Family Pictures

My son sent me some new pictures of my two beautiful grandchildren. It's amazing how fast Max is growing. He looks so happy! When I visit them in July, I will show them how to experience literacy with an iPad. It's going to be lots of fun.

New Amazing Apps

I have just purchased an iPad 3 and hope that we can all share PP slides, videos, charts, documents by using one of two Apps that an Apple technical support specialist recommended. The following applications will allow us to share and show a presentation on all of the iPads in the classroom.

Assemblee
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/assemblee/id434812547?mt=8

Idea Flight
http://www.ideaflight.com/

Stephanie is going to try to share an exercise based on her color-coded model on Monday. I am really looking forward to the shared experience.

Great Photo

Here are some of the beautiful people in my class. Greta has a cell phone, iPad, and laptop. How cool is that! We are all so wired! Are we becoming more efficient learners?

What a week!

I have been walking around like a zombie all week. I had too many papers to shuffle around last week and could hardly find time to read. I did manage to find two very interesting Apps to lower my stress level. One of them is Temple Run, a fun game. Now I understand why teenagers enjoy playing this game. It is really exciting, but I get frustrated when I fail to get my avatar to turn right or left and he ends up falling to his death. It is lots of fun.

The other App is Gardens of Time. This game allows players to find misplaced treasures in a Time Manor. Some of you will enjoy playing this game, but do it with your iPads. I find it very difficult to find treasures when playing this game on my iPhone because I can hardly make out some of the items. That's what happens as one grows old.

It's time for me to go for my daily walk.

Spring Break Is Over

The only thing I got out of our short Spring Break was seven hours of sleep. I was trying to finish lots of unfinished tasks and catch up with some non-school related readings. I finished some, but I have several deadlines this week (e.g., reports due, proposal writing, etc.).

I talked to my beautiful grandchildren via Skype and here are the most recent pictures of Peter and Maximo. Maximo looks just like his dad. I am so proud of my son. He has turned out to be a wonderful, loving father. I wish his paternal grandmother were alive to see her beautiful great grandchildren.

Visit Language Log

Here is the link to a superb blog. Thank you Greta for bringing this to our attention. I have enjoyed reading through this blog. The postings are carefully worded and those posting provide specific references and comments that display their specialized knowledge of the topic under discussion as it relates to the study of language. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

If you are minoring in Cognitive Science, you may want to pose a question or read through previous postings in order to find the information you are looking for. In my case, I am particularly interested in Corpus Linguistics.

Fashions in the 1960s

Yes, I am a Boomer, but I often forget my age. I would prefer to think of myself as someone who is still young. I am always open to new ideas and celebrate being alive.

Liz is studying fashion blogs. I wonder what she thinks of what my friends and I looked like when we were 14-15 years old. Here I am with my best friend, who now lives in Argentina.

Critical Discourse Analysis

You can find Critical Discourse Studies and Discourse & Society at Sprague. However, if you are looking for the most recent articles in Critical Discourse Studies, here is a link to the publisher's Web site: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcds20/current

The article, "Norwegian petroleum extraction in Arctic waters to save the environment: introducing ‘discourse co-optation’ as a new analytical term," sounds fascinating. I will try to get a copy during spring break in order to examine their methodology. I was in Norway last June and truly enjoyed my stay there. It is such a marvelously civilized country. It exemplifies the last of the social democracies, where the government provides its citizens with free quality health care and education, unlike the unequal access to decent health care and education in our own "civilized" and "modern" United States. It is a fact that its vast petroleum resources allow Norway to maintain this life style. However, they are under attack by right-wing fascists (the lunatic responsible for the slaughter of 87 children last year) and those bent on doing away with the last social democracy.

Chomsky vs Labov

Stephanie scanned a very interesting article from Penn's Gazette. Several of us went to this conference and heard both Chomsky's and Labov's presentations. They were debating the study of language from two different perspectives. In case you are not aware, Chomsky is not popular in Europe.

Please go to Blackboard (Documents) in order to access and download this article.

I Caught a Nasty Cold (gripe)

I have not posted anything these past three days because I was sick. It was so hard getting out of bed and driving on a rainy day (Wednesday), but we had a faculty meeting and I had to present a proposal.

Something really funny happened to me today. My significant other bought dinner tonight and while we were eating he complimented the way I looked. I was wearing a teal dress that kept me really warm. He said to me: "I love that purple dress. That's a nice color on you." I thought he was joking when he said that my dress was purple, but then I remembered that he is color blind and has a hard time distinguishing certain colors.

G. told me that when he was in Kindergarten his teachers would often get upset with him because he painted the grass brown and the sky purple. One of his teachers suspected that something was wrong with his eyesight so he asked him to describe the color of the walls in the classroom. He told her they were green and the entire class began to laugh because the walls were yellow. Then she showed him a dark-blue crayon and asked him to identify the color. He told her it was purple. That is when she decided that he could not distinguish certain shades of color. Many years later, when he was an undergraduate at McGill University, he volunteered for an experiment in the psychology lab. He was asked to identify hidden numbers or letters in some charts, but he could not. It was then that he found out he was really color blind.