Get to Know Me!

     Do any of you recall a skit from Saturday Night Live, circa mid-80's (and, yes, I'm dating myself), featuring Jon Lovitz repeatedly belting out, "GET TO KNOW ME!"? This neatly expresses my feelings regarding having an online identity and my status as a Visitor rather than a Resident in the digital world. The requirements of one of my classes this semester orbit around the creation and maintenance of a professional presence online. A public digital me. Yay. Jon Lovitz, anyone?
     Perhaps my aversion to this idea is based on old-fashioned self-esteem issues - who really wants to get to know me? Maybe it's the preferable characteristic of modesty - maybe it would be great to get to know me, but I'm not going to throw myself at you. Or maybe I just prefer an old school network where people converse in person. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that I am averse to this idea that the next, best thing is coming to a screen near me and I need to be a little pixel-y part of it.
     I am quite comfortable with my visitor status, much as I am in real life. Hanging out is great for a while, but at some point, I'd like to just thank my hosts and go home. I recognize  that this idea must evolve, both for the purposes of passing my class (Hello, Professor Heil!) and because there is an inevitability about social media and fuller professional lives that I do understand, if not appreciate. So here we go, Faceless Friends. Get to know me!

An interesting talk about how we inhabit digital space...or not http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/

Saturday Night Live clip http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/get-to-know-me/1353031

Six Impossible Things

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." ~ Lewis Carroll

     It is entirely new, this chapter. The roads had all become  familiar, the frustrations navigable, small goals handily met. There were signs aplenty that it was time to turn the page toward something that I had just been squinting at in the distance, something shiny and fresh with possibilities. So here I am, after teaching for over a decade and parenting for almost two, I find myself set upon a new path of learning.

     I am a student again, having returned to the academic world and a long-abandoned Master's degree. Universities are different. Everything is plugged in, my notebook and pen seem archaic, and I am older than some of my teachers and all of my co-learners. This blog is a result of a class requirement. I am scared of technology - it defeats me to0 often. Starting with its siren song of simpler tasks, global families and instant creativity, and ending, always, with my utter frustration.

     There will be many impossible things to believe over the next two years. Not the big one. I believe completely that I am capable and that in the long run I will leave with two very impressive pieces of paper in my hand. The impossibilities lie in the small steps I must take to get there. Full-time teacher, wife, parent of teenagers. Nothing has been taken away, just added. Time is the biggest challenge, but not impossible. The first thing I must believe at the dawn of this new day - well before breakfast! - is in my own power as a learner. It never leaves us, the desire to know new things, but returning to practicing it, publicly, with tests and projects and papers, that is today's impossible feeling.

     I believe, I believe, I believe.