Every blog has a beginning. This blog is no different. Today I begin to create a personal learning space. This will provide me with a place to create dialogue with ideas and items I find in my daily work, my course work with UBC or from other places and spaces.

Learning has no beginning and no end. It is a cycle of never ending stories.

Image from W. Ferriter's blog - The Tempered Radical

The original image can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4521616274/sizes/l/

New Beginnings for September 2011.

Text and Technology – ETEC 540

Beginning a new course and connecting my thinking between text and technology …. trying to find ONE image to capture my visualization of what it is all about?! What a challenge.

My first image: yarn – perhaps in existence longer than the written word. Yarn is created from natural resources. It is created by spinning elements together. It becomes stronger with each additional spinning. It can be combined and coloured to create new artistic fabrics. “Spinning a yarn” refers to telling a good story. Like the written word, yarn has substance and purpose. This yarn, many coloured strands, is analogous to the strands of hypertext leading from one place to another place, unknown. It can lead in many directions to interesting ends.

My second image: individual reading in subway station as the train moves past. For me, this image presents the paradox of the speed of the current textual world and the stillness of being immersed in a good book. It speaks of the exterior world going by while time stands still inside the textual world. It’s a powerful image about what reading is all about. Letting go of everything that may be around and reaching into the text for it’s true meaning.

Both images have meaning and present a visualization of ideas that I will continue to explore in the coming months.