My Journey in Image, Word, and Video: Sandy Brown Jensen
Department of Things That Make Me Wanna Say, “Hunh?”
I'm not dead yet! Virus: 3 Uber Blogger: 1
Hi, there! I’m your uber-blogger, back from the dead!
The best way to start a Lane Blog is by celebrating something Lane-ish. Here are a few shots from last night’s 2011 Winter Classical Cuisine Dinner entitled “A Feast of Tales” which was a Shakespearean theme.
Check this out: it's a Pickled Herring Platter, both beautiful and delicious. And that was just the appetizer!
It's a digital, digital world. Guest Kat Chinn shows pictures of her grandkids not with wallet shots but with iPhone shots. Her appreciative audience is Susan Carkin, Dean of the feisty Language, Literature and Communications Dept.Our Merry Crew: Kevin Steeves (birthday boy--33 today--wahoo!). He's a new addition to Lane's IT Team. Beside him is Jamie Guyn, IT's Michael Levick's better looking half. Kevin and Jamie are being regaled by Lance Sparks, English prof extraordinaire and everyone's favorite Eugene Weekly wine columnist.
Yo! Kudos to the entire Culinary Arts Department for a job extremely well done!
Back now, to your regularly unscheduled programming:
I spent way too much of the last month sitting around sick and tracking the news. This comes from the Department of Things That Make Me Wanna Say, “Hunh?”
Oh yeah, I’m talking now about the two faces of Facebook that came simultaneously into the news. One was the story of that young girl who was stalked and threatened on FB by her wanna-be axe murderer, a local boy. She called the cops, and sure enough, they found him and the collection of Very Sharp Objects he had threatened her with. Scary! Scary!
On the other hand, whose chest can’t swell with pride in the Egyptian protest organizers who used Facebook and Twitter to rally the troops to what amounted to a peaceful revolution?
Again we learn that the will to do evil or to do good dwells in human hearts, and steel or digits, a tool is just a tool.
Ditto, say, blogs in the classroom in that what we hope for, we also fear. Writing blogs opens students to the world; they write for an authentic audience, and the world talks back. That’s a writing teacher’s dream.
Uh. Stop. Rewind. Flip that coin. Students on the wild and open internet are vulnerable to a viper’s nest of abuses: cyber-bullying, pornography, information overload (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!).
College used to be called “The Ivory Tower” because its entire population was locked inside the firewall, safe to learn far from the madding crowd. And nobody said “Ivory Tower” like it was a good thing.
This ain’t high school, and you ain’t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. At Lane CC, we don’t usher students through the hallowed halls of (invasive) English ivy and lock the doors behind them for two years (she said wistfully, kinda thinking that’s not a bad idea).
We are more like a stage stop in the Old West with galloping teams of horses coming and going at top speeds from every direction disgorging dusty mind travelers who wander around our Western town trying to get ready for the next stage in their lives to carry them out to the frontier.
You don’t like my metaphor? Neither did my husband (your photographer here, Peter Jensen). He said LCC is more like a spaceport with students like rockets taking off in stages–still the constant flow of traffic in and out of the membrane (LCC is like an amoeba? Somebody stop me!) of the loosely defined boundaries that we can call anything that looks like a human hub, but we can’t call
