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In: Academented, Generational Divide, Pedagogy and Teaching
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Again. People are talking about the VARK again. Most research has discredited the VARK. Just Google it and you’ll see the debate pop up right away. But I still like it, the same way I like astrology, Tarot cards, and various other personality tests. The VARK is a framework that can over-determine or define people once we buy into it too much, and any framework or typography can lose its helpfulness if its overly rigid (hardening of the categories”). Lately, I have been rethinking my commitment to this schema, and why I like it, because POD folks trash it regularly. Their skepticism and rejection isRead More →

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In: Generational Divide, Pedagogy and Teaching
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Learning about learning, Part I The VARK I know my VARK and where I fall on the inventory of learning styles: Visual. Auditory. Read/Write. Kinesthetic. Someone recently asked me if I remembered Amy Grant’s song, “Every Heartbeat.” My reply: “Yeah, that’s the song where she’s wearing that cute polka dot dress and big sunglasses and there’s a dog. Like, she’s trying to be Taylor Dayne, but without sex.” Clearly, I am not an auditory learner even though I suffer from severe blabbativity and motor-mouthedness. I type super-duper fast, and I suffer from a rampant twitch-speedery that developed over years of living online as a digitalRead More →

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In: Generational Divide, Politics, This is my life?
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My grandmother was a grassroots politician, not a legislator. To me that distinction is essential. It gave her a clarity of vision that made things simple; she moved through a world in which the work was hard but the logic was unquestionable. Where she moved, people followed. Yesterday at RootsCamp I heard some of her clarity. The keynote speaker was Frank Curiel, a labor organizer of forty years’ experience, who talked about what grassroots work means. You go to the hall, you see the people there, you talk to them, and you listen. The backdrop of listening, in his case, was the farm and fieldRead More →

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In: Technoculture
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Today I opened something somewhere online and got another nag message from Google about its new privacy policy. The nag message invited me to “dismiss” it, a language choice that reflects a mildly amusing and disturbing political and interpersonal frame that we’ve developed with internet computing. Perhaps my amusement about being nagged over privacy derives from my almost-divorced status, but that is neither here nor there. I’m not going to waste time knifing through the current policy change. The short version: it will consolidate the privacy options for multiple Google services into one statement for the user to accept or reject with one click ofRead More →