Word Games/English in the Wild
I made a blog focused on the idea of English in the wild. The goal is to look at language and how it works outside of school, to capture the things people find interesting, odd, or broken about English as they interact with it. Essentially, I keep finding things that are interesting (at least to me)- strange phrases, interesting sentences, games comedians play with words1, even a little Scottish poetry recently.2 I thought it might be useful to aggregate content like this. Naturally, it’s just me at this point but I’ll invite/beg some people to join me at some point and hopefully it’ll map out to students as well. This content can then become fodder for all kinds of reuse.
I see aspects of it falling short of the weight of Defective Yeti’s book review posts but containing elements of them. His structure would make a grate template for larger scale project and I like his “Words I Looked Up” at the bottom of the post and his neologisms (and I had to look neologism up). So between neologisms and paraprosdokian you have some unfortunate names but interesting items.
This idea may be something that was submitted Henrico 21 at one point. Gaynell remembers it but hasn’t provided me with proof yet. I went through a huge chunk of our H21 lessons tagged English and found many interesting things but couldn’t find this.
Quantified Self
I need to be more intentional about tracking things about myself and trying to be intentional. I’m going to do something about this as part of the data visualization thing we’re doing (a major part of this thing for me is constructing a sustainable workflow for the process).
This could play a really interesting role in the idea of student efficacy and metacognition in a way we don’t even come close to currently (workflow would be key, as would at least some degree of interest but digital environments might make harvesting data interesting- especially interconnected activities like twitter/social bookmarking etc.). You should watch this video if that kind of thing appeals to you at all.
The video is from quantifiedself.com and Amy Robinson is a very interesting person in general.
1 I don’t have satellite radio but VA Beach has an AM comedy station (Funny 850) I can pick up most of the time and it inspired the Sklar brothers post the other day and has me watching Netflix standup as well.
2 Na Day Sae Dark – make sure you play the audio