For the last three years, I've had the opportunity to run a month long workshop on gender and identity using our Project Achieve CVE for the Triangle project. Triangle is Canada's only queer secondary school program. I've had wonderful help over the years from a variety of people, including Katherine Parish (salmon) and Rochelle Mazar (hildegarde), but this year I'm doing it alone. Well, not quite, for the past 6 weeks Kat and Muddy have been visiting the Triangle classroom to prep the students. Thanks Kat and Muddy!
This year we had a problem accessing lab space on campus, and we're planning to start next week. Panic time. But at the last minute Tony G at OISE offered us space for half the workshop period that we were having trouble getting space for. Thanks Tony!!! And Professor Suzanne Hidi who is our faculty host there. For the rest of the period we're using the Unversity College labs, thanks to Professor Hilary Cuningham who's our faculty host for Undergrad. Since I'm only teaching graduate courses, I don't count in this context, and I'd have to rent lab space. Isn't collaboration wonderful!!!
Comments (0)I'm off to lecture in Hilary Cunningham's Anthro course on Gender at 10. The topic" Technology, the Body and Identity. Only scary bit is that it is a class of 80 undergrads, and I'm planning to have a small group discussion. Hilary says it is doable with this group, so I'm just going to assume that it will work, and enjoy the process.
Comments (2)Went out for sushi last night with Larry & Atsuko (and chibi-chan, Aiya? Not sure how to spell it.). I can see why Atsuko wants to move out of a small town like Hakodate. There are some people who seem so un-self-aware that you wonder how they remember to breath. Then there are others who just dropped in to say hi, on their way between walking the Silk road alone and trying to culturally relocate Edward de Bono in a Japanese context. (Just pretend I said "Between two interesting and wildly incommensurable things.) Aiya can hold her own against two parents who are chastising her simultaneously in Japanese and English, and is as fluently bilingual as any eight year old can be. She and I left the restaurant poking at each other and muttering "Tsun! Tsun!" Which is, of course, the sound that poking at someone with your index finger makes. She's very much at eight, what my niece Marie is at 12; an independent soul in Japan. And as with both, the question is how parent can nurture it.
Foood: The sushi was excellent. Garish and noisy and family restaurant like. Line-ups, 6 shouting sushi chiefs in the middle, and a beltway of delicacies circling them. The shouting was as people requested special things. The sushi was like sashimi that had been mistakenly dropped on a few grains of rice. Ate mostly things I knew: squid, octopus, salmon, tuna, maguro (minced tuna belly, with green onions), crab, and cucumber (a favourite). Probably more, but we just kept piling up plates. And my gracious hosts entertained me with chat and stories. I don't usually feel that relaxed with people I've met so recently. But Larry and I have chatted so often, though usually for brief periods, online for the past couple of years, that it was easy to slip into casual. Atsuko, as mentioned, would be someone you could strike up a conversation with during an earthquake.
Then larry and I went out to a coffee shop for some brewskis. I had 25 grams of blend B in 150 mil of water. Larry and 20 grams of B in 150 mil of water. It was about 50 ¥ (70¢) more for the extra, but I wanted a boost. Excellent coffee. If you don't know, in Japan, you pay premium for coffee, but that's really just a charge for the opportunity to have a quiet place to chat unmolested. Just like the extra charge for first class peace of mind when traveling, rather than standing all the way.
And I got 5 full hours of sleep, getting up a 5:30. Going in to see larry's uniZoo in about an hour, after finishing some yoga, and more microwave rice.
Today was fun. Forgot to take pictures, but I do have some of the university that I took yesterday when I walked by. Larry has more computer toys that I've ever seen anyone have. It is just insane. Every little toy and gadget. I fixed up some problems he was having with his previously unused iPod, getting 18 gigs of mp3s off a computer. I'm going to wipe this puter and set up moveable type and PHP nuke, and mysql on it. And maybe OJS (Not Orange Juice Simpson). It's a nice g4 mac. Then we'll drag in the Dell server from the other side of the firewall room, and set it up for MOOOOOing. It will take for ever to download and apply all the patches, but it should give me a list of what I need to do for Achieve when I get home. It's behind on some of its patches.
Larry introduced me to one of his colleagues, and I met some staff, watched a pile of student presentations (some more tomorrow too) and then I got my picture taken and got a space in the visiting scholar's wing. I'll probably spend most of my time in Larry's office, because more of the hardware is there, but when I have to retire somewhere to write, I know I've got a private space.
But the highlight was Atsuko's decision that we were going out for Ramen!!! I love ramen more than sushi. It is a Japanese adopted chinese dish of noodles. I've always heard that the best ramen was in Hokkaido. And it was really really wonderful. No shit. It was a great bowl of noodles. Probably the best since 1988 when I was in Yuka's home town... another special area for ramen. Figures that they're the two parts of japan that have had some of the most non-japanese contact during the shogunate.
Comments (1)Here's the site that Steve Mann put together for the lecture in my class todayInvention of the Wearable Computer: Fundamental Issues and Technologies. When I get Ravin Balakrishnan and Paul Milgram's stuff, I'll post it too. I most always put the notes up on the course page for KMD1000, but I should have been pointing out the more publically interesting lectures in both places.
Comments (0)I finally decided to upload and make public my Curriculum Vitae. I've thought a lot about this, but since it is the season for applying for positions, and that is a pretty public experience, I figured that I'd share it with the world. Sorry for it being 90k. It is a word > windows document in XML, and as Salmon knows, it takes for ever to exorcise XML from Word > html documents. Please let me know if you see any typos or errors, since most of you who read this blog are mentioned in it somewhere. But don't worry about the missing ). from time to time. That's something that Word does as a special touch of its own that I can't remove. Ugh. Ok, I get the picture. Here it is in .doc and .rtf as well
Comments (0)Building Virtual Communities - Cambridge University Press is out!
I have a chapater in it, "Learning Cyberspace: An Educational View of Virtual Community." The bottom link is to an old draft fo the complete paper. Minor revisions were made for the final version. Comments (0)
I'm teaching a course this fall at KMDI, and the first assignment will including having to work with a variety of environments that can be used for blogging, including: MoveableType, GreyMatter, Blogger, Livejournal, TWiki.
I would like to know what your favourite blogging tool is, the URL for the site, and why you like it. I'll make up a list for the students to consider and use. I'm looking for insight about journaling tools like the ones mentioned above, and also things like blogdex, blogroller, comments.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Jason
Comments (2)Something interesting to share today. I'm teaching this grad course in Education called Foundations of Curriculum at OISE. I've mentioned it a lot. I love teaching it. I wish I could do it all the time. No joking. I've got 25 enthusiastic and intelligent people who think I'm from outerspace. How is that different from usual? Well, I don't hang out in large groups, and I.... Anyway. I was talking with two overseas students, and during the conversation I mentioned that I'd taught in Japan in the mid-80s, and that my step-father (Lars Thompson, aka Large Thompson) had taught in China in the early 80s.
It turns out that one of my students was one of HIS students when he was over there. And she remembered him. That's not a shock. He's a 6'2" great dane of an english teacher, always ready to dress up and wax theatrical when he's teaching. He's someone I never forget, and I know him. Hmmmm... It was neat.
Comments (0)Had my first class of CTL1000 today. Before I knew what had hit me, the full class got fuller. We have 24 folks enrolled now. Seems like a very robust group, many of whom may have figured out how to get to this weblog already, so if you want the dirt, email me directly.
Comments (0)I just got an invitation to be a visiting scholar at Koritsu Hakkodate Mirai Daigaku (Future University) this fall. I get to give some presentations on collaborative virtual learning environments, work on some publications, and try to impliment a plan that Kat and I have been playing with to distribute a single CVE database over multiple servers in different countries.
I can't wait to get back to the land of beer from vending machines, and electric Sake!
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