Home » Posts tagged 'anais nin'
Tag Archives: anais nin
Could blogging be seen as a scholarly activity?
This are me thoughts from reading:
An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship
Heap & Minocha (2012),
Fig.1. Digital Scholarship with a nod to Martin Weller‘s book of the same name. (Created in 2011)
By stripping back the paper what do I learn from this paper:
- about blogging and digital scholarship
- about devising the research question(s) and method of research.
This quote from Axcel Bruns is wrong in relation to blogging.
‘Were originally more popular amongst journalism and business context’ Bruns (2007)
In fact, from my experience from 1999 onwards, journalists were highly dismissive and didn’t cotton on to blogging as a valid way to share their opinions for several years. The exception being financial journalism where breaking views on markets were fed, blog like, to subscribers,
Fig.2. An excerpt from my own early blog.
I was reading blogs in 1998, did some Dreamweaver training and if I’d got my head around FTP uploads I may have been up an away in 98 rather than 99 when I heard of Diaryland and joined the platform soon after it started.
Fig.3. An excerpt from a blog created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998
Over the next 4 to 5 years I saw a massive growth and influx of what by modern terms would have been described as journals, creative writing, fantasy, role play and social networking.
Fig.4. How I saw blogging in 1999/2000
I question why bloggers are defined by the institution they are at – the blog is more personal, like the noticeboard at someone’s desk in the bedroom or study, or a diary or journal they carry about with them, whether electronic or paper.
Fig. 5. We should stop seeing blogging in isolation – forms of ‘keeping a journa’, for whatever purposes, is as old a writing itself.
Little is ever mention of a history of keeping diaries, a writer’s journal or other kind of daily record for reflection or in scholarly circles to record the iterative process of a learning journey or a piece of research. John Evelyn was a diarist. Was he scholarly? What about Pepy’s he was keeping an historic record? For whom did Lady Anne Clifford keep a diary if not for an historic, even a legal record, of her rights to her father’s estates? (Lady Anne Clifford kept at a diary late 1500s into the 17th century).
Was Virginia Woolf using herself as the subject of an internal discussion?
What did Anais Nin learn and share about her writing as well as her personal journey, a journey that was shared with Henry Miller and that a couple of decades was taken by the filmmaker Francois Truffaut. As someone who had kept a diary since he was thirteen and had been typing it up and putting on disc for nearly a decade, the move to the web was a natural one.
- for personal reflection (e.g. Xie, Fengfeng, and Sharma 2008)
- collaborative working (e.g. McLoughlin and Lee 2008)
- developing writing skills (e.g. Warschauer 2010)
- flexible usage of blogs to suit the individual blogger’s needs, such as
- a space for reflection, to seek peer support, or both (e.g. Kerawalla et al. 2008).
I read blogs and corresponded with writers who were using the format to try out chapters of fantasy novels, to share poetry, to test webdesigns even to meet and indulge in intimate chat, role play and even cybersex. (Early blogs were the forerunners of a lot to come).
Whilst some of this activity isn’t within the parameters of ‘scholarly’ practice, certainly from a creative writing point of view self-publishing was.
From personal experience there were those exploring their personality, who were lonely, depressed or bi-polar. Most studies in English speaking countries … yet it was presumably going on elsewhere. And where does someone who is using writing in English in a blog to learn English stand in terms of being a student and a scholar?
Defining scholarship in the digital age
Boyer (1990) developed a conceptual framework which defines ‘‘scholarship’’ as a combination of teaching and research activities. In particular, he suggests four dimensions to define scholarship: discovery, integration, application and teaching.
Fig.6. Another excerpt from a blog for young writers created by Claire Z Warnes in 1998 when she was 17 herself. (I think she went off to study Computer Sciences)
The earliest bloggers played a teaching role, for example Claire Z Warnes set up a series of web pages to encourage and support young writers in 1998. She was teaching, they were exploring through reading, writing and sharing just as if they were meeting face to face in a classroom.
Boyer’s dimensions constitute an appropriate starting point for researching digital scholarship (Weller 2011).
Pearce et al. (2010) elaborated on Boyer’s (1990) model to theorise a form of digital/open scholarship, arguing that it is:
- more than just using information and communication technologies to research,
- teach and collaborate,
- embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society.
Which is exactly what Claire Z Warnes (1998) was doing, indeed, as some remaining posts that can be viewed show, it was as if she were becoming the Dean of one of the first online creative writing classes.
In relation to the research here’s the problem that needs to be addressed:
There is a lack of empirical evidence on how the openness and sharing manifested in blogging can influence academia, research and scholarship. (Minocha, p. 178. 2012)
Discussion
‘We have found that blogs seem to occupy an intermediate space among established writing forms such as peer-reviewed academic papers, newspaper articles, diaries, blurring the private public and formal informal divide ‘. (Heap and Minocha 2011).
There is a growing awareness of blogging as a writing or communicative genre in academia and research and as a new form of scholarship (e.g. Halavais 2007).
- to ensure validity of work through established forms of publishing,
- to integrate blogs so that research findings reach more readers
- to enable sharing information without time lags involved in formal publications.
The next steps in our research (according to the authors of this paper) are to validate the effectiveness of the framework (they developed) as a thinking tool about digital scholarship, and for guiding the practice of blogging in academia and research.
REFERENCE
Heap, Tania and Minocha, Shailey (2012). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging for digital scholarship. Research in Learning Technology, 20(Supp.), pp. 176–188. (Accessed 28th February 2013 http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/19195 )
Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar
Related articles
- All you need to know about blogging that you can’t be bothered to research for yourself because you’re too busy blogging … (mymindbursts.com)
- Scholarly Blogging (malmsy.net)
- What my pink highlighter taught me. (dfbierbrauer.wordpress.com)
- Essay on placing academic work in the right scholarly context (insidehighered.com)
- Driving learning through blogging: Students’ perceptions of a reading journal blog assessment task. (mymindbursts.com)
- Exploring students’ understanding of how blogs and blogging can support distance learning in Higher Education (mymindbursts.com)
- Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works XHTML Version (digital-scholarship.org)
- Blogging Inspiration, Where Does it Come From? (prefs.zemanta.com)
27 blog posts from all that I’ve posted since 1999
I’ve done an inadequate sweep of the 600+ entries here in order to select 7 entries and have it roughly down to these 27: If I do another sweep I’d find another 27 and be none the wiser. I have another blog with 16000+ entries and some 16 blogs. What interests me is what iWriter next.
I work in an Orchard Emotional intelligence means more …
Is education a problem or a business opportunity?
Grayson Perry and Rose Tremain on creativity
Fingerspitzengefuegel How where and when do you learn?
152 blogs I try to keep an eye on
E-learning is just like Chicken Masala
Life according to Anais Nin, Henry Miller and Samuel Pepys
100 novels personally recommended
12 Metaphors visualised to aid with the brilliance of blogging
Prensky and the concept of the Digital Native deserves to be lampooned
The Contents of my brain : a screenplay
We can’t help to think in metaphors it’s what makes us human
Maketh up a quote at ye beginning of thy book
Personal development planning as a thermal
What makes an e-learning forum tick?
Social Media is knowledge sharing
Making sense of the complexities of e-learning
Social Learn (Like Open Learn but networked)
Twelve books that changed the world
Some thoughts on writing by Norman Mailer
Visualisation of the nurturing nature of education according to Vygotsky
Woe betide the Geordie linguist
Does mobile learning change everything?
The Digital Scholar. Martin Weller
The pain of writing and how the pain feeds the writing too
Digital Housekeeping and the Digital Brain
My heads like a hedgehog with its paws on a Van den Graff generator
Where’s education in technical terms compared to the car?
My preference, having created an @random button for my original blog started in 1999 (and the first to do so) is to do exactly that: hit the ‘enter@random’ button 7 times and see where it takes me.
Life according to Anais Nin, Samuel Pepys and Henry Miller
Life’s a Game of Pinball
I would have been the witch doctor in a tribe,
The pinball that kicks away from the small black hole,
Disappears, then comes back for more.
I’m the ball which gets flipped and flapped, which dings and dongs.
Can you hear it?
Ding, sling, ping, dong!
Whack!
Donga-donga-donga-donga .
Rumble, tumble, ping-ding-ring.
Thwack!
Ado ga-danga-donga.
El Pepys
Ping! Ding, sling, ping, dong!
Whack!
Donga-donga-donga-donga.
Rumble.
Thwack!
I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between Anais Nin and Henry Miller for two decades and wish, even if it only meant being Richard Osborne to their relationship, that I could have been their watching it unfold and hearing about it from each of them.
Is this what the celebrity tabloid press do fifty, sixty years on? At best there is commentary and interview, at worst the photographs that make it look sordid.
Can they be studied in an elective on American literature? Would it be just American? She was French/ Cuban.
She wrote about D.H.Lawrence, so I will write about her (or Henry) or both.
The relationship fascinates, how couples are the making of their work. As if taking a lover catalyses creativity.
Just pages into her first Journal I am marking down long tracts which I want to record and discuss.
What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up saying it is absurd, illogical, empty of meaning. There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To give as much meaning to one’s life as possible seems right to me. For example, I am not committed to any of the political movements which I find full of fanaticism and injustice, but in the face of each human being I act democratically and humanely. I give each human being his due. I disregard class and possessions. If it is the value of their spirit, of their human qualities, I pay my respect to, and to their needs as fast as I am able to fulfil them. If all of us acted in unison as I acted individually, there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.’ (Anais Nin, Journals Vol 1)
If we see life as a novel then we deliberately set out to make it worthy of a novel.
If this novel is written on a daily basis as experiences unfold then surely the diarist goes out of their way to ensure that they experience and do things worthy of a novel?
Pepys is about to be serialised on BBC Radio.
The trailer justifies why a young person might keep a diary. Had millions been doing so in the 17th century would we be that interested in Pepys? Possibly, given that those blogs that are published are easily described as nefarious and sordid.
They take lovers, they are unfaithful to other halves, they go to places and do things they would never otherwise have done? Some would.
Is this the would-be artist’s struggle?
Is this what defines a frustrated creative?
The desire to express and share what they make of life and to have actions in their lives worth sharing.
I prefer to be the witch doctor in a tribe, the oddball.
From a diary entry of Saturday 17th October 1992. Thought over 19 years on.
When does a diary become a blog and is it diminished as a result?
In the Guardian Review, March 2003, William Boyd discussed the journal
‘There are many sort of journal: journals written with both eyes fixed firmly on posterity and other that were designed never to be read by anyone but the writer. There are journals content to tabulate the banal and humdrum details of ordinary lives and journals meant expressly to function as a witness to momentous events of history. There are journals that act as erotic stimulants or a psychoanalytic crutch and there are journals designed simply to function as an aide-memoire, perhaps as a rough draft for a later, more polished account of life and so on. But buried within these varying ambitions and motivations is a common factor that unites all these endeavours – the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth. The implication being that in the privacy of this personal record, things will be said and observations made that couldn’t or wouldn’t be uttered in a more public forum. Hence the adjective “intimate” so often appended to the noun “journal”. The idea of secret diaries, of intimate journals, somehow goes to the core of this literary form: there is a default-setting of intimacy – of confession – in the private record of a life that not only encourages the writing of journals but also explains their fascination to the reader.’ William Boyd
I’ve written here often enough about why we blog.
I’d love to hear what you think. Why do we do it? The ‘we’ being the obsessive journal writers. I’m trying to gather ‘you’ (vous i.e. plural) into this debate.
William Boyd’s to Ten Journal Keepers
James Boswell http://www.jamesboswell.info/literature/boswells-london-journal-1762-1763
Keith Vaughan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Vaughan
Paul Klee. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Klee
Evelyn Waugh http://evelynwaughsociety.org/about-evelyn-waugh/diaries-letters/
Gilbert White http://www.infobritain.co.uk/gilbert_white_biography_and_visits.htm
Cyrical Connolly http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/cyril_connolly.html
Virginia Woof http://www.woolfonline.com/?q=diaries/vw/overview
Edmund Wilson http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/12446/
Valery Larbaud http://m.eb.com/topic/330472/Valery-Nicolas-Larbaud
Katherine Mansfield http://www.tusitala.org.uk/blog/katherine-mansfield-the-journal-and-the-collected-stories/
‘It mimics and reflects our own wayward passage through time like no other writing form.’
‘You have to be dead to escape the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre.’
My diary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary
My record.
My journal.
My aide-memoire.
My lies.
My ties.
My deleterious exploits.
I’ve been at for thirty years; that isn’t a boast, it’s an confession. What Boyd says is true too, there’s no value in it until I die.
I wonder why? Often. But I do it anyway.
To save events in family life and to capture memories that may serve some literary purpose.
In the past I thought I might achieve something, it would become the record of a successful anything.
I can’t even do this properly.
What next?
I have details from estate agents (realtors) in France; I fancy a change. Different language, different culture, better weather – I should know. I’ve lived and loved there.
On vera. Il faut …
And the words fail me, I’ve not spoken French for five years and not written it for a decade.
Why keep a diary then put it online?
A diary is many things
‘Maketh up a quote at ye beginning of thy book; it will make people think thou art clever.’
Christopher Marlowe ‘The Obscure Tragedie’ Act II, Scene ii.
The following comes from a seminal book on diary keeping by Tristine Rainer.
It is as apt if you are writing a blog. Here are some thoughts
Some of this thinking can be brought up to date in the context of keeping a diary online; the essential principles remain the same.
A dairy is many things:
‘Everything and anything goes. You cannot do it wrong. There are no mistakes. At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include, or the audience you write to. You can misspell, write ungrammatically, enter incorrect dates, exaggerate, curse, pray, write poetically, eloquently, angrily, lovingly. You can past in photographs, newspaper clippings, cancelled checks, letters, quotes, drawings, doodles, dried flowers, business cards, or labels. You can write on lined paper or blank paper, violet paper or yellow, expensive bond or newsprint.’
Tristine Rainer, ‘The New Diary’ 1976.
‘Flow, spontaneity and intuition are the key words. You don’t have to plan what you are going to do. You discover what you have done once you have set it down.’ Tristine Rainer.
Write Spontaneously
Write quickly so that you don’t know what will come next. How the unexpected can happen. Surprise yourself.
Write Honestly
Be open about what you really feel. Few diaries actually lie to themselves in a dairy, but many out of shyness with themselves avoid writing about the most intimate aspects of a situation.
Write Deeply
Anais Nin, disappointed with her childhood diaries, developed the practice of sitting quietly for a few minutes before beginning to write. She would close her eyes and allow the most important incident or feeling of the day or of the period of time since she last wrote to surface in her mind. That incident or feeling became her first sentence.
Write Correctly
Expressive language is not a science. There are no rules. You are writing for yourself, so self-expression is the key. Test the range of your natural voice – it will develop. Errors are part of the form of the diary, as they are part of life.
Choose your audience
Your best audience is your future self. In ten years time you won’t remember the situation unless you capture all its sensual vitality now.
Value contradictions
In time they will develop towards a larger truth; leave them in.
‘Some diarists find when they go several weeks without writing they begin to feel off balance and take it as a signal that they are avoiding the inner self.’
Those of us who keep a diary regularly are stuck with it; whether it appears online, and which bits of appear online is another matter.
‘We taught the diary as an exercise in creative will; as an exercise in synthesis; as a means to create a world according to our wishes, not those of others; as a means of creating the self, of giving birth to ourselves.’
Anais Nin, December 1976.
There’s more to follow from Tristine Rainer on basic diary devices and special techniques.
P.S. The Marlowe quote is John O’Farrel’s invention and appears in ‘I blame the scapegoats.’
How to study
I bought this in 2000 when I was thinking about an OU course. In February 2001 I signed up for the Masters in Open and Distance Education. We used First Class, it was loaded from a disk I think. Using a Mac might have been a problem, I was rarely online to follow the independent, spasmodic asynchronous threads.
Anyway, a decade later I am heading towards the finish line.
2001 wasn’t a good year for many of us … I did the first Tutor Marked Assignment TMAs but was made redundant a couple of months before the TMA would have been due and had by then decided that doing less for a couple of years rather than more would be a good idea.
Anyway … despite having successfully negotiated two modules and six-eight TMAs and a couple of End of Course Assignment ECAs I find myself turning to Chapter 10 of the above.
‘Writing essays and assignments’
I love the way the book is laid out. I reads like is was designed to be web friendly with short sentences and paragraphs and bullet points galore.
We may be floating around in cyberspace 12 years on from the last edition of this book (first edition 1970), but is remains relevant, not just for preparing for an ECA, but for writing at all.
I like lines like this,’ After we’ve read, heard and talked about a topic, our minds are awash with ideas, impressions and chunks of information. But we never really get to grips with this experience until we try to write down our own version of it. Making notes is of some help, of course. But there is nothing like the writing of an essay to make us question our ideas, weigh up our impressions, sort out what information is relevant and what is not – and, above all, come up with a reasoned viewpoint on the topic that we can feel it our own’. (Rowntree. 1999:170)
- I will be probing
- I will develop a critical argument
- I will start tonight and write 500 words a night over six nights, then revist/redraft and pull it all together.
- I will have the evidence
- I will have the references in place
- I will plan, weigh up and select from the work that I have done (and that has been done in my tutor group)
- These will back up whatever themes or viewpoints or arguments I am putting forward
- I WILL write and outline and stick to it
- I will not become blind to better approaches that suggest themselves (which happened for one ECA and had me heading towards a 40 mark)
- And I will ‘write like I talk’ (which is what I’ve always done)
Maketh up a quote at ye beginning of thy book; it will make people think thou art clever.
From Christopher Marlowe ‘The Obscure Tragedie’ Act II, Scene ii.
The following comes from a seminal book on diary keeping by Tristine Rainer.
Here are some key thoughts
Some of this thinking can be brought up to date in the context of keeping a diary online; the essential principals remain the same.
A dairy is many things:
‘Everything and anything goes. You cannot do it wrong. There are no mistakes. At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include, or the audience you write to. You can misspell, write ungrammatically, enter incorrect dates, exaggerate, curse, pray, write poetically, eloquently, angrily, lovingly. You can past in photographs, newspaper clippings, cancelled checks, letters, quotes, drawings, doodles, dried flowers, business cards, or labels. You can write on lined paper or blank paper, violet paper or yellow, expensive bond or newsprint.’
Tristine Rainer, ‘The New Diary’ 1976.
‘Flow, spontaneity and intuition are the key words. You don’t have to plan what you are going to do. You discover what you have done once you have set it down.’ Tristine Rainer.
Keep it all in one place
‘When the dreams like next to the fantasies, and political thoughts next to personal complaints, they all seem to learn from each other.’
This works for blogging:
Write Spontaneously
Write quickly so that you don’t know what will come next. How the unexpected can happen. Surprise yourself.
Write Honestly
Be open about what you really feel. Few diaries actually lie to themselves in a dairy, but many out of shyness with themselves avoid writing about the most intimate aspects of a situation.
Write Deeply
Anais Nin, disappointed with her childhood diaries, developed the practice of sitting quietly for a few minutes before beginning to write. She would close her eyes and allow the most important incident or feeling of the day or of the period of time since she last wrote to surface in her mind. That incident or feeling became her first sentence.
Write Correctly
Expressive language is not a science. There are no rules. You are writing for yourself, so self-expression is the key. Test the range of your natural voice – it will develop. Errors are part of the form of the diary, as they are part of life.
Choose your audience
Your best audience is your future self. In ten years time you won’t remember the situation unless you capture all its sensual vitality now.
Value contradictions
In time they will develop towards a larger truth; leave them in.
‘Some diarists find when they go several weeks without writing they begin to feel off balance and take it as a signal that they are avoiding the inner self.’
Those of us who keep a diary regularly are stuck with it; whether it appears online, and which bits of appear online is another matter.
‘We taught the diary as an exercise in creative will; as an exercise in synthesis; as a means to create a world according to our wishes, not those of others; as a means of creating the self, of giving birth to ourselves.’
Anais Nin, December 1976.
There’s more to follow from Tristine Rainer on basic diary devices and special techniques.
P.S. The Marlowe quote is John O’Farrel’s invention and appears in ‘I blame the scapegoats.’
Blogging works – you too should keep a diary. You can always go private.
‘Maketh up a quote at ye beginning of thy book; it will make people think thou art clever.’
Christopher Marlowe ‘The Obscure Tragedie’ Act II, Scene ii.
The following comes from a seminal book on diary keeping by Tristine Rainer.
Here are some key thoughts:
Some of this thinking can be brought up to date in the context of keeping a diary online; the essential principals remain the same.
A dairy is many things:
‘Everything and anything goes. You cannot do it wrong. There are no mistakes. At any time you can change your point of view, your style, your book, the pen you write with, the direction you write on the pages, the language in which you write, the subjects you include, or the audience you write to. You can misspell, write ungrammatically, enter incorrect dates, exaggerate, curse, pray, write poetically, eloquently, angrily, lovingly. You can past in photographs, newspaper clippings, cancelled checks, letters, quotes, drawings, doodles, dried flowers, business cards, or labels. You can write on lined paper or blank paper, violet paper or yellow, expensive bond or newsprint.’
Tristine Rainer, ‘The New Diary’ 1976.
‘Flow, spontaneity and intuition are the key words. You don’t have to plan what you are going to do. You discover what you have done once you have set it down.’ Tristine Rainer.
Keep it all in one place
‘When the dreams like next to the fantasies, and political thoughts next to personal complaints, they all seem to learn from each other.’
This works for blogging:
Write Spontaneously
Write quickly
This is so that you don’t know what will come next. How the unexpected can happen.
Surprise yourself.
Write Honestly
Be open about what you really feel. Few diaries actually lie to themselves in a dairy, but many out of shyness with themselves avoid writing about the most intimate aspects of a situation.
Write Deeply
Anais Nin, disappointed with her childhood diaries, developed the practice of sitting quietly for a few minutes before beginning to write. She would close her eyes and allow the most important incident or feeling of the day or of the period of time since she last wrote to surface in her mind. That incident or feeling became her first sentence.
Write Correctly
Expressive language is not a science. There are no rules. You are writing for yourself, so self-expression is the key. Test the range of your natural voice – it will develop. Errors are part of the form of the diary, as they are part of life.
Choose your audience
Your best audience is your future self. In ten years time you won’t remember the situation unless you capture all its sensual vitality now.
Value contradictions
In time they will develop towards a larger truth; leave them in.
‘Some diarists find when they go several weeks without writing they begin to feel off balance and take it as a signal that they are avoiding the inner self.’
Those of us who keep a diary regularly are stuck with it; whether it appears online, and which bits of appear online is another matter.
‘We taught the diary as an exercise in creative will; as an exercise in synthesis; as a means to create a world according to our wishes, not those of others; as a means of creating the self, of giving birth to ourselves.’
Anais Nin, December 1976.
There’s more to follow from Tristine Rainer on basic diary devices and special techniques.
P.S. The Marlowe quote is John O’Farrel’s invention and appears in ‘I blame the scapegoats.’
P.P.S. A diary cannot be ghost written, I’m sure many blogs are.
Words, words, words; but not in that order!
‘To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.’ Said Alfred Hitchcock.
If I’ve written below about the demise of the written word, then I take it back.
OK, love letters have had their day. I don’t even suppose that boarding Prep School Boys are writing home religiously every Sunday either; though we did.
My mother’s collection of letters written by my brother and I from aqe eight years make quixotic reading.
Avatar started with a script.
The three CD edition is worth it for the documentary on the creation of the film. It started with an idea expressed as a ‘scriptment’ (sic) i.e. not even a script, but words on sheets of paper nonetheless.
A Learning Designer starts with a script, as does an Account Manager.
A client wants to see it in writing. You can edit words. You can share words. You can hold, copy and digest them in written form.
An idea (or problem), a brief, a synopsis and treatment … that leads to a script. And once this is nailed down the costly business of production begins. Why should e-learning be any different to the production of a mega million Hollywood movie, or the Christmas Pantomime in Ambridge Village Hall.
I get paid to write because I’m able to fill a blank space with bright ideas in a sequence that makes sense (linear) or does not (non-linear).
But ultimately says something.
I find reflection spiralling out of control into an extra-terrestrial maelstrom of thought that has nothing to do with the ‘job at hand.’
At the macro level reflection for me is on the scale, and of equal significance to Douglas Adams and ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and the Meaning of Life and Everything.’
I find reflection spiralling out of control into an extra-terrestrial maelstrom of thought that has nothing to do with the ‘job at hand.’
At the micro level, the job at hand is a tiny part (10%) of a TMA in a unit, of a module of an OU Course.
My mindset has to be of a myopic jeweller with some gems and a gold band.
I don’t mean to trivialise it. On the contrary. I worry how in my life reflection has never imposed itself. I see, I feel, I do. If I reflect it is to look in a mirror and accept what I see, not try to change it.
Reflection has been hijacked by educational institutions. Don’t have time to mark a student’s work, get them to mark it themselves … and then judge their ability to reflect on what they have done.
I think you can take from this that I don’t value reflection as a tool to assess a student. As a tool to gauge a person’s position, as a coach or facilitator to build on that person’s personal view of themselves – brilliant. But to give it a mark, pants.
Given that for the seventh or eighth time in the last two decades I have been advised that I am skewed towards action and visualisation I have to wonder how I can, or do, generate this amount of verbiage.
I am transcribing a dialogue between characters. I have a scene in my mind’s eyes as I type. I even see people, from the OU course, tutors, others … friends, as if attending a garden party.
For me reflection has to be, as it has been taken twenty years to engrain itself, the kind of introspection, sharing and reflection, fictionalisation and admonition, of Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf and Proust. I favour, absolutely, the indulgence of a Proustian ‘Involuntary Rush’ and its relevance to the person in this state. Serendipity. Where is there space for it if we are shunted down a dead track, into a Waste Land.
I go with Kolb and Cowan, their cycles and spirals. I favour the hurricane, the tornado over the spinning top. Which is what this is, spinning a top through a set of questions: what happened? What next? So what?! And then, I suppose, not a lot, or a lot, you defend your position, you stick, you retreat or move forward. Is this reflection.
Stopped by a Police Motorcycle on the A1 South of Gateshead my mother turned to her children and said, ‘cry,’ look uspet.’ And in due course, the traffic cop, seing three miserable children and a harassed Mum let her off the speeding fine.
Was that micro reflection on her behalf? Is this a Proustian ‘involuntary rush’ on mine.
Where lies this in education? Everywhere, especially in education social networking, which I have hated and now smile at. Reflecting on the whiffs of conversation I dared pick up as my daughter typed into Facebook with the speed of criminal law court copyist. The bulk of what her generation are learning is being done this way – socialising, homework, the entire mess of life a 21st century melange which says to me the OU is not right to say I am wrong, when I may be proved right and ‘they’ haven’t a clue.
I suggested to someone today that I would like to do one MA after another, five years a time, ’til the day I day. The OU can have my money and my mind. This is a little boy in a sweet shop.
Next up History of Art … with the OU, while doing an MA in Fine Art.
Then a return to History, 1066 to the Restoration for starters. Or Modern or Contemporary History? I fancy the First World War and have trunks (literally) a libary of books and other resources and artifacts on that one.
Geography, and all that it embraces.
English Literature and creative writing.
And French, once I’ve mastered the written language.
and kite surfing, and paragliding …
In your dreams mate, in your dreams.
Mind Bursts 