A winter shutting down; a new year starting up

For a week between Christmas and New Year’s the college where I work shuts down. Everyone is sent home (okay well almost everyone), the heat is turned down (okay well not in all of the buildings) and people are given an extra few days of paid vacation time to spend as they wish.

My goals for winter shutdown have always been simple: once the mayhem of the holidaze is over, I attempt to curl up with a movie or a book, put on fuzzy slippers, and stay in my pjs for as long as I can without offending the family. Go offline as much as possible. Stare at the bird feeders. Walk the dog. Sleep until noon.

The new year comes and I am tempted to make long lists of things I will resolve that I will do. This year, I am making a list of all of the things I have left undone…stuff I started but never quite finished, stuff I thought about doing but somehow convinced myself I could never do. Stuff that seemed impossible or implausible during an eternally long, bleak, dark and depressing Ohio winter.

Don’t worry, I am not gonna bore you with resolutions about getting more exercise, eating fibre, or tidying my desk (but if you saw the state of my desk right now…oh never mind).

Part of the reason I am blogging here vs there is Jim Groom’s fault. (Isn’t everything Jim Groom’s fault?) Ryan and I decided we would join Jim and Martha’s on line digital storytelling MOOC. Why not post our work over at LLU? Well, because if you follow the directions for the class, step number 1 is to establish your own domain name and then blog from it. So here I am. And off I go. I need to work on my animated gif assignment. It’ll be here soon.

I also have wanted to take pictures. Alas, I do not have some sort of super fantastic camera. I have a crappy little point-and-shoot camera that is one step up from an Instamatic. Plus it is not even mine, per se. It belongs to the lab. But I want to take pictures. So there. I am intrigued by the daily shoot. (I need guidance, I need people to tell me what to do, what can I say). So I am gonna try to keep up. Here’s hoping.

Finally… I want to make myself get into the habit of writing. As a teacher, I ask my students to write. As a person, I know how hard it is to write. So Ryan and I (and maybe even the other LLU authors) are gonna try to write 250 words a day, 6 times a week. Be it here, be it on LLU…we are gonna write.

Neither the MOOC nor The Daily Shoot or the 250 Words a Day Project have anything (directly) to do with Language Labs or Language Teaching… so that stuff will be parked over here for a while. And once I make some connections over here, I will write about it over there.

It’s a lot to take on. It’s also a lot that I feel as if I have left undone. So here’s to new beginnings and new discoveries, be they in digital stories, images or words.

Happy New Year!

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5 Comments

    • Aww thanks, cogdog.

      It’s watching folks like you do the things you do that gives me hope I can actually do some of these things… and not get caught up in my own perennial self doubt or fear of falling flat on my face.

      Onward, and woof,

      B

  1. You go, girl. I wish I could join you guys, but I *know* I won’t have the time to do anything more than lurk. I’ve got my own experimental course to teach!

  2. Thanks for the good wishes and hooray for you… I look forward to hearing more about your adventures!

  3. Pingback: Musings from The Back Deck

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