like she usually does (she says she’s always there, it’s just that this is the only time it is quiet enough to hear her above the noisy din of my mind and ego). As I began my awkward confession, she chuckled and raised an eyebrow playfully. I lay in panic as her chuckles escalated to a roar. “Dear child”, she managed between her guffaws, “wouldn’t it be you that was created in my likeness and not vice versa?” Oh. Riiiight. She’s a sharp one, my God, I like that about her.

And so I come to share what I learned this week; in this life maybe it’s ok to B.Y.O.G (be your own God). 

Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook

In pursuit of my personal goal for the semester (which is to share, share, share), I have created a website for the weekly writing warm-ups I am creating for my Writing 6 class at USD's English Language Academy. Here it is http://christinascreativewritingcookbook.blogspot.com/ !

Hopefully I'll be adding the creative writing activities that I have created thus far in the near future.

Visitors and Residents

As I stepped into the cyber galaxy, blinking like an owl in the sun, I imagined I could hear a collective utterance from its residents, "You're not from around here, are you?"

According to the video  Visitors and Residents, internet users can be classified into two categories; visitors and residents. In the video visitors are described as those who, upon logging out of their email/Facebook/on-line banking, disappear completely. They leave no footprint, no evidence of their residency in the world wide web. In contrast, residents are those who have made a "home" on the web, they leave a footprint, which even when one is logged off, can be seen by others.

Even now with diggo, twitter and blogger accounts, I would consider myself a visitor. Or perhaps a resident-wanna-be. My contribution to the www story is fleeting. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I am attempting to guide myself by the principle that one's value is measured by the knowledge they share, as opposed to the knowledge they keep. The internet is the venue with the widest audience with whom to share. I hope that the creation of my "Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook" will be a major step in earning my residency in the cyber world.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

Beware the  AAAs! In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink warns that a revolutionary shift from left-brained to right-brained based society is upon us due to 3 factors: 

Abundance (we've OD'd on the material  and are attempting to medicate with the ethereal)

Asia (analytic, left-brained tasks are being outsourced) 

and 

Automation (robots are going to steal your job!) .

According to Pink we have moved on from the Industrial Age (where brute strength is the "backbone" of society) to the Information Age (where the brain is now the backbone of society) and are now into the "Conceptual Age" (where "inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities" are the backbone of society). 

The Information Age obsessively rewarded Left-brained thinking and skills with high paying jobs. In the Conceptual Age these types of jobs are at risk of being either outsourced to Asia or automatized and taken over by technology. Pink argues that "a whole new mind" built on the interplay of both left and right-brained skills with an emphasis on previously dismissed "artsy fartsy" R-dominant skills is what it will take to get/keep/protect your job from Asia and robots. 

What made the existence of the Conceptual Age obvious and undeniable to me was Pink's illustration of how in today's society it is not enough for a product to be well-priced and highly functional, it must also be beautiful...enter that 'artsy fartsy' right brain;)

My First Re-Tweet!

Hooray for me! I got a RT!

Ok, I'll admit it...If you had asked me anytime before today what I thought of twitter, my reply would have been less than enthusiastic. That is, until I got my very first re-tweet (RT to those in the know;). 

I participated in my first edchat today at #ellchat. The topic was ways to differentiate for ELLs and since I've never been one to sit on the sidelines, I jumped right in with a tweet sharing a link to this awesome site.

I was immediately re-tweeted by another #ellchat member. I must admit I am much more enthusiastic about twitter now! Feels good to be loved...

Assignment 3- "Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook"

The Challenge: I want you to reflect on some possible ideas that you would like to pursue for the remainder of the course. Hopefully, you will find a topic driven by your passion. Write a blog post of at least 200 words reflecting on some possible topics and any questions you might have around the topic.

 My Response: I have done a bit of a 180 in my area of interest. Previously I had mentioned iPads in the classroom as a possible topic. In truth, my motivation for choosing this topic had more to do with the fact that it linked to current research I am doing for a merit scholarship research obligation than it did with following a true “passion”. While I am enthusiastic about any kind of technology in the classroom, I couldn’t honesty say that iPads in the classroom could be considered a “passion” of mine. What I was finding that this lack of intrinsic motivation was leading to some lagging on my part in compiling resources. And ok, I’ll admit it…I don’t even own an iPad!

 What I did find was that I was spending the majority of my free time (and I have precious little of it thanks to being a teacher, a student and mother of 2 children under the age of 2!) searching for information and resources that could help me build my Reading and Writing classes syllabi. This is my first semester teaching at the English Language Academy at the University of San Diego and it is a bit of a dream come true. I actually entered the MEd TESOL program in hopes of landing a job like this after graduation and now here I am doing what I’ve always wanted to do before I’ve even graduated. So my “aha!” moment was more of a “Duh!” moment, I realized I should be tapping into this passion for our assignment.

Of the 3 classes I am teaching this semester, I would say that the writing course is my baby. I came up with an idea of including a “Weekly Writing Warm-up” (www for short) which focuses on writing fluency over accuracy. So much of these academic ESL writing courses are focused entirely on teaching writing for academia and in my opinion, this is at the sacrifice of teaching the act of writing for the pure enjoyment of it. I told my students that one of my goals for the semester is for them to become comfortable with writing in English, which I would give myself a grade of a ‘C’ for accomplishing but if they love writing, then I’ll give myself an ‘A’. I also let them know that I’ve never received anything lower than an ‘A’ in my academic history so the pressure is on ;)

 So my new idea is to possibly build a new blog linking any awesome creative writing activities I find, as well as a log of The Weekly Writing Warm-ups I’m creating for others to use. I am really trying to live by the quote I mentioned in my 9/24/11 post, “In today’s world, your value comes not from the ideas you own but the ideas you share.” Starting a ‘Creative Writing for ESL students’ blog to share what I create and compile seems like it could be a step in the right direction. Maybe I’d call it “Christina’s Creative Writing Cookbook’…

My question is then, is this idea “techy” enough? Does it satisfy the requirement of the assignment?