20080127

re: feedback

I have had a really fun week of getting back into teaching. Review week and exam week were torture for me because it's all the parts of teaching I hate. Drilling vocab, scores of multiple choice, overemphasizing grades, ugh. I'm glad to be back into exploring ideas and discussing science topics in the news.

Thanks to everyone who answered my request for feedback about web 2.0. For most of you, it seemed like communication with friends was a big factor. I haven't noticed that with my own internet use. No one contacts me on AIM or Pidgin, and I have one friend who GTalks with me, and one who Tweets. I don't answer my phone, and don't text either. Email is mostly work and family. Any kind of friend contact is limited to Facebook, but that still doesn't explain The Daily Plate, All Consuming, 43 Things, Blogger, Flickr, and Last.fm. I get a few comments from friends or family through each of those, but that communication is by no means my primary reason for using them.

I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind yesterday. There's the part where Clementine tells Joel about her favorite doll as a child, an ugly girl doll named Clementine. She would yell at her doll, "don't be ugly, be pretty" as though if she could make her doll change she would magically transform herself.

I have a compulsion for sorting that some people have insinuated borders on teh crazy. I have undertaken huge projects like sorting all of the science materials in St. Francis School. I most recently sorted all of the books in our office by size in order to maximize bookshelf occupancy. I see my online activity as an extension of the same thing. Web 2.0 presents me with ways to sort my life, my goals, my food, my music; I create dolls of myself with names like entropic ankh and say "be pretty!" hoping to magically remove the unsorted ugliness from my life. There's quantitative data in terms of numbers of items consumed, and qualitative data in terms of my many blogs over the years. I itemize and collect data on my own life, searching for a pattern that makes it worthwhile, or a pattern that says I'm doing something right.

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