Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Sickbed 

Left work early Tuesday to drive home half-delirious, thinking about the devil's own flu that's been making the rounds. Crashed almost immediately, slept for five hours, watched TV for another five, slept for five, woke for five, slept for three, puttered around a bit in the verycold house, and am now thinking I might actually make it to tomorrow's NERCOMP Impact of Technology on Students special interest group workshop down in Southbridge.

Despite deep headache, chills and a godwaful mess of fluid loss, without the five full days of fever and jointache that's going around, it seems it was just "a bug" -- which means I'm still eligible for the flu, more's the pity.

On the bright side, I did get to miss an entire morning session learning about why my vocational testing showed I should be a teacher or a lawyer. I mean, this is news?

Some nifty stuff stacked up in the campus email while I was offline, most notably a student's gorgeous exposure of last night's waxing gibbous moon in the crystal-clear, five-below air, and a link to the NYT article on ETS's new and dubiously opportunist Information Literacy test. On the latter: I agree with much of the suspicion surrounding both ETS and, more generally, the tension between testing skills and the current inability/disinterest to/in being proactive and concrete about the way we teach them in any school I've ever seen (see new comments on this recent post for more on the testing mandate), but the way the test defines Information Literacy (incuding the full range of skills and approaches from research and preparation to production and evaluation), and the way it uses applied testing strategies for Information Literacy rather than the same-old number 2 pencil bubble-fill, confirms my occupation better than some old multiple-choice vocational test ever could.

By the way, don't forget to download this week's radio show remnants: four full-length mp3s of diverse genres (genra?) for your sonic enjoyment!

posted by boyhowdy | 10:39 PM |

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