Writers' Houses

Sometimes two good ideas add up to more than their sum. Authors and Homes are two such.


Writers’ Houses (with the apostrophe in the correct spot, of course), a website/blog that explores authors’ homes and writing places is a place for stories and pictures.  It is interested in preservation and has an attic feel to it.


The site’s beauty draws you in and its writing keeps you there. This month the featured home is Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home near Austerlitz, NY.


You can browse by author, state, city or international, but the archives are the best place to look for the substantial writing. Some entries are little more than a picture with a web address. The Press page is a bibliography of writings in books and journals on the writers’ homes.

Their twitter feed printed on antique mailgrams is amusing. You can follow them on twitter @writershouses. Delve in to read here or search it before a trip to see if there is an author’s home you might visit.


Thanks to @Paul_Lisicky for tweeting this site.


Google Lit Trips are virtual trips to places that authors wrote about or where they lived. A special project on author's homes includes maps in Google earth and homes you can move around in.   http://www.googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/Special_Projects/Entries/2009/9/10_Author_Homes_by_Beryl_Reid.html
Seeing Willa Cather's home in Red Cloud Nebraska gives you a feeling for author's frame of reference. (Google Earth needed to view) 

PS. If you love books and architecture, check out this slideshow article on The World's Most Inspiring Book Stores.

Finally Getting Facebook

 Even though my job is in educational  technology, I have been slow to adopt Facebook.  Last year I finally set up a page because I was doing a workshop on social media and felt I needed to have a page to be mildly competent. I limited my “friends” to my nieces, nephews and son. I checked it once every couple weeks. I just didn’t “get it”.   My thoughts about Facebook mirror what people often say about Twitter: I don’t want to know what you had for lunch or what your “status” is. (An erroneous characterization of Twitter, by the way.  I'm an enthusiastic Twitter user and stay up to date with my work colleagues and network through Twitter all the time.)

Gradually, though, I have seen that for a lot of folks Facebook is their “home on the net”.  It’s their personal web page and it allows them not only to communicate with friends and family, but to be creative—post  pictures and videos, for example.  It is a place to share something of themselves.  I have a blog if I want to write something to the world. Others use their Facebook page for that.  I am in favor of anything that increases people’s ability to be creative, so I started seeing the value of Facebook.

I didn’t get the real power of Facebook until recently, though. My eighty-something mother-in-law asked my husband to set up a Facebook page for her so that she could communicate with her grand children and children.  In helping with the process I “friended” my mother-in-law.  Within a day or so… in some cases within minutes… I had invitations to be friends with that whole side of my family.  I made the leap and said yes, to broadening my friend-base.  Within hours of becoming friends with them, my son had reconnected, through me, to his cousins on the other side of the family.  That I count as a real benefit.  

I’m still negotiating how much I want to get into the Facebook culture. I’ll probably never run to update my status with every little life occurrence but I can check every few days for family news and stay in touch, add the odd thought or question. I find it’s not so much about faces as it is about hearts.

Assistive Technology

We are all users of Assistive Technology

As a newly appointed member of the Keene State College Accessibility Committee, I admit I have been more aware on accessibility issues around campus and around town.


I am also learning the “jargon” associated with accessibility and one phrase that leapt to my attention and made me think is “assistive technology”.  Assistive technology is used to refer to devices that allow students with disabilities to compensate in some way.

What makes assistive technology even better, as far as I can see, is that it no longer stigmatizes users. We all use “assistive technology,”  smart phones, ipads, phones that take pictures and video, phones that read foreign languages, software that creates Braille and printers that print it.

"It’s a great time to be disabled," a disabled friend said to me recently.  There are so many ways to speak, hear, act using technology that were not available even five years ago. It is truly an amazing time and I love the way it both levels the playing field and makes us all into users of Assistive Technology.

My hope and expectation is that a generation that is accustomed to relying on electronics will develop more understanding and be more accepting of people with disabilities.  

Geocaching for Fun

Geocaching is searching for a hidden object with the help of a GPS device.  You use the GPS device, plus any hints to find the approximate location. Then you search for the treasure box. 


My husband and I have friends that do it so a few months ago we asked to tag along when they went on a geocache.  We drove about 3 miles from home to a natural area which I had never noticed before.  The searching was fun. The finding , opening a box in the woods full of funny little trinkets, was even more fun.


But the best part is finding places that you would never ever go to unless “sent” by the geocache coordinates.  We have found paths in town forests, town recreation areas,  We started looking for caches around bodies of water nearby and found several ponds on which we could kayak.  It’s fun to do with friends or family.  Caches can be found at the end of a strenuous hike or easy stroll.  It satisfies the goal-oriented and the less purposeful.


When I search and find a geocache I am a kid again, taking shortcuts around town through people’s back yards.  

What Does Your Avatar Say About You?

Seems like we are constantly being asked to "personalize" applications we use by adding a picture that either is you or stands for you, your avatar. 


While you might just take the nearest image at hand,  my guess is that folks put some thought into the image they choose. They are making a statement. And what does that statement say?


Here are some things I've noticed about different types of avatars and what they say to me, at least. (These are all from Twitter, though I think you see the same types of avatars in Facebook.)

Posed portrait	Is this an artist? A model? Someone with too much time on their hands?
Digital image	I distrust this automaton. Is there a soul here?
Parts	Parts of faces once looked innovative but is now one of the older tricks in the book
Landscape	This is a shy person, possibly artistic.
I am cool	Not
Default	I’m new here... or possibly just lazy?
Way too sexy for prime time	Cheesy. Having trouble taking what you say seriously.
Couple shot	A case of confused identity? Who's speaking here?
Too much detail	This is not the place for a mural. Don't try to fit too much in. Says to me you have trouble making decisions.
Lousy pix	Would you buy a used car from this man?
cartoon	I’m simple? I work with kids?
Sepia or B/W	Sepia or black and white photos stand out in the crowd. Shows independent thinking.

How about the picture that is obviously better looking than the person? I share no examples but you know who you are.


If your picture changes a lot you look indecisive.


People who don't care for their faces use their backs. 

Sometimes you just have a great face. Use it. 

Giotto's Genius

I first became aware of Giotto in Santa Croce, Florence. Beauty and compassion shown out of his work like light. When I saw his much larger work, the frescos in Assisi’s upper church, I was overwhelmed with their size, beauty and humanity.

Particularly touching was the panel “Renunciation of Worldly Goods”, in which Francis stands clothed only in a sheet that a bishop-figure has wrapped around him. An older man holds a heap of fancy clothing. That man was Francis’ father and he was a cloth merchant. Giotto captured, along with the illumined Francis, the look on the face of Francis’ father, the consternation, anguish, the “where did I go wrong?” look of a parent that makes us realize suddenly that both to be a parent and to be related to a saint is not easy. It sets the exalted act in a more complex human context.

So when I saw a new book, Giotto’s O by Andrew Ladis, I grabbed it. Giotto’s O is the story of the Arena Chapel in Padua Italy which Giotto painted between 1305 and 1307. He painted every inch of the interior and because it’s dedicated to Mary, it is overwhelmingly blue.

The book is part description, part explication and part meditation. There are 64 panels telling Christ’s and Mary’s story and arranged in a way that creates a whole, a complete circle.

Ladis shows that there was complex planning behind the choice of content and the ordering of the murals.

In one paired set, the left hand mural shows Judas selling Jesus, while the right shows The Visitation, Elizabeth welcoming Mary. Depictions of the visitation are often most tender and moving. I love them because they are so wholly female, 2 pregnant women greeting, one older and one younger, both

unaccountably with child. In few scenes from the bible are all the main characters women, so it touches me in a personal way. The scene always has to me echoes of Mary being sent away to her cousins to be less of an embarrassment at home. Elizabeth welcomes her as an equal, another woman whose body is being taken over by natural forces.

To compare this scene with Judas’ betrayal is startling.



“To my knowledge, this is the only instance in Italian art where they are,” says Ladis. And there is no doubt that they are being compared. The figures in both panels are in mirror image, the colors used are the same. The embraces that Judas is receiving from a man and the devil show his undoing, his betrayal. The embrace of the two women shows an outpouring of love and concern for the other’s welfare. It seems the two panels show the best and worst that humans are capable of. For the rest of the meaning I will have to live with it for a while and see.

Birth of a Blog - Colleague Helping Colleague

Jim Glading, teacher in the Intensive English Program at Southern NH University, was at a staff meeting recently. The faculty were sharing what worked and what didn’t in their classes. Energy was high and Jim was loving it. But he stopped the discussion long enough to comment:

“We need to be able to do this all the time, not just at faculty meetings.”

From this comment and realization, rose, a week later the IEP Teacher’s Blog, whose tagline is “an interactive repository for SNHU ESL teachers to share tips, tricks, and news.”

It was not a terribly difficult process to set up a web space in which to interact. Once Jim was convinced that’s what they needed the process went like this.

Jim researched various blog-type software that he might use. He wanted something that would be easy for faculty to post to and easy for him to administer. He tried setting up a page in each one to see how easy it was.

• Wordpress was too complex, with an unfriendly author interface.

• Wikispaces had too many ads in the free version and was really more than he needed.

• Tumblr, which looked so easy, turned out to be incomprehensible.

• Google’s Blogger turned out to be just right. Enough functions (like being able to be notified when a post appears) but easy to post to. You can even mail in posts.

With his Blogger account set up, he created a “workspace blog” in which to try things, a “live” version at http://iepteachers.blogspot.com/ He made a few entries of his own and then sent invitations to all the faculty log in and post something.

It’s really easy to make an entry to a blog


So far a handful of faculty have posted ideas, recommendations and comments. The question now is, how to get more interaction? How to make it a living resource? Any comments you have about how to do that would be appreciated.