Serendipity

While wrangling with a problem in Scrapblog, I discovered another social site that amused me. It's called Catster. It's for cat owners to share stories and photos about their pets. There is also a companion site called Dogster (ew!). For those of us for whom pets are our children, this would be great fun. They have groups and little gift buttons (to give someone else's pet a virtual treat) and generally they are like Facebooks for pets. Of course, Facebook has some applications that are actual pet Facebooks (I've also registered Yseult and Collage for Catbook), but I get bored with these things quickly and feel the need to move on to fresher meat. The site is highly commercial, unlike Facebook, so it's more like MySpace. MySpace doesn't have a Catspace application that I'm aware of.
I wish I could tell you more about Catster, but actually I ran across it about 2 am and barely had enough energy to fill in profiles on all cats present and past. Now I have this major luggage labeled LV all over under my eyes.
I've added a Catster button for Yseult on this page. Show your pets you love 'em!

Hot Off the Press

Gee, the web can be fun! So is shameless self-promotion!

Gliffy - Glyphs in a Jiffy, I suppose

Look familiar?

You may or may not know that I just love this sort of thing. I've done several of these, for the Children's Room, the Adult Section, and the Children's Workroom (to plan how to move things around). This looked like Gliffy would be prettier than doing it in Publisher, which is what I had been doing. I've even done this with paper, a ruler, and scissors. But, a mini-Cad that's online! Wheeee!
Well, I find it annoying. By "it" I mean the free version. You can't see all of the work surface because there's a ruddy great banner urging you to upgrade to a paid account. And you can't get rid of it. You can do other things with this, such as flow charts (which I don't love quite as much as floor plans), but it's not worth the effort/annoyance if you already have Publisher and are used to working with that. What it has: a grid for layout. What it lacks: nudge. One more annoying thing: I confused my internet toolbar with theirs because both Edits were in the upper left corner. That could confuse a stupid person. Oops.

Meez Avatars

I get an avatar from Meez.com. You can earn Meez coinz if you rat out your friends, etc. by hounding them to join also. With the Meez coinz you can purchase better clothing and backgrounds for your avatar, which you can implant in various blogs, etc. sigh. Well, there you are. But can your avatars chat? Can they walk around freely? Fly? Swim? Snowboard? For free? Then what's the point?

Photobucket (some people pronounce it "boo-kay")

It's been a long time since I've used my Photobucket account. I had made a slideshow a while back, but couldn't find it when I visited today. There are more types of "themes" than I remember. I think I just needed something to embed somewhere and didn't look farther than that. I looked at the Neverland theme, because it seemed appropriate to my old Second Life photos, but it was just an icky border with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell staring back at you. I looked at some others but in the end I think I used the same one I had last time.

I like this one because it shows the titles I carefully (I thought "carefully" - I just saw one of them and wondered what I really meant) added to each of these photos because it doesn't take those added previously. Flickr uses whatever label you put on them, either stamped from your camera, or added afterwards, as a default, which you can change later. In Photobucket you get a thumbnail and that's it. But the embeddable slideshow is pretty cool. I haven't added music because I can't really listen to it where I am right now (and I find music can be annoying when it shows up everywhere). These Photobucket slideshows are limited in size, unlike the Flickr ones that can be ginormous, but they are just for viewing the photos, not tarting them up with fancy visuals or sound. There are several other online programs that can do a fancy slideshow, such as Scrapblog and Animoto, which I've blogged about below. Photobucket can load a slideshow directly to MySpace, if you're into that.

Me, Neither

So, I got this email from Picnik. Remember Picnik? Me neither, but apparently I have an account to use to fiddle with photos online through them. They were encouraging me to get the jump on my holiday greetings with their free tools (there are premium tools as well, but we all know what a tightwad I am - it nearly killed me to go pro with Flickr, but it was that or lose a whole bunch of photos that had been in my Photos account with Yahoo). So, I nipped over there and constructed the above greeting from one of my Flickr photos.
Picnik graciously accessed my Flickr account (with my permish, of course), I chose a photo (okay, it's just a screenshot of an avatar - give me a break!), and gave it a frame and some text. I was able to save that to Flickr, and also post it to Facebook, in the photos there and to my news feed, to alarm my visitors (both of them) to that site.
They added some "holiday" fonts for the text and I could choose about any two colors I wanted in the frame, but apparently lots more is available if you pony up for the premium. Somewhere in the nether reaches of this blog I may have reviewed Picnik before, (sings) but I don't remember where or whennnnnn. So, I have no memory of what I thought of it. I had to check. I clicked on the tag (they call them "labels" here at Blogger) "photo" and, sure as shootin', it came up. Picnik won out in a head-to-head with Fauxto, which is now ... something else ... ah, there it is, it's called Splashup now.
Oh, and I'm not ready for the holidays, either.

Looks Like I Picked a Bad Week to ...

I'm working my way through the backlog of blog posts in Library 2.1 and found FitDay just before Thanksgiving. I think we all know that a little less intake and a little more activity wouldn't hurt me, but everyone knows what happens when you go on a diet. It works for a while and then your body kicks into starvation mode and starts being more efficient. Or the minute you stop - it all flies back on and then some. For this I recommend the book Mindless Eating, wherein the author suggests that you cut back only about 100 calories a day so you don't trip the starvation meter in your body. He has some other tips - read it yourself. Back to FitDay.
FitDay is a social weight control site. Oh, boy! I heard you say. Just how aware are you of what you consume in a day? Sure, you can write it down, but only FitDay can call up the calories for you and then tell you at the end of the week if you're burning as much as you're taking in. I recorded a Thanksgiving dinner and two trips to Ryan's (along with all the rest of my eating - lunch at Santa Fe, dinner at India Palace, snacks) and still came in at burning more calories than I consumed! Something was wrong, so I adjusted my activity level to having a seated job, as opposed to seated with some movement. I'm still burning more. I'll have to go over my intake again. I mean, I posted two pieces of pie a day! You do have to be careful about entering a correct portion size, which involves a lot of airy-fairy estimating. That might be it.
FitDay only as social as you want it to be. I'm really only using the food and activity part. It's time-consuming to enter all the fiddly bits you've eaten in a day ... maybe if you had to enter each one before you ate it ...

Plaxooooo

Ha ha - Plaxo tries to be funny.

Let's see, how many websites do I subscribe to that are supposed to control the clutter in my life? Bloglines is supposed to aggregate my RSS feeds. ClaimID wants to manage my on-line identity. Google wants to host my e-mail, photos, videos, blogs, groups, etc. I have at least six e-mail addresses that are current.

Now Plaxo wants to coordinate my calendars, address books, and all the other little social networks that have me scattered like seed beads after the cat's been playing on my work table. What a great idea! I'm more scattered on the internet than seed beads after my cat's been playin' on my work table. If only ...

Well, I have to say this much, it did coordinate my calendars. Now I can add something to my Yahoo calendar or the Plaxo calendar and it will appear on both. I don't see it showing how to differentiate between business and personal calendars, though.

There is also a feed that shows everything I entered as one of my websites (that I was able to enter - I can't get it to recognize thingie, Bloglines, or Blogger ... ironic because I have a Plaxo widget on this page now!). This is called Pulse. It will not only show my additions to these sites (when I post more photos to Flickr, mini-blog to Twitter, etc.), but also when my contacts do. It will even check my address books to see if anyone else therein is signed up for Plaxo. I was surprised to find my cousin's son, my friend in Hong Kong, and good old Jane Connor at the State Library! You can also p-o your other friends by having Plaxo invite them, which I haven't done for Yahoo Messenger or anything else, so I'm not about to start.

Just so that I don't feel this has made my life any more stress-free, there is an option to have count-downs to events on your calendar! 54 more days to my husband's birthday!
No pressure, Plaxo!!!


Oooo, look! The editor of our local paper has been sucked into my social vortex! This is the business version of the Pulse page. On the left you can see that I can select other feeds: everyone, friends, family, just little me ...

The calendar, showing what's up for tomorrow, and the infamous countdowns.
Oh, no! What am I getting Bob for his birfday??!!
I've got my cursor over the Yahoo link to show that it last sync'd
with Plaxo almost three hours ago.

Took Six Months Off Of My Life!

But maybe with the proper warning, it won't harm your life expectancy.
Jott is supposed to make your life easier. Missy can tell you that I need help when it comes to texting/text messaging/SMSing/TMing. She watched me try to contact Bob on my cell phone in the car on the way back from SCLA and is probably still laughing.
Laugh no more, Missy! A text message from me is just a cell phone call away! Well, at least now that I've set it all up ...
What Jott does is allow you to speak your message and then it uses some space-age technology to transcribe that (better than the closed captioning on tv news shows, I hope) and send it to the cell phone and/or e-mail address of your choosing.
So now when I want to contact Bob, all I do is pick up my cell phone, turn it on (because it's never on), squeeze the voice command button, say "Name Dial," then "Jott," and then when Jott answers, say "Bob" and then give my message in my clear, Mid-Atlantic accent. Jott tells me "Got it!" and I can snap that puppy closed. In a minute or so, Bob's cell will ring and he will have a nicely typed text message with punctuation (thanks for the tip on doing that by hand, Sarah and Missy) and everything. A back-up e-mail goes to his account.
Bren listened to me say naughty words as I was setting up the account. I wanted to be able to Jott to my Twitter account as well (because one can) and I couldn't see how to do it. It was very frustrating only because I'm a poo-poo head. The "add" link was on the left, but in very tiny letters. Well, all those letters look tiny to me these days. Why don't they make the buttons on cell phones bigger? Why don't those young whipper-snappers speak up? Ahem. Sorry.

New Obsession!

Rooting through the Library 2.1 thingie I came across Scrapblog and that turned out to be great fun. I recommended it to Ellen who needs to feature her Drew photos in a worthy format! They have theme scrapblogs, so you don't have to be terribly creative, but it helps. And even when you have chosen a theme, you aren't locked into it. You can look for other puzzle pieces to stick in (stickers, frames, backgrounds) along with your photos.

Fauxto ...

Is now Splashup. FYI.

SCLA 2007

The link is to the program ... which took me four clicks to reach from the SCLA homepage. Heads up, guys! When I was looking for information, I had to really hunt for it. Four clicks is the minimum for someone who knows exactly what they're looking for because they already found it once. I can't tell you how long it took me to find the program when I first hunted for it. If you have a big annual event coming up, there should be a direct and obvious link on your homepage.
The same thing applies to us, I guess.
Ahem.
Next time remind me to drive myself - or to check to see when people think they are arriving and leaving.

South Carolina in Second Life

[Sigh. There she goes about Second Life again!]. I had been asked by Catherine and Kevin to be on the panel, for questions at the end (so being there at the very beginning wasn't necessary). Then when Catherine batted the ball to me, I choked and had to pass. Hmm, mixed metaphor there. I don't think every library needs a presence in SL, but when the question was asked, "Why at all?" I thought it was self-answering. "Is there any reason for being in SL other than because people are there?" You could ask the same question about any branch library or bookmobile stop. Why scatter yourself all over? Make the public come to you. Haven't they got legs? Doesn't everyone have a car? If they have a computer with internet at home, surely they also have a car and you have a website. Why add this new interface?
Why do telephone reference? Damned technology, messing up our lives!
Why provide materials for the handicapped (they're useless anyway), non-English speakers (they should learn the language!), children (most can't read), or any specialized group?
Why stay downtown when you could move out to the suburbs, have a lovely library without the pesky homeless people walking in and spoiling the ambiance?
We go where there are people! It's our job!
Kevin showed that you could have a storefront in SL for the total cost of Zero United States Dollars ($0.00). Lemme see, how much is that in Linden Dollars ... dum-de-dum, carry the four ... uhhhhhh, Zero Again (0.00L)! And he has a conference room with a video uplink. Of course, he doesn't have any puppet shows going on ...
It was also brought up that you get a certain amount of anonymity in SL you don't get when you bring Home Remedies for the Clap up to the giggling women at the circ desk. There's a medical library on SL with live staff to direct you to better websites, and if they giggle, you'll never hear it. An avatar's face remains pleasantly frozen.
And I didn't remember to point out that I wouldn't have had to travel over two hours to get there if the sessions were simultaneously on SL. I could have slept to a normal time, sat in front of my computer in my jammies with a mug of tea, and not missed a thing. Well, unless there was a technical glitch. And then I might have connected late and ... oh, hmmmmmm.
I was able to give Kevin a real hug when it was over. Bless him, he has the energy and conviction of a Pentecostal preacher.

Serving SC Latino youth

I took a page and a half of notes on this and got an 8 page handout. Jamie Naidoo started by reading one of my favorite stories, Just a Minute! by Yuyi Morales. He went over the statistics on official and undocumented latinos in SC. We don't need to do any research, we can see them every day. Latino culture is based on four core values: familia, pertenecia, educacion, and compromiso. Note that the family one is first.
Intergenerational programming is best. They will come as a family.
Find someone in the latino community to assist in planning.
Survey the community before doing anything.
Naidoo is concerned about stereotyping, inaccuracies, and omissions. Bi-lingual books can have bad translations or the Spanish may be represented in a way that diminishes it (placement, font style or color that makes it difficult to read). We should be on the look-out for these things in choosing books.
The hand-out was loaded with resources, printed and web, that will take ages to sort through to glean info useful to our particular situation.
Tidbits:
When doing a bi-lingual storytime and you have the book in English and the book in Spanish - should you read the whole book in one language and then in another? At Lexington they are able to double-team for bi-lingual storytime, so one person reads one page in one language and the other person follows up with the same page in the other language. That's handy! [So, if you just have one person? Use the Spanish book and translate page by page. It may have to be a very simple one such as Oso pardo, oso pardo, or you might just have to memorize it.]
Idea for a program: make a dia de los muertos altar! (There's one in SL, as a matter of fact!). Do holiday programming, on Saturdays (hush my mouth!), once a month.

Lunch

I hadn't meant to stay for lunch. I didn't see an afternoon session I was interested in, but everyone else was staying for lunch. I wasn't even hungry until the vendors kept talking about lunch. Is everyone going to the lunch? Was the lunch extra? What are they having? We might go somewhere. After listening to all of that, I regretted my decision to not have the lunch (although there is really nothing worse than convention food - and I saw that the dessert was already sliced and drying out on the tables). I decided to eat at the hotel, and I ran into Annette from Abbeville at the bar. Ahem ... I mean, we ran into each other at the hotel restaurant. We ate and had a nice chat and she talked about some YA programming she had done that sounded like a lot of fun (instead of having everyone make the duct-tape wallet, she had instructions for that, another duct-tape craft, and then threw out the rolls of tape and let 'em have at it!). We agree at how much you can plan for a craft and then see that the kids will take it to another degree. I told her about the people pens we made one year with round-stick Bics and embroidery floss. One teenager just couldn't deal with it and one 9 year old boy made what he said was Britney Spears, complete with long blonde hair and exposed midriff. I made a Sammy Sosa. I should send her that page from American Girl where I found that craft.
It makes me think I should turn the wiki into a craft info center where we can share ideas and photos of crafts.

21st Century Literacy

This was far more interesting than I thought it would be. It was the closest session to my field, and I didn't expect much. Deborah Yoho (not about to forget that name) works for the Organization Formerly Known As Literacy Council. They merged with some group and now call themselves "Turning Pages." Things like this only inspire a rant with me about how names of companies these days just don't make sense. I am suspicious when companies change names (often to shake off bad publicity). Gone are the days when someone's name meant that a genuine person or family took pride in their business. But I'll save that rant for another blog.
Part of the problem with learning to read in schools today is the "tension" between the three methods: phonics, whole language, and sight word. When dealing with kids with learning difficulties and especially with adults, you have to find the best method to use with them. That will require some one-on-one teaching which is expensive.
In SC we are still dealing with the legacy of the denigration of education. Education was not compulsary for all SC children until the early 1960s. I ran into a more in-depth view of education in SC, particularly in the upstate, in Kathy Cann's history of Spartanburg Methodist College, Common Ties. SMC started up as a school to teach textile workers, some who had had no education or school experience prior to attending.
You didn't need any school to work in the textile mills and children were often brought to the mills to watch their parents work until they were old enough to be doffers or take on some other paid job. This was in the 20th century.
We babyboomers are the last generation to reach a greater education level than the one before us. I see in my notes that I don't say we are better educated. Or smarter. There's this synergy between a lost generation (education-wise), immigration, and shrinking resources that is creating "The Perfect Storm." [I'm so glad she brought that up because I hadn't heard of that movie/book and it was part of the answer to a question on "Says You!" last night. That made me look soooo smart!]
Literacy needs: volunteers, space (we'll have more space in the new library), and resources such as books and magazines for new readers. It would also be nice to have a private audio-visual space. Math books. (This is so hard for librarians. If we could do math, we'd be in industry making the big bucks.)
An important lesson she learned is that It's About Story. She had to relinquish her animosity toward the furry animals in stories when she discovered that the adults could relate to them because they were in stories. Go figure!
It is about stories. It is the stories that engage children and adults. A story makes it worth puzzling out to the end of the word, the end of the sentence, and all the way to the end of the piece. Did it turn out the way you expected? Was it satisfying? Was it worth the effort? It made me want to tutor ... although the idea that it took Yoho four years to get her group up to a second grade reading level is pretty daunting.

Storytelling In Depth

Pat also gave us extra materials to go over outside of class, so I'll make you suffer through that as well.
So you want to be a storyteller (too)! You want to ride the waves without a net ... erm, I mean, a surfboard. Block that metaphor! You already have everything you need: a voice and a body. You will be communicating with both. The voice even communicates with unborn babies! Take care how you say things!
We've all learned from the Ripley's about body language, and the same things apply to storytelling. Your eyes are also a powerful communication tool. You have to use them to connect to your audience (to begin with and now and then to keep the connection up) as well as use them to express emotion, characters, and location (I look to the left, where "rabbit" is standing when I am tortoise speaking; I look to the right at "tortoise" when rabbit speaks). Then there are gestures. How much is too much? When are my gestures, albeit expressive and appropriate otherwise, a distraction? I use my eyes to confirm that the audience is still with me and not flinching each time I throw my arms around.
Your face is the focal point (as that's where the sound is emanating from), and you can use few flailing about with arms by using your face.
I use a lot of different voices when I do storytimes and storytelling (okay, most of them sound like Bob Dylan with a hangover). How do I keep voices straight (I don't always)? How do I even know how to make up an entire voice that's different from (not very, see parenthetical note about Dylan) the rest? I mimic other voices. Mostly Bob Dylan's, of course, but I have met a lot of people with distinctive voices and I remember them. I am careful, though, to only use certain readily identifiable voices with particular characters. The voice I use for Dog (and only that particular dog - not just any dog) is based on someone I knew in Boston.
But not everyone has to be able to mimic Bob Dylan and Marylyn Monroe (Cow) to differentiate between characters. Sometimes just the speed or pitch of voice is enough. Maybe it's enough to just say, "Said Cow." The important thing we learned from Pat is that you have to create your own style and it has to be one that you are comfortable with. I am more comfortable stepping behind a mask (even if it's invisible, like a voice) when I do storytelling.
Another thing to consider, besides your voice and body, is your location in relation to your audience. How close are you going to be? How big is the audience? What size of voice and gestures will you need? Will you need to walk around, the better to fix your individual "audients" with your eye? Or can you stay seated to be closer to them or more at their level? If you have a small group of pre-schoolers, you don't want to be towering over them so that they get little cricks in their tiny necks.
You can talk all you want, but then comes time for ...
The Pause.
It refreshes. It provides suspense.
It gives you a chance to catch your own breath.
Little Problems that crop up:
Nervousness.
Who doesn't get nervous? You think that after all the theatre I've done (since 1974) and twelve years of storytimes here at this library I don't get nervous? Have another think. Pat suggests that we do vocal warm-ups and relaxation exercises. We can also use the energy from our nervousness and channel it into our story. How does one do that? Especially since most of the nervousness is at the beginning of storytelling when there isn't much going on for you to work off your anxieties? Sing an opening song! If you aren't a singer, make it a chant. Let the rhythm of the song or chant help regulate your energy, focus it, and blow a bit of it off. (Note: some mornings Miss Marf is a little too tired from having too much fun on Second Life the night before and she usually finds a spot in a story where she can stick in a yawn and get it out of her system ... oh, look! Here comes the word "bed"! YAWWWWWN! That way it's not a distraction, it's ... it's an Augmentation!)
Storytellers and performers have for generations begun their performances with a "calling on" song. It settles the audience by getting their attention and getting them to focus on you as a group.

Earsdon Sword Dance Calling On

Good people pray heed a petition
Your attention we beg and crave
And if you are inclined for to listen
An abundance of pastime we'll have

We have come to relate many stories
Concerning our forefathers time
And we trust they will drive out your worries
Of this we are all in one mind

Many tales of the poor and the gentry
Of labor and love will arise
There are no finer songs in this country
In Scotland or Ireland likewise

There's one thing more need be mentioned
The dances are danced all in fun
So now you've heard our intention
We'll play on to the beat of the drum

Okay, it can be shorter than that. And you can get your audience to join in, if it's something familiar or easily learned.

Uhhh, uhhhh, and then, uhhhhh ... If you aren't Dog (who talks like this as part of his character, a forgetful type), this will be a distraction. Practice, practice, practice the story and if you are still hemming and hawing, take a breath whenever you feel the urge to air gargle. Breathing is quieter.
Wild gestures? Find something neutral to do with your hands (no pens to click!). One of the workshop's participants demonstrated the dreaded "fig leaf" - which is folding your hands over your crotch, like you're expecting to be kicked there. This is not the best solution. A better one, she told us, was putting your hands together at the fingertips at chest level. As long as you aren't trying to do resistance exercises with them while you are talking, they shouldn't be a distraction.
Pacing? Try sitting on a stool.
Talking too fast? Practice by imagining you're talk-ing to an id-i-ot. Just kidding! How about imagining your audience doesn't speak English very well or is taking notes.
Jerky storytelling, where some is really fast and then there are sudden stops? Try practicing by telling the story as fast as you can.
Not loud enough? Speak from the diaphragm. Support your speech from your belly, not with the throat. Will anyone believe that when I was young I stuttered and didn't speak up? "Stop mumbling!" my mother always said to me. What happened? Theatre, musical theatre. I had to develop a voice that filled a room. You take a deep breath and hold it, letting it out slowly and see how long you can take to let it all out. Practice that. I am now famous for being loud. When I want to be, anyway.
You have a story you really love, but it just doesn't sound right coming from your mouth? I have bad news for you. It's not one you should tell. I learned a terrific story at the workshop, one I thought had one of the best messages I'd heard in a long time. I was excited about this story! I rushed home and told it to my husband who just went, "Huh?" I guess that one just isn't my story to tell. It's a shame, but I'm not going to beat my head against the wall when there are lots of stories that hang on me and fit me like my own glass slipper, transforming me into cows, dogs, country bumpkins, and princesses. I'll just go with them.

Best viewed reflected

The Litticher Factory

Don't forget to turn down your volume. This time I used pictures from the Second Life Literature Factory and Bob's music ("Froggy's Night Out").

Animoto at Lasto!

Turn down your volume or be blasted out of your chair. Have you done that? Okay, now watch the video of some pictures of Halloween on Second Life.

Storytelling Workshop in Columbia

LeVerne and I attended the Panning for Gold Storytelling Workshop with Pat Feehan. Love that Pat! Pat always wonders what I'm doing there and I always say, "You can always learn something new!" Pat's take on storytelling, that is, telling a story without the book, without a net (as it were), is that anyone can do it. And she proceeds to prove it to us.
First we had to tell about ourselves and what we hoped to get out of the class. Next, we had to tell three facts but one of them had to be ... (shock! horror!) a fib! You have no idea how hard this is on me. I strive for accuracy as a matter of policy. How can I ... dare I use the "L" word? ... speak an untruth, worst of all, an untruth about myself? And then make it convincing? I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I am sooo bad at lying. (Eeek! I said the word!)
Next, we were to take a known story and tell it from a minor character's point of view. It was a story we already knew, but we were doing something different with it that required creativity on the spur of the moment. We were divided into teams for this and LeVerne and I picked the Henny Penny story. That's the one about the sky falling on the panicky chicken. We told it from the point of view of the acorn, whom I called Nutty Wutty and LeVerne called Wutty Nutty, which gives you an idea of how well we were going to collaborate on this. I told the first half and LeVerne finished it off, starting with Nutty Wutty (or whoever) crying out, "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" and finishing off, literally, by having a squirrel eat him. LeVerne is so cruel.
There were some really great stories that came out of these, and from individuals trying to wrestle a story to the ground by turns.
Next, Pat told a story and we had to retell it (Imitation, one of the ways of learning/telling stories), going around the room, each person contributing another part of the story. Thereby Pat proved that we could hear a story told once and tell it.
Last, we had lunchtime to learn a new (and preferably short) story to tell and be video'd, to watch and have critiqued later. Pat said this would be hard, not so much because of the video, but because we were performing in front of peers. As an example, she mentioned how stressed she was in the previous part of the class when she had to tell that story for us to learn ... and the Dean was sitting in on the class at that time. She kept hoping the Dean would leave and go do her work, but she stayed and stayed until finally she had to tell the story before we ran out of time and had to go to lunch.
This was quite the time-consuming class because it was rather large and each person was telling a story or a part of a story about 3 or 4 times. Despite this, the class went very, very fast. I suppose that's because we were wishing we had more time to learn before performing.
We each performed a story of our choosing that was video'd and then we watched it. Others were permitted to give their "appreciations" while Pat reserved the right to critique. She says you don't know what you are doing that's annoying or distracting until you see yourself on video. And what did I notice? I noticed that I need a facelift. It is really hard to look at yourself on video and not just cringe at how you look.
Coincidentally, I had been to Westview Middle School the day before to do a story for Teen Read week ... on video. I had read a portion of Richard Peck's A Long Way from Chicago last year and thought that would hold them, but they asked me to come back and this time maybe do something with puppets. Now they're getting pushy. sigh. So, I brought the puppets and shirt to do "Jack and the Three Sillies," a fairly long story that I have done before many times. I didn't even have to review it in my head. I don't get to see the videos, which is a mercy, I can tell you.
We learned the perils of live storytelling: upspeech (where your voice? keeps going up? like you're asking a question? but there's no question there?), saying "um" alot, flipping your hair. If you have any of these bad habits, you just need to be shown them and then when you are aware, you can start cutting down. "Oh! I've scratched my face again! I have to stop that. There! I did it again! I need to pay more attention. Don't do it ... don't do it ..." Eventually? you should be able? to stop it?
The room was filled with terrific storytellers. Their stories were really good and they were either already great tellers or Pat did a fantastic job in just five hours!
Pat said something about putting the videos in a podcast so we could be tortured all over again. If I can get the url for that, I'll post it here.

Update on Livemocha!

Boy, you need a pretty thick skin to do the writing assignments. I did my first writing assignment, clicked the button, and sent it off to be trounced upon by native speakers (I hope they are, anyway). There's nothing like instant humiliation! I had prattled on like I knew what I was talking about (or writing, anyway, or how I was writing it) and then five people leaped on it like a school of piranhas! Okay, one of them took back part of what he said, but Holy Cripes!
Bravely, I assayed yet another writing assignment and although I was very careful and didn't write as much, and the comments were brief, it was still like being stabbed through the heart. It actually brought hot little tears to my eyes!
You can say I'm over-sensitive ("You're over-sensitive!" Thanks a lot), but it was really hard on me. This is actually what makes it so hard on people visiting a foreign country. They remember what it was like in school to have every little thing marked wrong and they are afraid to say anything for fear of that humiliation of being wrong.
My husband recently played at a local music festival and did great, but all he remembers are his goofs. He was Mr. Pouty for almost a whole day after. It's no surprise that musicians become addicted to drugs from the pressure of performance. But I could identify with his feelings. I came out from reading the comments on my writing assignment and told him what I felt. "Why do you do it then?" he asked me. "I have to learn," I replied.
Of course, the difference is that he is thwacking himself over his own goofs and I have a whole social network of people sharpening up their red pencils to get at me.
And just like he will forget the goofs of this weekend when the new goofs of the next gig fill his mind, I will eventually toughen up my skin and forget the perceived criticisms of my attempts to communicate ... once I get the new corrections for the third assignment I've turned in today.
Is this a good way to learn a language, wincing and cowering? That remains to be seen. I will keep y'all posted.

New Widget!

In case you're interested, and I'm sure you're not, the reason the blog comes up so slowly now is that I've added yet another widget.
"Why, Marfie?" you ask, tearing your hair. Oh, because I can. And it was so easy.
There's a new guy (R. A. Meyer) for October's Charlotte-Mecklenberg Library 2.1 learning thingie and because he hasn't actually put anything up yet (to date), I went to his blog, The Internet Can Change Your Life.
Waaaay down there was an entry on widgets, cute little tools you can add to your website or blog. I already have a poo-load of them, but I combed the list at mashable.com until I found something new I thought I could insert into this blog: the del.icio.us widget that shows the last few things I added to del.icio.us, which is a sort of traveling bookmark. Yes, we all have bookmark/favorite functions on our internet programs, but if you move to another computer (and I have one at home as well as two here at work I use), you have to find the site all over again and mark it. And what if you are out of town on business and, like me, you don't have a laptop? Or what if you are a library patron and you don't always get the same computer?
Post to del.icio.us (I hate typing that with all the periods so I usually just call it Thingie which unfortunately renders it indistinguishable from other Thingies)! Once it's on Thingie, you can access it from anywhere and find other people who marked it at well. Another step, and you can discover more interesting sites from their Thingie collections. Yes! It's a social bookmarking!
You can also mark your own blog or site and see how many other people marked it. I used this to see who and how many people linked to Bob's sites.
Right now the widget is a huge list, but perhaps if I add to it, it will show only the most recently ones. And perhaps after a while it will become a nuisance and I will ditch it. Only Time Will Tell.
Widgets: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore!

LiveMocha!

Where was this LiveMocha idea forty years ago when I still had brain cells? When I was still branching, instead of pruning? What a great idea this is! Well, it's a great idea for those of us who want to speak another language.
I signed up for Spanish. Okay, okay - y'all think I already know this stuff, but you don't really know it until you have to use it day after day with, like, real speakers and all. I wanted to see how this works and I should have kept in mind that it's in beta-test because there are some little niggly things that annoyed me.
I went for Intermediate because I'm definitely not a beginner but I'm nervous about my abilities. So I started with Spanish 202. And what are they teaching? Telling time ... People, I'm telling you, it was Math!!!!! I have no trouble with the Spanish. I've taught telling time in Spanish. But I have to figure out what time it was a half an hour ago, etc.! Talk about sweating!
First they showed clock faces and had written underneath (there was probably some audio that went with it, but I don't have a way to actually talk so I was going to ignore the audio portions) the time, then what time it was such-and-such amount of time ago (which is the "it makes so much time" construction in Spanish). Then it showed people being in certain locations (use of the correct verb for location is a tricky thing for non-Spanish speakers) at certain times. Then they were in those locations a certain amount of time ago. Then you were asked if it were such-and-such time, with the response being, "Naaa, that was three hours ago!" Fine. That was just showing you what to do.
Next came the finding the correct response portion. You had to pick from four possibles the correct time or phrase represented by the sentence. Not too bad, I only screwed one of those up because the photo was missing and I wasn't sure if I'd clicked it. Tch - beta-test!
Then there was the magnet board: you translated a sentence by clicking on separate words made available. It was easy enough to find the first and last words in the sentence because they were capitalized and punctuated. I messed up once when I used the right words with the wrong punctuation in the "Is it blank o'clock yet?" "Naaa, it was blank o'clock fifteen minutes ago." Obviously, in Spanish the word order is different:

¿Ya son las 7:15? Hace treinta minutas eran las 7:15.

And I screwed something else up being careless. sigh. So, you ask, what's the point of this? It doesn't sound like such a great system. Ahhh, but you forget the social aspects. You are also required to make friends. When you sign up, you are given a few people to ask to be friends that either are taking the same language, or are native speakers. If you are the misanthrope I am, this is a painful process. I rooted about and clicked on three people that looked safe (female). One of them has already contacted me! She sent me a simple note in Spanish and I have replied. She's a nice granny, semi-retired, and brushing up her old skills.

Well, hot damn!

I also had the opportunity to look over someone's written composition (only about 7 sentences). Shhhhhugar! Her English is worlds' better than my Spanish! As a native speaker, I could correct it and/or give comments. What could I say? It was all excruciatingly correct, if overly careful. So I told her it was perfect and gave the full five stars. Other people had been giving marks as well and it showed her average star tally.
Oops! I had written a short piece as well. I hope people are kind.
Also, I've noticed that there is a tote board that shows the rankings in each class of how many points students have accumulated. I guess that's for the terminally competitive. Me, I'm glad I didn't bite off too much by aiming too high in levels. Phew!

Hmmm, perhaps I should look into the German as well. Then again, Germans grade really hard. "Och, ja - nice of you to zend ze note, but ve don't use ze datif in zat case, you know ..."

Added later: Horrors! Someone graded my short written piece! They walked all over it! Then they sent another note and said they had misunderstood something and that other than a little tiny bit, it was good. Phew! You need a thick skin for this! Next time I will write le minimum. Fewer words, fewer mistakes.