Skate of the web

Lists of the past year: #1–Best students’ blogs

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Antonio Vantaggiato

With 2018 already in its second week it’s time to stop the laziness of the past weeks and do some work. First of all, I plan to publish a few posts to summarize interesting stuff of 2017, in list form. Since I love lists and fill my planner, post-it notes, Evernote of lists of all kinds, here is the list of all the lists.

My students’ best blogs, from the past August semester.
Adventures in San Francisco & Berkeley, from my trip to the Far West during the Christmas season.
Colleagues’ shoots from the early days of hurricane Maria’s aftermath.
My books of 2017 (yes, I kept track, through an Evernote list of the books I was reading and of the films I watched at the movies (I practically don’t watch movies anymore on the TV… only TV series, thank you)
My films of 2017

That’s a lot of work, but thanks Jupiter, I don’t have to do it now, do I.

So, I’ll begin with List #1. Because I kept a folder with screenshots of the best blogs my students created during the past semester. It’s a list that I compiled in a completely subjective manner. The only objective part (albeit a very important one) is that behind these blogs there is work, attention and passion. But they are also beautiful, inspired, well-thought and interesting. I hope a few of the students will keep on blogging. I know some will, I asked the very last day of class and I got sincere answers.

They have–as I have repeatedly said throughout the semesters, an extraordinary vehicle and medium to express themselves, like humankind has **never** had available in our history. Surely not with its simplicity of use and expressive power. We who live in a place where free speech is still protected must recognize that power and protect and diffuse it.

The blogs I am referring here to are from three sections of the #inf103 course, Fundamentals of Computing, a basic Gen Ed course geared to communications students. I will omit the section of the course in each case, it’s irrelevant info. As I said before, this is a list outside of the course formal evaluations, and is completely subjective.

And the Oscars go to…

Natalia, for her Dance blog. Bailar… una de las mejores formas de vida. (Una vida con movimientos al ritmo de la música es mejor.) // Dancing… one of the best ways of life.

José Frank, for Este es mi blog (This is my blog) #EsteEsMiBlog

Génesis for Génesis Blog, a blog focusing on topics of importance for Puerto Rico.

Gabriela María, for Industrya, on Coffee, cocktails, art & culture… Café, coctelería, literatura, arte, cultura, ¡y lo que venga!

Kathia, for katwalk: Fashion History.

Carolina, for Tu mundo en Palabras (a veces la mejor forma de expresarte es escribiendo). // Your world in words (sometimes the best way to express yourself is writing).

Andrea, for Once Upon A Time. Write Your Own Story.

Janisse, for her photo blog: Photography vs the world. The struggles of being a photographer.

Erika, for her blog on poetry & photography, Poetisa sin rumbo (Este blog trata sobre expresar sentimientos a través de poesía y fotografía). Literally, the blog’s title means “poetress without direction”. Nice, eh?

Natalia, for her blog Crutches Live Aventuras en muletas: Yo camino con mis manos y tambien escribo con ellas. // Adventures in crutches: I walk with my hands and also write with them.

In truth, despite the hurricane, it was a good semester, and many students did took it very very well, even though they underwent (and possibly still are) very harsh living conditions.

Posted in blogs | Tagged blogs, inf103, lists, students | Leave a comment

The Class of María–A photo-shoot of students

Posted on December 30, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

After the hurricane stroke, when we resumed classes in mid October, I decided I would shoot a photo to each student from my inf103 and inf115 classes–that is, to all students who would come one specific day to class. I used a long-abandoned, recently found Nikon camera which I didn’t really know how to use properly. I’m not new to photography, but I had only used analog reflex cameras before the small digital cameras of today. I got this professional digital camera with a great 55-300mm lens–I love the 300mm for portraits– and I asked students if they agreed to be photographed in closeups portrait mode. And almost all agreed. They agreed also to let me publish the photos, so those you see down here are only the ones which I got a student consent for.

~~I used the~~ ~~Awesome Flickr Gallery~~ ~~plugin for WordPress, since it allows for parameters to be set with no hindrance.~~ –Later, I changed the plugin to Album Photostream Profile For Flickr, so to be compliant with PHP 7.1. I uploaded, tagged and titled the photos in a new set on Flickr and created a gallery with the plugin. Here is the result of that work. Few images have been edited, but I think all students came out pretty nice. If you click on one image a pop-up opens with the full photo and you can navigate the gallery with swipes or clicks.

[Added 25 Sep 2019] The slideshow on Flickr is still a very good option, if you want to click here.

These are in a sense some heroic students who decided to overcome the many obstacles the hurricane imposed upon them and come to class. This is what I wanted to celebrate with this set. Thanks to them all for allowing me to do this.

And Good New Year to All!

The Class of María

[FGAL id=4684]

Posted in myCourses, photos | Tagged 2017, 2017-2, hurricanemaria, inf103, inf115, photos | 1 Comment

New Media 2017

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

At year’s end, after completing the evaluations of my students’ work, blogs etc., with grades assigned, I wanted to post a short visual story about my New Media class, INF115 and the students I had the pleasure to share this semester with.

This was a class under the tent (restarted October 15), with (from left) Christian, Eric and Sheila:

Here is the last episode of the Coffee Date podcast of the class, which was begun by students Alondra & Sheila and followed by all the others. Enjoy the complete series! (Hmmm, there one final episode missing, and that’s my fault. Soon available, promise!)

Here are photos from our session at TeleSagrado for the recording of the students’ final project, a video reportage of the bad storm, which follows at the end of this post. I have to say and thank Carlos for his leadership in the video project and his role as director. But all the students were enthusiast and collaborated. They worked in pairs and each did something specific: research, interviews, story, etc. Theirs are the idea, composition and final editing. Proud of you guys! Note that this is not a course on video and all but Carlos had little previous knowledge of the medium, which is a point for the course.

Joselyn

Aracelymar, a helping hand and former student.

Alondra & Sheila

Carlos

Amaris

Carlos

Joselyn

Carlos & Joselyn

Christian

Last but not least, how they say, is the final video, Más allá de la Burbuja. Enjoy! [in Spanish]

Posted in ccourse, inf115 | Tagged class, inf115, podcast, students, video | Leave a comment

The Puerto Rico Connection podcast: 2nd episode

Posted on December 16, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

So we have our second episode of the famed podcast titled The Puerto Rico connection, which is amazing thanks to the brilliant work that Alan Levine has been doing. It is for me very intriguing that we are managing to do this from our huge distances. In fact the second episode was recorded while we were very far away from each other. Alan was in Australia’s East Coast with Kate Bowles (musicfordeckchairs.com), a friend of his who invited him for a while to work with her and we were also talking with Parisa Mehran (beyondyourstereotypes.wordpress.com) who was in Osaka, Japan. So we formed a triangle of people very far away from each other and still quite connected.

The purpose and the theme of the episode is in fact to talk about connections. I am still learning about connections and I consider myself an apprentice so I’m very happy to have such friends who mentor me in the process. I said that Alan was visiting Kate Bowles—whom unsurprisingly I follow— and by quasi-chance we had a person we both respect very much who was included in the conversation and the worldwide connection.

“Every time we tell a story about ourselves, we make a human network.”

We talked about connections and about humanity; about Parisa’s efforts to make people knowledgeable on the prejudices and the stereotypes they form about other people. I think we all have suffered from such stereotypes but definitely certain ethnic groups suffer their effects today more than others. And of course it is of some advantage to be a white male and Western. So we were talking about humanity and Kate at some point sort of invited to talk about oneself. Alan is known for doing that: he has talked about his family, about housesitting in Iceland, about his grandmother, his father, his mother while on the other hand I’ve been pretty shy about this and I usually don’t talk about my family. Nor about myself. So, what about talking about my own personal feelings? But what Kate suggested perhaps can be reshuffled: perhaps I can tell more about my own experience of the hurricane and about what happened after hurricane Maria struck.

Well prep work was awesome and very hard. We had two houses to fix, but we did in on time, with a brainstorming courtesy of a local wood workshop which produced a pec-blockage of three windows that proved essential and life-saving. The aftermath was also terrible. Our street flooded, backyard full of fallen branches, leaves. Half a (huge) tree on the roof. But no actual damage (a little on the roof but that is the condo’s worry).

I stopped working for a while in the sense that I didn’t go to my university to teach or do my job. Instead I stayed at home, which is pleasant in a way but at the same time is unnerving because you have to confront yourself with the huge amount of work you will have to do when “normal life” resumes. And the shock to find yourself on vacation but without the amenities. A bare bones vacation, and useful for that, actually. Also, after the initial shock and assessment of my family’s own situation, we worked for a few days with the community of our condo and our street: to clean, get water and fallen leaves out. We worked like crazy for the first days taking out and dispose of the tree branches and trunks which had fallen upon your roof or patio. We were completely cut off from networks: no cell signal, no electricity. Thus, we had no Internet. Also, I couldn’t avoid thinking about students, about what they will be doing at that very time so you feel—for personal and professional reasons—an enormous uncertainty hanging over your head.

I certainly wasn’t sad, since I had my family with me and we reported no damages. We had no electricity for a long while–exactly 52 days– but we counted on friends who had generators available and they gave us ice bottles so that we could conserve some milk, and a few stuff that we needed, including a little of cold water (remember, we live in the tropics!). We also had a small camping stove that we could use for cooking, and we actually enjoyed doing so. Of course, we had to buy every day the stuff we were going to use. But not the very first days after the storm: shops and supermarkets were closed. When a few reopened, the queues were gigantic. We had to do them!

We learned to live without fans and in a tropical place with mosquitoes, well, you understand how useful fans actually are, so we had to use anti-mosquito sprays and candles etc. Of course without light reading was pretty difficult. We could fortunately charge cell phones and laptops and tablets with the aid of a car or other tricks like Starbucks.

Reading was difficult but at least through my iPad I could easily enjoy it. I read in fact probably five books during those 52 days and at least half of them where on the iPad. Reading was really a huge activity done as soon as the sun light went down. My wife and I went to the roof to have some fresh air and to avoid mosquitoes and we enjoyed reading books or reading the social networks stuff. Of course the social network stuff was available when you got a signal from the cell company but for many many days, especially at the beginning, we had no connection at all. But I had printed, unread books waiting for me.

Queues where the very thing that you had to do every day. Gasoline, food, ATMs: we had queues for everything. Also, we had close friends who invited us to eat with them during many nights because they had generators that helped them, so we enjoyed our friendship very much during that period!! However the difficult thing is that as soon as the night comes and you have no light even if you like reading with a candle or with a headlight or with an iPad, still you sooner or later fall asleep and in fact everybody was going to bed pretty early. But I did not wake up early since I love to sleep long hours so I enjoyed staying at home a little longer and not having to look for my car and get dressed and go and do this and that.

Now I learned a lot about doing our own podcast thanks to Alan and thanks to our friend Parisa and Kate I also learned about the importance of connecting with people and also to let people know that you care about them. I mirrored our podcast with my New Media class INF115, and my students got to produce a nice podcast titled Coffee Date. Fun (consider we did this course under a tent). Regarding this particular podcast episode I have to say that I enjoyed very much that long live hour that we had, being so distant from each other. I enjoyed talking as I usually do with friends and it was a great conversation. And of course I talked too much. I hope we will be doing more of these with such great people and with others who may want to join our own Connection. I hope Alan and I continue this conversation/connection within this podcast and beyond since I think the podcast itself is an excellent way to put in the air and in the open our own thoughts and perhaps to better understand what our own thoughts are.

Posted in PRConnection | Tagged podcast, PRconnection | Leave a comment

A Whole Class Worth of Postcards

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

At last I’m publishing today the last big batch of postcards arrived here for the #care4sagrado series. This one batch is quite special because they all come from one class in one institution: the College of New Rochelle (New York State) where my friend Dr. Lynda Shand teaches.

I began receiving one or two nice white little cards with a flower printed in the front, where the stamp goes. Nice messages on the back. Then two or three more. Same kind. In one of them the message contained “…from Dr. Shand’s class”. I honestly did not connect the dots at the time. Then it struck me. New Rochelle, Lynda.

Then we were hit by the massive posting. A bunch of cards got here on the same day and I had no doubt. I checked Facebook (I am not fond of checking in often, lately) and here I am, some time later. I said to myself. Let’s wait for the last day of class and then post (on this blog) all the cards from her class together. Which I’m doing now. Well, it will be a very image-dense post, this one!
How to say thank you to all the students (and the professor) who thought of us and wished us some good vibes?? We appreciate it, it means a lot. But of course you are Nursing students, so you have it in your DNA, to assist, be empathetic, to care.THANKS, and may the good season festivities bring peace to you and to us!THANKS also to Lynda and the Faculty Resource Network, through which we met. Hope to see you soon!