Another good month, in no particular order:

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
A story about the costs of wishes coming true. Quite beautiful.

The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman
A story about the consequences of love. And loneliness.

Castle Waiting (Vol 1) by Linda Medley
A very fun fairy tale about misfits and belonging.

Earlier:

January #2013reads

I’ve decided to keep track of the novels I read this year.

January was a good month, and in no particular order, this is what I read:

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
A story of unfathomable loss, love, hope and beauty. It shattered me.

Big Ray by Michael Kimball
A story about being glad that someone is dead, and missing them at the same time. Written in small bits, like memories work.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
A story about all the things you find when you’re looking for something else. Heartening.

Misao and Fukumaru by Miyoko Ihara

“‘We’ll never be apart!,’ says Misao to Fukumaru. Both of them live in a tiny world, with dignity, with mutual love. Still today, under the blue sky, Misao and Fukumaru work in the fields and in these natural surroundings, where they shine like the stars.”

Beautiful.

A former research assistant of mine just pointed me to FJP: a weird and wonderful blog about interaction design that gets updated each week and has no archives or social media extensions, which makes it pretty ace in my books above and beyond its content.

And apologies to the author, but this post is just too good to let slip away. It’s what I always try to explain to my students, but better put:

Opening Your Mind So Wide the Ghosts Slip In

When I’m designing, I believe in ghosts. Let me explain.

I’m an analytical person. I believe in science and logic. I don’t actually believe in ghosts in any serious way.

But part of great design is taking lateral leaps of logic, of challenging assumptions, letting the world change your mind, staying receptive to new experiences and ways of thinking, channeling the energy and ideas around you, knowing anything is possible, letting your intuition drive your thinking, not saying no, not shutting things down, re-evaluating your point of view, treating everyone as if they have something to teach you, staying mentally agile, sharp, light, nimble, and quick.

And when I’m in that mode, when I’m truly in touch with my creativity, when my mind is necessarily wide open, the ghosts slip in. Of course ghosts might exist, just like of course this design problem has a solution just out of my reach, one I can discover as long as I keep working at it.

In that moment of creative inspiration, everything has to be possible. When I’m designing, I believe in ghosts. I have to.

Nice.

Hi, my name is Anne and I am a researcher an educator.

Of course, I’m both. But the reason I work at a university instead of doing research somewhere else is because I love teaching. Not every moment of it, for sure, but my best moments with students have been amongst the best moments of my life.

And now, just in time for the start of term in the northern hemisphere (and not too late for those of us in the south) my friend and colleague Matt Ward has offered some excellent reflections on what it means to be a facilitator of learning. The whole post is worth reading, but here are some of my favourite bits:

1. Teaching is really difficult
It’s a fine art. I started my career feeling that my job was to create ‘great designers’. I would crit work and deliver lectures to promote a certain way of designing, a certain way of thinking – hopefully engaging students enough to inspire them to do ‘good design’. However, as I progress in my career I realized that this isn’t actually my job. It’s merely a convenient side effect. My main job is [to] promote learning, the fine distinction is that students can produce unsophisticated design work but still have an excellent learning experience.

4. Sparking imagination
The most important reason for us to be here is to spark our students’ imaginations. It’s important to stand back from the content, the detail, to understand the impact and relevance to our subjects to our students’ lives. The good part, is that we live in fascinating world, your job is to show them how wonderful it is. This means that it’s important to remain enthusiastic. The daily, yearly grind of an academic can be tough, but the best way to make your job brilliant is to show your love and excitement for your discipline. Enthusiasm is contagious… be proud to be a cheerleader.

6. Debunking complexity
One of the most important roles we have as educators is to unravel the messy complexities of our subjects. It’s very difficult to remember what starting to study a subject at university is like, our students sometimes miss the ‘most basic’ of skills, language and knowledge. Therefore, breaking down complex language and difficult concepts is essential.

8. Humor / Humility
Don’t be superior, people learn best from people they connect with and admire. Academics have the tendency to act superior – they waft in, deliver their words of wisdom, waft out. Most people in the position to lecture are smart, but being clever isn’t enough, be nice.

On the first day of my doctoral studies, Charles Gordon told me that we were all brilliant so the best way to distinguish myself was to be kind. I don’t always succeed, but as time goes on I can think of no more important academic aspiration. Reading Matt’s post this morning reminded me why I teach, and reminded me to never get complacent about it. I do a lot of the things he suggests, but I also learned a few things that I can’t wait to put into practice. Thanks Matt!

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home by Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside –
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

(Thx James!)

Everyone’s been talking about the London Olympics, but I’m pretty thrilled with Central Australia’s Bush Olympics:

“More than 50 students from cattle stations and remote communities across Central Australia are currently competing in the final rounds of the Alice Springs School of the Air Bush Olympics. The students log in from computers in their schoolrooms hundreds of kilometres apart, to participate in warm-up activities via web cam. They then head outside, into the dustiest of playgrounds to complete half an hour of whatever Olympic sport is on the London schedule that morning. So far that’s included weightlifting, equestrian events (featuring real hobby horses at some stations), athletics, and hockey. Their trainer, Jo Black from the YMCA says there’s some real talent among the School of the Air’s students, who live in an area covering 1.3 million square kilometres.

[...]

But it’s not all about exercise: Mrs Pearson says the highlight of the Bush Olympics was the opening ceremony. ‘Student and parents logged in from 62 sites across Central Australia. It was important for us to light the Olympic flame here in the studio. A flickering flame is made from red and yellow and orange, so we had lots of helium balloons, concealed under a veil. And when our student William Weir lit the cauldron, the veil was pulled off and the balloons reached skywards. It was a beautiful representation. Also, every team from each station or community made their own flag [and] mascot’.”

Plus, Alice Springs School of the Air is pretty amazing. It “offers a wide range of educational services and activities to isolated primary children” in the southern half of the Northern Territory, the extreme north of South Australia and the south-east of Western Australia. Originally relying on radio communication, “the first broadcasts were made from the Royal Flying Doctor Base in Alice Springs, Northern Territory (NT), in 1951.” Today they run their own ISP, making “extensive use of satellite technology” because only 5% of the Outback has mobile coverage and their landlines (upgraded in the 90s) cannot support broadband.