Category Archives: ds106

Haiku It Up

I wish I could take credit for this assignment but it comes from my student at WM, Rachel.  She is in my undergrad pre-service class and one of their assignments is to do a ds106 assignment.  Here’s hers…

This is my haiku:
they see us as ghosts
just faceless apparitions
they see us as teens

Making Creativity A Priority

At the beginning of the year, I dove into The Daily Create, part of ds106. Then, real life intervened: the semester started at the two universities where I teach, the to do list for my day job got longer, and, this week, the spring gardening season took off as we started working on the greenhouse and planting beets and carrots. The 15 to 20 minutes required to take a picture, record a sound or create a video suddenly seemed more difficult to find. I saw today’s assignment to record a sound of something that comforts or makes you feel safe, and I knew exactly what I would do. But as the afternoon got crowded, it was tempting to skip it again.

Since I was going to make my afternoon latte anyway, I decided it wouldn’t be that much harder to record the sound and do some quick processing. Garageband gave me a little trouble but I was able to get it done and posted.

Is it creative? Is it art? It answers the prompt: my afternoon latte is part of my daily ritual. It means a break from the work day for a cup of coffee and a few pages of whatever book I am reading. I curl up in the window seat upstairs, read and watch the sun set. And the act of recording it gave me a break from the daily work as well.

I can’t help but think about the classrooms across the country where the work–often defined as preparing for the test–takes away from the opportunity to create, even something as simple as recording every day sounds. And as budgets get tight, the creative arts are the first things to go.

So, here’s my ode to creativity and my pledge to continue to find that time for creativity as much as possible:

The Tongue Twister Took Me Down

I had a LONG day…teaching a newbie how to use Twitter and then running a webinar. But I was determined to complete The Daily Create. I fiddled around with my SL avatar but there was too much delay. Then I found the PERFECT avatar at Voki–I am witchyrichy after all–but trying to convert the resulting swf file to something that YouTube would recognize was the obstacle I just couldn’t tackle. It is now 11 PM and I’ve made the self-preserving decision to just embed the video in a blog post that will get aggregated on the ds106 website. A bit of the fail and I’m wondering how this has become such an obsession so quickly!

My Love Affair With Books

booksWhen my husband took a tour of the old farmhouse last year, he was sure he would be able to convince me to buy it when he saw the library. Floor to ceiling bookshelves covered three walls of the room. Many of the shelves still held books as the former owner was also a book collector.

My husband was right: the library made the rest of the farm an easy sell, and the first things that got moved were my books. In our tiny little house, they had been double shelved, stored in boxes and hidden in the linen closet. Now, they are breathing freely, mostly organized, and I spend happy hours browsing the shelves, pulling out a book here and there, dreaming of the many hours of happy reading they will provide.

This is about more than just being a reader. After all, I can read books from the library, on my iPad, or borrowed from others. I love owning books and have collected them throughout my life. Poetry anthologies and literary collections from my days as an English major, textbooks about educational planning and policy from my doctoral work, and plenty of volumes of history and historical fiction along with nature writing, areas of personal interest that have grown over time. Now that we have moved to the farm, the shelves devoted to books about country living and farm stories are starting to fill up.

So, my dream of having a real library has come true. I’m waiting for some snow days to begin seriously cataloging the collection. My next dream is to open a bookstore, which in this day and age will probably be online. My husband says I won’t be able to part with my books but I don’t think that’s true. Instead, selling some of the less-loved volumes will pave the way for buying more. For now, however, I’m just going to enjoy my days in the library.

Note: This entry is an answer to the writing assignment “Tell Me a Story” as part of ds106.