I did not expect that the pond was overflowed with water and many of the flowers disappeared because of the overflow.

However, there was still something to expect since the landscape never repeated itself like many family gardens.  The changes of temperature and lot of other variables affect plants and my experience told me that there were different dominant plants each year. 

This year, I found a new patch of ground covered with a lot of flowers by the retention pond.  This was so far the best dream I had in the summer in Madison.

The digital revolution has turned the world (at least a great part of the world) upside down, if not making it a brave new world. Now we are communicating with blogs, facebook and many other social networking applications–these all demand different capabilities traditional schooling does not provide.  Well, at least it is true to many schools in the US or Taiwan. The ability to use new media to communicate or express ideas are often, again, vaguely defined as “new literacies” or “multimodal literacies.”  If you are interested in digging into, I have two refs for you.

New London Group, The. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 9-38). London: Routledge.

Leu, D.J., Jr., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J., & Cammack, D.W. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication technologies. In R.B. Ruddell, & N. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 1570-1613). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=leu/

Other references

diSessa, A. A. (2000). Changing minds: Computers, learning and literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Research Groups

Local Games Lab
University of Wisconsin-Madison 

MIT STEP’s Handheld Augmented Reality Simulations
MIT’s Teacher Education Program 

Journals:

International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organization
Special Issue on: “Mobile Learning with Context-Aware Technologies”

Recent progress in wireless and sensor technologies has lead to a new development of mobile learning, which is able to sense the situation of learners and provide adaptive supports in the authentic environment. Researchers call such feature “context awareness”, and have been investigating the development of new mobile learning environments; nevertheless, the methodologies and applications for conducting effective learning activities in such environments have not yet been well discussed and demonstrated. This special issue aims to enhance mobile learning a step further from learning at anytime anywhere to be at the right time and the right place with right learning resources and right learning peers by applying the context-aware technologies. 

[ Dates to remember ]

Full paper deadline        February 28, 2009
Notification          May 31, 2009
Revision deadline          July 1, 2009
Special issue             January, 2010

Conferences (randomly assigned)

• US 
  GLS (Games + Learning + Society): Madison, Wisconsin

Journals

The International Journal of Computer Game Research:”Narrative, Games, and Theory” is an interesting article I should read (by Jan Simons), because narrative is one of the major design principle in my first design of serious games.

Research Groups

• US
   GLS: University of Wisconsin-Madison–Well, as a member of GLS, I surely list it as the first one.

其實, 很多事情都不需要開場白. 開場白顯的太過正式了. 感覺上像是在宣告眾人, 我現在要做甚麼事情, 請你們觀看或者聆聽. 如果你們不注意看的話, 我就要… 於是 有了開場白.
開場白讓人難以負擔, 因為我們預設了觀眾, 預設了觀眾想要的品味, 預設了自己要如何迎合那樣的品味.

也因此限制了自己的想像空間吧!
想看看, 當你的想像空間被這樣子限制住的時候, 你的想像力變成甚麼?

於是, 我有了另類的開場白. 因為開場要宣告的對象不是已知的觀眾或聽眾, 而是自己.
當宣告的對象是自己的時候, 開場白變成自己與自己的對白, 也許有人會說這是獨白, 表白, murmer, 神經錯亂, whatever you want, you name it–
這樣的一個非正式的開場白的目標是自己: “別忘了, 一開始就是為了和自己的內心對白, 而不是要針對某個具像的對象表白. “

唯一不同的是, 我知道, 在某些時候, 也許會有人不經意地闖入這一個不知名的空間, 閱讀, 從字裏行間尋找和自己契合的心情, 或隱然有所觸發. 也因為這樣的關係, Web log, or Blog, 不可能成為我最終最私密的日記.

存放在地窖私密的保險箱內–日記–還是適合放在那裡. 或者就隨著歲月消失
受潮與發霉是日記最終的宿命, 上鎖是它之所以還能夠呼吸的原因.
所以, 我開始了我的第一個 Blog, 紀錄一些日常生活中被自己忽略的細節, 或者是 spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, either represented as images or words or verses or the emptiness in the empty space between lines.

在這樣的一個冬日雪后的中午, 我, 一個暫時旅居異鄉的過客, 為自己的開放的獨白, 宣告了開場白.

*轉貼自 2005.12.10在台灣雅虎的開場白, WordPress Blog的誕生也宣告了使始終未能開始的雅虎部落格的落幕