Looking for a Twitter image for my class slides, I came across these. Let’s see, which ones ring most accurate?

and finally, one that feels like me around most of the people I know:

I have no idea how I came across this today, but there is an interesting and potentially valuable article on How to Survive a Riot. I have never been in one, but being in a large, international city (even a well-managed and rather safe one, relatively speaking), one can never be too prepared. The article is short and there are a few useful suggestions I found.

My main take away? If in a riot or mob, move to the side slowly so as not to attract attention to yourself (and possibly make you a target of the rioters or the police). I hope I will never need this . . .

I started to read Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose while at the gym earlier this evening. I tried to get into the novel several times, but found the Prologue (yes, I usually read them!) overly obtuse. That in itself had stopped me from getting into the story itself, which is something I finally decided to do when I went to do some cardio at the gym (I read while on the machines, and none of the pile of magazines I have enticed me).

One of the statements in the text struck me about our present political and socio-economic challenges: “If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from the other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds” (p 29).

Does this have a familiar ring, in an election year with seemingly obscene spikes in oil and food (and Manhattan real estate) prices?

What an engaging story.

Have you heard that catchy tune in the colorful new Saturn Vue commercial? It is by Simple Kid, and is called “Lil King Kong,” and I just bought it from iTunes as well.

Thank you, Tunes on TV! How did we ever learn these sorts of things before the Internet?

The New York Times’ review for La Fille du Regiment isin, and as I predicted two days ago after I saw the premiere, it was fantastic.

What struck me most about the review is not that Juan Diego Florez hit all 9 high C’s, and not even that he did so twice, after having done the first solo encore at the Met in 14 years. What struck me at all is that there was a ban on this at all.

What? The Met has been too highbrow to allow for anything different? It is a wonder, then, that Peter Gelb (the General Manager of the Met Opera) was quoted in the Times as stating that opera should be “as entertaining and exciting for the audience as it can be.”

Isn’t that what music and opera and art and culture is all about? Give the people what they want? If culture is too highbrow for people, and old and outdated restrictions prevent audience desire from being realized, then the art itself will get scaled back and dismissed as something archaic and out of touch with consumer (yes, consumer) desire. That is what was happening with opera itself before Gelb took the reigns. Nice to see sense come back into the genre. High culture is wonderful, but it still costs money and needs support.

Go Florez, go!

I have been Tweeting tonight during intermission for the premiere of the new production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment at the Metropolitan Opera. Featuring Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez, I believe they set a new standard in operatic couples, if only on stage. More ovations and bravos and bravas than I have heard all year. No wonder this new production was sold out before tonight’s opening night. What a wonderful conclusion for my opera season.

I only hope the New York Times gets the review as right as they did with Satyagraha.

Brian Lamb shared an amazing blog post about his recent NMC Mashup session. Not quite sure why I did not get a trackback for Brian’s work as he mentioned me (and my comments) by name, so thankfully I got a Google blog post alert about it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Brian’s post–his reflection, authenticity, model instructional strategies to discussing educational experiences, and the like–so finally posted my own musings on his blog this morning. I copied and pasted it verbatim (save for one spelling correction) here as a record of my own thinking.  

I have been reading and rereading this post for a few days, Brian, and appreciate your reflection and then sharing this for open discussion. I suppose this is becoming a metareflective opportunity, and I think I need to finally process my own thoughts enough to share them as well.

I saw Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha this past Monday evening, and your presentation came to mind when I started to process that work. I was expecting an opera about the early life of Gandhi, yet with it sung in Sanskrit, intentionally without subtitles, the focus is forced to change. The hypnotic chorus, repetitive music, and postmodern set together made this a work that was not only unexpected, but boundary-pushing for the Metropolitan Opera (and me as well).

I see my role as an education professional to push my students to expand their boundaries (learning) while facilitating the process and maintaining some sense of safety for those who need to hold on while confronting the learning ahead of them. I felt that at the Met (the safety of being at the premier US opera stage with its desire to promote and expand culture in this art form), and have been considering why I have such a hunch there is some connection between it and your work during the Mashup.

I have heard you present and read your work for some time now, and that is the stable (safe) part of your presentation. I trust you not to take us someplace meaningless, and that is why I attended the entire session rather than leaving it mid-way when I was completely disoriented (to be honest, I don’t dance in the first world, either). Had it been somebody I did not know or was not known by those people I read, I would not have even bothered to comment at all, chalking it up to an unusual experience, period.

The fact you lose sleep over comments demonstrates (to me) that you take your work seriously and are in many ways helping to move education in an electronic age along. Pushing boundaries is never an easy business to be in, and having a hard skin seems to me to be a great asset when people are used to the status quo. So much for non-educators thinking education is a safe and easy profession to be in . . .

I am convinced that education challenges the status quo, and as educators sometimes we need to shake things up to help people see there are other ways to look at issues. Where else can growth come from?

With this said, I am really glad that this session has sparked discussion–the educator’s dream! Without it, we never know what we have done has worked if at all. As we often do not see the results of our work, these online discussions are testament that reflective practice and learning is happening. I am now beginning to wonder where it is going . . .

I think there has been such great discussion on this event, and wish more educational initiatives sparked the same sort of interest and reflective practice.

I saw the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha this week at the Metropolitan Opera. Amazing vocal arrangements, mesmerizing music, and spectacular though simple sets. Somewhat mythically recounting the early life of Gandhi in South Africa where he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.

The opera was amazingly clever in its use of materials, repetition, and even its singing were phrases of the Bhagavad-Gita in Sanskrit without subtitles (though some English was projected for key effect). I have never been a huge fan of the work of Glass before, but I am now an adherent.

By the way, the New York Times loved it on the day of as well as the day after the premier last week. With the puppetry on a scale I have not seen before on the Met stage, this is well-worth expanding horizons.

Perhaps this was what my colleague Brian Lamb was after with his recent creative mashup expression in the NMC Consortium on Mashups?

I had lunch Thursday with George Siemens, the networked learning and knowledge strcuctures guru from Canada, at my favorite Korean restaurant near my office in Manhattan. Having read George’s work for several years now, it was nice to put a face and voice to the writing. He and his wife are in New York for some conference work, and it was rather stimulating to speak with him about his areas of research interest and the locations where George travels to speak at conferences and other events.

One theme that kept surfacing that struck me is how technology changes so much and so quickly, with seemingly every week a newer social media killer app, that things will not change unless the underlying knowledge structures and our approach to them changes. I recall him speaking about this in his book Knowing Knowledge, though hearing a similar message through a different medium (F2F) and situation (while using chopsticks to eat goon mandoo) makes it so fresh.

Enjoy your time here in New York, George, May it stimulate you to consider how knowledge is larger and wider and louder and more culturally diverse than we have seen throughout history!