Welcome to the Hypothesis annotations for the Tiny Tales of Nasruddin. I'm looking forward to seeing conversations that might take shape here. You can find out more about this project at Nasruddin.LauraGibbs.net.

This has been a theme in the past for me: so many (SO MANY) struggle with perfectionism... I'm hoping that, especially during a pandemic, they might (finally) be willing to cut themselves the slack they totally need in order to grow and learn. I have some resources bookmarked about perfectionism here that I've shared in the past with students: https://www.diigo.com/user/lauragibbs/?query=%23gm%3Aperfectionism ... want to update and develop this more for Fall!

And that displacement scenario is made more intense by the time constraints I mentioned above. There are so many more things I could/would do in my classes if we had unlimited time. But we don't. Our available time is very very very limited...

Just speaking for myself, there are tons of numbers I could extract from the blog network that powers my classes: posts written, words written, comments, etc. ... but I haven't extracted those numbers because I'm not really sure the numbers are useful. I vote for assessing what we do in education, but I am not sure the word "measure" is the one I would use, insofar as it usually means to measure with numbers...?

This is the same pitch I make to my students about feedback! And it's actually an easier job to motivate them about the usefulness of feedback skills because they have often encountered feedback situations in the workplace, both receiving and giving, and they know they need feedback skills in their future jobs. In that sense, annotation is harder, because it does not resonate as directly with the workplace (I get most of my useful feedback materials from Harvard Business Review, for example; feedback is a frequent topic there).

One result of this conversation has been to help me see that all the work I do with students on FEEDBACK is, in a sense, a kind of annotation; I had not really realized that before because it is annotation with a very focused purpose: helping students to revise their writing. But I now see that the "Comment Walls" where students are leaving comments on each other's projects are a lot like annotation, and it requires a lot of the same skills, skills I spend a lot of time explicitly teaching since students are often unsure about giving each other feedback and hesitant about it.

Not quite sure where this fits in, but one of the biggest pressures I see is lack of TIME on the part of students because of their many other commitments, often working full-time to cover cost of school, unable to afford child-care, etc. So whenever I ask students to take on something new, as annotation almost always would be, I have to weigh that within the very limited time i can fairly ask of students (I ask for 6 hours per week of their time total for work on my online class; we have no class meetings.)

ha ha, I think Alan means my Latin cats: Latin Cats at the Proverb Laboratory Here's a saying that uses some of the imagery that you will also find in alchemical writings: Lux umbra dei est. Light is God's shadow.

I left some unfinished NetNarr projects... but that's what is so great about these online events: you leave a trail that others might follow or that you might pick up again later. Wouldn't the alchemists of old be thrilled to see us looking at their work and being inspired in new ways... and using new technology to do so! :-)

Okay, people, you have provoked me in a good way; I had not picked a new theme to think about at the Bestiaria for 2019... but now I will make sure to do something alchemical! I'll come back here and add something to this document when there is an alchemical event at the Bestiaria next! :-)