As at all graduations that I'm aware of, parking is at a premium and folks get pretty creative at parking, so lots of temporary measures are taken to insure safety for all. This sign, however, baffled me. Are they creating a temporary parking space for handicap parking since there is such a need for a large event like this, or are they creating additional parking for those with temporary handicaps?
Here I am at the reception for graduates with the president of UMF, Theodora (Theo) Kalikow. You can see my full regalia.
Today is graduation day! I missed last year's graduation because I hurried home to Dallas to attend my own graduation. So this is my first UMF graduation. Some of the students I had in spring 2007 semester are graduating today. At the last minute, the call was made that graduation would be indoors. It's a tough call to make when the weather is being iffy but I certainly understand. Here you see faculty gathering underneath the tent outside the Fitness Center:
Those are the bagpipers who led the procession and are now on the stage while everyone marches in:
I'm about to sit in the second row behind these faculty:
That's Dave on the first row who is on the University Culture Committee with me. He teaches chemistry.
Just as Dave takes my picture, my tam (hat) starts to fall off, so this is an action shot of me trying to save my tam.
| Fiddleheads | | | |
| by Brenda Athanus | |
| Next I cover them with water in a large uncovered pot and gradually bring them to a boil. Boil for 2-3 minutes until they turn a bright “spring green” and then dump the first cooking water. Now you can finish cooking them any way you like for another 7 or 8 minutes. Cooking twice will ensure a sweet not bitter fiddlehead and then use your imagination to finish cooking your long awaited, foraged, first vegetable feast of the Spring.
Brenda Athanus runs a small gourmet food shop in Belgrade Lakes, Maine with her sister Tanya called the Green Spot. The Green Spotgreenspotmaine@yahoo.com 207.465.2921 |
It's Friday night and tomorrow is graduation at UMF. If weather permits, we'll be outside in the Computing Center parking lot. It's all set up tonight (I saw this driving back and forth between my old house and my new apartment).
Here are views of the porch and from the porch. The green tarp is over the lawn mowers--that's only temporary. The 4 chairs and table are provided by the landlords. What a deal!
That's the Sandy River way down there. The field in front of it (the river bank/floodplain) is nicknamed The Dog Walking Park and I can see all the dogs and dogwalkers from my porch. You can also see "The Highway," the lawn, and Darlene's vegetable garden (she promised me green beans and tomatoes through the summer...I didn't harvest any rutabaga even though she told me I could).
Notice the crabapple tree on the right of the house in full bloom. There's a closeup of it in the next photo. Yes, it's the end of May and fruit trees are just blossoming.
More wonderful fruit trees blooming. This is an apricot tree at "my old house" in the backyard. Oh my, does it smell incredible!
Imagine my surprise walking into WalMart to see this sign at the front door. The greeter gave me a funny look when I pulled out my phone to take this photo, but she let me do it anyway. I have no idea what this is about, but if it's pandas, I need to investigate.
After signing the lease, I went downstairs and put my food in the refrigerator and just started looking around. I had some stuff in the car and I unloaded that. Then Rodney called and asked what I was doing. :-) So he and MRM came over to see the new place. I hadn't been in 20 minutes and already I had company. I love it! They looked around the place, sat on the porch with me (I do love the porch), met the landlords (hmmm, that new tenant is already having folks come over to party), perused the property, and gave it their seal of approval. Then we all went out to Dunkin Donuts for free iced coffee (well, I didn't have any, but I went anyway) and then to Farmington House of Pizza (F-HOP . . . not to be confused with I-HOP) for dinner. What fun!
In this photo you can see the entrance to my apartment and my "covered" porch. The porch goes the entire length of the front of the apartment and above it is Darlene and John's sundeck which shades my porch for me.
Half veggie/half pepperoni pizza from F-HOP.
Here's a close-up of the sink and you can see its proximity to the refrigerator.
Bathroom--tiny but functional:
This is the broom closet . . . big enough for one broom. I love it when people make efficient use of space. Instead of just covering up the pipes, they put a tiny door on it and created enough space to store a broom and dustpan.
Here's the new place. It's furnished, so all I have to bring is clothes, books, and knick-knacks. I hope I haven't acquired too many knick-knacks since going minimalistic when I left Dallas.
This is the front door from the inside of the apartment. I'm standing in the entry way taking this photo:
In the entryway are a desk and open closet (that's the bedroom door inbetween). I brought the book and the basket on my first trip over (and the winter clothes in garment bags). The book is from Joy my choir bookmate back in Dallas and the basket is filled with Easter eggs, each with a personal message from choir members sent to me Easter 2007 when I couldn't be in Dallas to sing with my choir of 23 years. Those items seemed appropriate first items to bring to the new place.
This is the living area. The wood burning fire stove is functional but isn't to be used--insurance costs sky rocket if tenants are playing with fire. ;-)
Turn around in the bedroom and there's the closet. This should be the ultimate test of my new minimalist ways. ;-)
Today, I signed the lease on my new apartment. My landlords are Darlene (whose office is practically next door to mine) and John. I went to their house to sign the lease (they live in the house above my daylight basement apartment) and ended up spending over an hour just chatting with them. I knew Darlene from work but had never met John. We had a blast just laughing and telling stories. I'm not sure how it came up but a discussion of Mexican food and the nuances between true Mexican, Tex-Mex, and New Mexican led my revealing that I loved green chiles and the next thing I know, John is handing me a bag with two frozen green chiles in it. Then he asks if I've ever had pepper jelly. Oh my! I love pepper jelly--green or red or any other color. Next thing I know, he's gone downstairs and emerges from the front basement (next to but not connected to my basement apartment) with a jar of red pepper jelly that he had made himself. So I left with a lease in hand and food to put in my refrigerator. Now that's the way to start a new lease!
By Lorna Collier
As of fall quarter 2008, Abilene Christian University will be the first school in the United States to equip all its incoming freshmen with iPhones. The school has developed about 15 applications for these phones, including course registration, 3-D campus maps, surveys, podcasts and emergency alerts.
Using Internet-connected smartphones is just one example of how mobile broadband technology is expected to make a significant impact on education in the near future. It's one of several trends explored in the 2008 Horizon Report, an annual review of emerging technologies in education produced by The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, in cooperation with 36 education and technology experts around the world.
Theresa Overall is an associate professor of education at the University of Maine at Farmington. Like many educators, she believes using such tools helps students to "think at a higher level and produce better-quality work."
She uses a classroom "wiki" (or communal Web site) for student assignments. "It's about allowing students to use tools that they are comfortable with," says Overall.
What else is on the horizon for teachers and students? Take a peek into the classroom of the future.
Mobile broadband
Abilene Christian University may be taking the lead by offering iPhones to every student, but the Horizon Report predicts smart phones will be more widely adopted in the coming years because they have so many potential educational applications -- especially with the recent release by Apple of software development tools that allow users to create custom iPhone programs.
"The big surprise is campuses haven't started to pay much attention yet," says Larry Johnson, chief operating officer of The New Media Consortium, especially since smart phones can be used to collect data, record and upload sound and video, take notes, answer polls and view video podcasts. Slowly, however, the technology is catching on as a curriculum aid.
"If you look at grassroots video produced in the academic environment, the proliferation is more in the life sciences than anywhere else," says Jerry Sheehan, manager for government programs development at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.
This is because, says Sheehan, students studying life science "have to have ways to visualize it -- you can't understand it without visualizing."
This fall at George Fox University in Oregon, all students will receive Mac laptops equipped with Apple's iLife software suite, which includes video-editing capabilities. The school's chief technology officer Greg Smith says this uniformity in software and hardware will make it easier for teachers to incorporate things like grassroots video into their curricula.
"The students' increased ability to express themselves via video will allow them to more accurately describe what they have learned," says Smith.
Wikis can be even more far-reaching than a single classroom. For instance, the Flat Classroom Project brings high school students in the U.S. and Qatar together online for discussions and to create video or other projects.
Rochester Institute of Technology created a Digital Entrepreneurship "Ning" site, which lets undergrads connect with venture capitalists and business owners from around the world.
"The whole idea was to create something out in the open ... with students aggregating information in a way that was valuable to the community, and the community contributing by offering insights to the students," says Vic Perotti, associate professor at RIT, who directs the "DigEnt" site.
"What is special about this community is that it approaches learning in a very open way. We conduct the process of entrepreneurial education in the context of real-world entrepreneurs and investors, and invite them to participate however they choose."
Overall keeps her classroom syllabus on her wiki, and uses it for everyday classroom sessions. "If we're brainstorming a list as a class, I don't write it on the board; I make a new wiki page and type as we brainstorm. Then when we're done, we have the list in a place where everyone can access it later. Before, someone had to write it down on paper or else we lost the list."
Purdue University currently "mashes" Google Earth with historical data to create "Visible Past" -- a site that allows students to see a rendering of how historical sights may have looked in the past.
Professor Susan Smith Nash -- a mash-up expert -- used a combination of sociological databases in an interdisciplinary course at the University of Oklahoma this spring. Nash had her students probe the connection between rural poverty and cultural isolation in the U.S. by mixing census and zip code data with Yahoo maps of restaurant and retail locations.
Programs such as Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly let students or teachers easily mash together a variety of resources.
"Students can drag and drop together media from various sources, such as YouTube, Google Maps, the New York Times, Flickr and any other Web site with an RSS feed," says Perotti. "The hybrid feeds that they create are truly novel forms of communication that offer unprecedented linkages."
Collective Intelligence isn't expected to impact education for a few years yet, but Johnson says it is coming. "We're seeing more and more data collections and collections of papers incorporating folksonomy -- the idea of people putting tags on how things should be categorized, as opposed to the way an expert might," says Johnson.
Another technology just beginning to emerge in schools -- with more usage expected in the next four to five years -- is social operating systems, says Johnson. This technology is an expansion of today's social networks like Facebook, which will allow teachers and students to evaluate the reliability of academic data they find online, and find research partners for collaborations.
UM Farmington education professor Theresa Overall believes the new technologies in the Horizon Report are here to stay. "I can't imagine going back."
How sweet is this? Today was our Celebration for each of the two cohorts of students involved in Practicum. We call them "Block 1" and "Block 2" because they take 4 courses in a "blocked schedule" and there are two sections. Section 002, had a thank you card signed by all the students and a potted plant for each of us (Dr. Grace, Beth, and me). :-)
It wouldn’t be Spring in Maine without eating at least a couple “batches” of fiddleheads. This has been a record winter for snow and the melt has been gentle and slow until a few days ago when it rained for twenty-four solid hours! Since fiddleheads grow along the banks of waterways they literally disappeared until the waters receded. Interesting vegetable, huh?
The ferns are cut with a knife riverside as the fern frond is just breaking/popping its little head out. There is a brown sheath that is partially covering the fern. This has to be removed before cooking as it imparts a real bitterness and turns the cooking water a very tannic brown, like over steeped tea. I fill the sink with cold water and agitate the ferns and wait for all the wispy brown covers to get waterlogged and fall to the bottom of the sink.