Using Google Maps

I'm trying to use GoggleMaps to chart my trip to Fife. It's still a work in progress but here's the map so far. I will add photos when I get the time.


View Fife Villages in a larger map

Gardens are not made by singing

Rudyard Kipling wrote "Gardens are not made by singing, "Oh how beautiful," and sitting in the shade." How true! They are a lot of work. Today I have a young man helping to dig up the masses of peppermint that has loved this rainy weather. This afternoon another group of young men with Becky Buxton will come by and help out. Gian and Andrea have helped a lot too. I suppose I could simplify and take out all the roses, etc. but it wouldn't be the English garden that brings me joy in spite of the weeds and tons of work!

Debris in Space

I heard on the news last night that there's an international conference being held in Germany on the topic of debris in space. Apparently there's bits and pieces of old satellites, etc. floating around our planet. Not only do we mess up the ground we live on but we also have to pollute space too.

Hope vs grumpiness

A copy of "Insight," the Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, reached my desk today. I liked the quotation from Elder Maxwell so I thought I'd share it in my blog:

"Ultimate hope and daily grumpiness are not reconcilable. It is ungraceful, unjustified, and unbecoming of us as committed Church members to be constantly grumpy or of woeful countenance. Do we have moments of misery or some down days? Yes! But the promise is that Christ will 'lift thee up' (Moroni 9:25). The disciple can note the depressing signs of the times without being depressed. He can be disappointed in people without being offended at life. Thus it is that ultimate hope, if it does not finally dissolve our daily dissapointments, at least puts them in perspective." (Thanksgiving speech, November 26, 1980)

Judgments

Teaching is always difficult You never really know how much students are taking in until you read their papers and get back exam scores. I saw an article in Science magazine (March 14, 2008) about archaeological studies on how people learn. Although they are looking at primitive cultures, I wonder what it means for more complex cultures and what it means for students and teachers in a formal (school) setting. Maybe we're going about it wrong. And with the focus on assessment and learning outcomes right now in the universities, we are very conscious of the fact that learning doesn't always happen, or at least how we expected it to. I just finished grading another batch of papers for my first-year writing course. What students don't always realize is how hard it is to grade and how it is the most unpleasant part of teaching. No one is happy about it so why do we do it? It's the same idea of what's going on with the assessment of courses, schools, etc.---everything has to be quantified for some reason or other. I suppose value judgements are all around us in so many ways; it seems to be part of our lives. Judge not that ye be not judged! Yes, try doing that as a teacher! The only thing we can do is to be as fair as we can be.

Next Blog

Once in a while, out of curiosity, I click on the link that says, Next Blog. I don't know how they categorize what Next means because the "next blog" to my Family Files blog has always been different. Anyway, today I clicked on the link and found this fashion blog. I was trying to find out what the language was and ended up typing in one of the words magazinok (magazine, I presume) and then got more links with the same strange language. I finally recognized the word, Magyar and so found out that this is a blog in Hungarian. The last entry was the most interesting with a model wearing knitted clothes that are pretty weird as far as clothing goes, but as far as art is concerned, very creative. Check it out at http://modellekesmindenmas.blogspot.com/

I also tried the next blog from this site and came up with an Italian photographer. At least I recognized the language this time! Look at the stunning photos of the carnival in Venice taken in November: http://angelobattaglia.blogspot.com/

Serendipity

Horace Walpole has called serendipitylooking for one thing and finding another.

I was looking for a quotation from Giambattista Vico when I came across a site, Think Exist that lists quotations from famous people. I discovered that my son, Gian was listed among the famous and infamous. I did a double take when I saw his name, thinking, "Wait, that can't be my son?" Sure enough it was my first-born with a quotation taken during his involvement with Provo city's ban on dancing and another about his now defunct band, Midwife Crisis. (http://thinkexist.com/quotes/gian_pierotti/)

Another bit of serendipity came across my desk the other day when I received a flyer from BYU Faculty Center about a discussion group on Alasdair MacIntyre's book, After Virtue. When I was researching for my thesis, I kept coming across various people who quoted MacIntyre. I thought I might read him someday but forgot about it until the flyer appeared. I feel as though I'm being nudged to read him so I signed up for the discussion group. It should be interesting to see what the BYU community makes of a Marxist Roman Catholic's point of view. But MacIntyre's book looks back at Platonic philosophical thought, especially that of communities. And that is what Vico concentrated on too. My thesis examined Vico's sensus communis and how a community could come together in a technological world through digital storytelling.

I recently found an article that also looks at Vico's views on community. (I hadn't come across it for my thesis, and anyway I had so much stuff I couldn't use all that I'd already found!) John Shotter of the University of New Hampshire looked at "Vico, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin: 'Practical Trust' in Dialogical Communities" (http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/virtual/js.htm).

I was recently invited to join a Facebook group and with that venue for communication as well as blogs, what elements of Vichian theory are evident in these communities? There's food for thought, grist for research.