UDUTU and "Green Beer"

This weekend I am rubbing noses with UDUTU amidst St. Patrick's Day weekend! As St. Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday -- not your typical "drinking" day, as Monday follows Sunday -- it seems it will be a three-day celebration. In retrospect, it arguably started last weekend, as one town held its St. Patrick's Day parade and many patrons in the establishment I work in on weekends were garbed in green. For me, however, the holiday means I'm saddled with an added day of work -- this Sunday, a day normally allocated to my grad work! A separate distraction this week has been finding out the new evaluation criteria for, get this, Language Arts and mathematics teachers, that will be tied to student performance and growth, a topic bandied about for some time. I received a link to this post, which, mind you, is SATIRE, about a teacher suing parents for the poor performance of their child. And I just had to smile as I reflected back to the simpler days of time in college reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal," another jewel of satire whose meaning, alas, was widely missed by the readers of his day. (It takes place in Ireland, so it's an Irish theme this week's post.) Hopefully, these changes taking place in evaluation reform will be far more bark than bite! In my last post, I mentioned the poem "A Birth" by James Dickey, and I find now that I am trying to turn the vision of my e-Learning topic and storyboard into an actual module, the meaning of the poem is all-too-fitting. To paraphrase the poem, the narrator creates a pasture, only to find a horse in it. The idea, I think, is that an idea comes to mind; however, the initial idea morphs into something else, something more complex and unique. Further, he cannot control the horse, the fence posts fail to hold. Such suggests how the creative process is limited by the realities of the world. A parent creates new life in the birth of a child, and yet, that child is a life unique and independent of the parent - or author- who created it. Back to UDUTU - I find that many of the ideas I have envisioned may be impractical or even impossible to execute, so my new philosophy is to work through UDUTU as one does a riptide: let it take you out and away and wherever it will, and, all the while, keep your head above water, swim parallel to the shore (your desired learning outcome), and make it safely back to shore whatever way you can. Let the journey begin!

Dancing with UDUTU

I think I've finally figured out the pattern to the MAITS program. Almost always, we're challenged to learn about a new concept and, at the same time, tackle that by learning a new tool, too -- often the means of reporting or sharing our learning. This week's challenge: to create a pre-storyboard for our e-Learning module, which, in my case, centers around the use of an apostrophe to form the possessive. Using Gagne's nine events, we are to call upon our ID skills and lay out a blueprint for our module. In this case, I'll be dancing with UDUTU, yet another unfamiliar tool, a partner I haven't danced with yet. The challenge of creating this storyboard is that I'm not altogether sure if what I envision myself creating is actually "do-able." In other words, I'm left guessing a bit whether the interaction I see happening is going to be implementable. I sure hope so. After listening to Amy mention "Capstone" time and again this past year and whatever, I haven't really had a vision of what that could be. But, warned again by Amy that we better like it and be invested in it, this project -- and the idea that I could use e-Learning as the teaching and learning vehicle for grammar -- is very appealing. It certainly meets some of the key criteria for e-Learning -- self-paced, independent, individualized, and so on. If I can create engaging modules for students to learn certain grammar concepts, then that is one less thing to take up valuable class time...of which there is so little as it is. For this project, I'm counting heavily on the prefix "pre" in storyboard, as I've learned there are a few walls to encounter and work over, through, around, whatever, to get to the final product. That said, I'm gearing up for the challenge. Here's a link to a challenging poem by James Dickey titled "A Birth." The poem's about creating a story is like creating a life -- how it takes on its own identity and begins to control itself, like a parent of a child. Anyhow, this project reminds me of that. And if I can find a way to use e-Learning to teach my students what they can learn on their own, it will free up my time to do what would be far too difficult for them on their own, things like reading, interpreting, and discussing poems like "A Birth." Enjoy creating!