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Week 2: observations

There are some still green

While others have turned yellow

Leaves laying grounded.

The grey covers blue

No light has yet broken through

Morning’s clouded sky.

Wood gently faded

Here sitting amid the trees

Motionless wood bench.

With a nut in mouth

When still, they come next to me

The scampering squirrels.

High boughs releasing

Sharp thud and bounce on the ground

Acorns are falling.

Being still at first

Cool gusts visit, then they are gone

Morning wind blowing.

Silent and yet not

Very few cicadas or birds

     Who Is The Intruder In This Garden?

I watched this movie almost 3 years ago when I first visited Guatemala, and it shook me to my core. I know our classes are already really intense and heavy, but I just requested this from Magill at Haverford and if folks want to watch it with me I'd love to have a movie night (maybe this weekend?). As I remember it gives a really good background of the Guatemalan Civil War and why it happened, which I think would be helpful for us to be aware of in our discussions of Rigoberta Menchú.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/discoveringdominga/

To me it has been hard to see the application of Clark's ideas to the classroom. His ideas seem so theoretical and massive that applying them to the small setting of a classroom is hard for me. However, I take his ideas at the most basic form to mean how integrated our biological beings are with technology. Technology however can be just about anything. In my group we wanted Clark to put forth a list of what exactly is not "technology". There seems to be no line at all to draw between technologies and non technologies. However, I would like to take away the fact that we have and have always had a relationship with technology. Whether it be your pen our your laptop. We must then understand how we can use and work with technology rather than see it as it's own separate entity.

Instead of blaming the computer for why technology has taken over our lives, perhaps we should pause and take a moment to figure out how we can change the comupter so that it betters a human's functioning capabilities. In this sense, we should find a way that a comupter can benefit taking up a human's time. For example, I worry that all of this technology is hindering children from learning social interactions face to face so let's just say that the problem is lacking face to face interactions, and don't blame the computer for causing this. Rather, figure out a solution using the human--social interaction on facebook or twitter or blogs might just be changing what social interaction means. People are still communicating, just in a different sense, they don't need to be face to face but they are still sharing their ideas and thoughts. Similarly with what we talked about in class-children aren't learning cursive anymore because they can type. At first that seemed terrible but it seems much more efficient because typing is faster and often, more legible. 

Hey 360 friends. I am writing to let you know that my second web event for our silence class is posted as a comment to my first essay.I was not able to tag my comment as a web event and so I am linking you to my first essay here so that you can easily find my new web event. 

/exchange/conflicts-within-cement-silence

...over the relationship between those murals and poverty,
prodded by this graph, which shows a direct correlation between
poverty and the Baltimore City mural program:
http://geocommons.com/maps/166122

So overall, I really enjoyed Saturday's trip, even if I felt a bit torn at time by some of the comments I heard and the things I saw.

One of the pictures I took can kind of explain how I felt through the entirety of the trip.

For me, this photograph shows a clear view of what is in the frame but it can also, very clearly, show that the person viewing the room is behind a chain/fence. That whoever is looking onto the cell and onto the broken down bed frame is an outsider.

Outsider. That is to me.