Welcome to The Spaces in Between, a weekly newsletter on culture, language, and technology written by Stephan Caspar. If you’re new here, then welcome, feel free to subscribe.
The thaw is on and as the snow recedes we are all hoping that spring will reveal itself. It has been a long winter but the last few days of sunshine and blue skies have lifted us. It won’t be long before we’re venturing out a little further.
We celebrated a birthday in the household, our eldest turned fourteen and we celebrated with Thai dumplings and chocolate cake. We are very proud of him, he hasn’t found it easy coping during lockdown. It has been a tough year, just as he was finding his feet, exploring the edges of his newfound independence, he was confined to quarters, stuck at home, with school work and video games to keep him busy. Throughout this time he’s been kind and helpful, he’s done his work (with a bit of cajoling) and he’s kept his room relatively tidy. Well done lad.
Our family party came as a bit of relief in a relatively busy week, I have two grant applications to complete, assignments to mark, lessons to prepare, and a huge list of people to follow up with on new projects. This is all good though, it is extremely satisfying to tick something off the list and move onto the next one, and believe me when I say I feel very lucky to be able to do all this.
Let’s take a look then, see what has been going on, and reflect on how it’s gone.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
Perhaps hours of endless zoom conversations have finally reached their nadir, peak awfulness of black boxes, disjointed chats, and endless technical issues. I’m well aware that we still have weeks and months more of video conferencing, but playing with ohyay.co and the craziness of ugly.video in our LangTech class felt like we were trying to pop the bubble of this year in zoom. We succeeded only in breaking the class, with one of us needing to completely reboot their machine so that they could fix their audio and camera settings. I felt pretty guilty, but it can happen and it was sobering enough to not try ugly.video again with its crazy screen bombing emoji and gifs. Fun though.
From the conversations that I’m having with people though, it feels that many of us are desperately searching for new ways to connect. I’ve mentioned proximity chat loads in recent newsletters and I’ve even been searching for novel types of online forums or creating informal conversation threads. Drop me a line if you know of any.
Across the way, in our other class, we ran our first in-person/remote session, with my colleagues beaming into the session via a room cam in our designated lecture theater. At first, joining remotely, I felt even more removed from the content of the session, watching the room, rather than focussing on the instructor. It lacked intimacy for those on zoom but must have been much more intimate and immediate for those in the room. I think my colleagues looked like they were genuinely pleased to be with students, I’m sure it was wonderful to enjoy the rapport. Again, I’m in no way convinced that there were pedagogical benefits and I’ve been vocal in saying that the socially-distanced classroom retains the alienation, in some cases more so than remote-online learning. I don’t doubt that teachers will get better at teaching in-person and socially distanced, as we learn and adapt, find things that work, pedagogies that seem to stick.
I signed a petition calling for teachers in Pennsylvania to get the vaccine, as they should throughout the world. Currently, 60% of students aren’t attending school at all, either hybrid or full-time. As mentioned on Pod Save America this week - there are around 3.7 million teachers in the US, which seems an achievable number in terms of vaccines, if the local dermatologist can get a vaccine, then surely teachers need to be higher up the priority list.
Life Lessons
Another newsletter that I subscribe to is the brilliant TinyDriver which shares similar ideas about research, pedagogy, and culture. I’m going to give it a proper feature and hope that we can have a chat with Ida Yalzadeh who writes beautifully about her life and scholarship. This week Ida shared quotes from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones which I thought spoke not only to writing but other aspects of creative practice.
There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever. Don't identify too strongly with your work...They are not you. They were a great moment going through you.
Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.
While I don’t know if in the moments I’m working, that these are particularly great or significant, perhaps to me, I do see the way they are “of me” but also “outside of me”. For instance, in drawing finding your line seems entirely arbitrary, it forms itself, and while you might learn to steer it one way or another, whether through play and experimentation, it is still your unique line.
Perhaps a part of creativity is learning to love that line, or seeing the words on the page as if they were written by someone else, and being okay with that and knowing that it is truthful in its own way.
This is probably unrelated, but it made me think of a documentary about the making of the tv series “Top of the Lake”. Jane Campion’s writing partner Gerard Lee said he was often plagued by doubt and the voice in his head telling him that he was doing it all wrong. So he started to write this internal monologue on a pad by his laptop and when he needed a few lines for the script, he would turn to them. “Why not?” he says, “…it’s conflict after all?”
Lost and Found
One of the questions that I’m often asked is how we know what good learning technology looks like, for real, when you get past all the marketing bluff and fluster of EdTech companies? Truth is that it is often a question of trying things that pique your curiosity. I said last week that the usefulness of tools and apps is often not immediately apparent and I’ve passed over ones that I’ve returned to later, or have dismissed as limited only to see some brilliantly creative use elsewhere.
I thought I’d publish my course page as a medium article for you to read.
Take in-class polling, for instance, I thought these might be good as icebreakers, or to facilitate discussion but had never really thought about them in a more complex way until Southampton’s David Read started to use them for feedback, flipped teaching, and a whole host of methods that students engaged with. It really is in the eye of the beholder.
This week’s FLTMag has a good article about choosing education technology, with a list of great questions that really get to the point of knowing whether the time spent looking at a particular tool, app or platform is really worth your time.
I spoke to a colleague this week who kindly passed on a link to the Resemblage Project that explores multimedia scrapbook creation. It works to captures themes through conversations with its participants which become digital stories. I was really pleased to see Sonia Chaidez’s Digital Storytelling Guidebook which I use with my own students. You can read more about Sonia’s work here, a kindred spirit in the world of digital pedagogy, media creation, and multimodal storytelling.
Thank you
In this week’s Field Notes by Christopher Brown, he mentioned using a trail cam and have to admit to not knowing about them. These are small cameras used by hunters and wildlife enthusiasts, they are triggered by a motion sensor and camouflaged to hide them in the trees. Before you could say special offer on Amazon I was fixing one to the porch at the back of the house, in anticipation of seeing the creatures leaving fresh footprints in the snow each morning. I’ve had it about a week and I’m afraid to say we haven’t had many visitors show up, but it is a great little device and has a timelapse feature, and even managed to get a few shots of the deer in the distance on the other side of the fence.
I seemed to get a few emails this week from fellow academics still adjusting to the start of term. I share your tiredness and frustration that hardly anyone will read the syllabus that you took a few days to put together. I suppose it’s the educational equivalent of flossing your teeth. Bon courage.
I know I shouldn’t be up so late writing, but thank you for reading, and look forward to catching up next week.
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