It's a Flickering World
The world is small indeed and Flickr can make it seem a small village. Early this month, someone in Austria emailed me with a republishing permission request for this picture:
Thumbed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79066620@N00/5558170700
The picture has recently been publised in a students' magazine called JAWS (journalists, artists, writers, students). You can see a taste of it here. Quite inspiring for any ESL or EFL writing class.
Mina, the magazine editor, was kind enough to send me a pdf with the article my picture illustrates. There I found a teacher's voice who could be someone working next to me.
It goes on...
"Sometimes the line between private and school reading was blurred by me realizing that a book I had ordered just for fun actually fit a course I was taking. This should have thrilled me, as it meant that what I enjoyed doing just for myself was also valuable academically. " (1)
Lots of coincidences with Mina as a node in the connection. She had no idea the picture in Flickr had been taken by an English language teacher. Mina works for a magazine which belongs to the English and American Studies Department of the Karl Franzens-Universität at an Austrian university.
What Mina doesn't know yet is what the book in the picture is about:
Thumbed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79066620@N00/5558170700
The picture has recently been publised in a students' magazine called JAWS (journalists, artists, writers, students). You can see a taste of it here. Quite inspiring for any ESL or EFL writing class.
Mina, the magazine editor, was kind enough to send me a pdf with the article my picture illustrates. There I found a teacher's voice who could be someone working next to me.
Susanne Kopf writes:
"Another means of transportation, which helped me up my reading was the train. Having family and sometimes even visiting friends in a different city is a great motivation to go there. One train ride usually took about 3,5 hours, the equivalent of a third of a book."(1)
"Another means of transportation, which helped me up my reading was the train. Having family and sometimes even visiting friends in a different city is a great motivation to go there. One train ride usually took about 3,5 hours, the equivalent of a third of a book."(1)
That's about the length of my train journey to visit my family. That's how I got most of my reading done while commuting daily to study in Buenos Aires a long time ago.
It goes on...
"Sometimes the line between private and school reading was blurred by me realizing that a book I had ordered just for fun actually fit a course I was taking. This should have thrilled me, as it meant that what I enjoyed doing just for myself was also valuable academically. " (1)
Blurring the lines. That's it. Borges in his prologue to Borges Profesor argued that 'obligatory reading' was a nonsense phrase. How could you obligatorily enjoy reading? (Quote source in Spanish)
Lots of coincidences with Mina as a node in the connection. She had no idea the picture in Flickr had been taken by an English language teacher. Mina works for a magazine which belongs to the English and American Studies Department of the Karl Franzens-Universität at an Austrian university.
What Mina doesn't know yet is what the book in the picture is about:
If there were any more coincidences that linked us, I would not be surprised. Perhaps this post reaches Susanne? I sense this story may have a sequel. For now, I just enjoy to see what these connections through our published content can lead to. As I wrote in my Flickr profile, take me wherever you are.
(1)
My Semester of Reading by Susanne Kopf. JAWS Magazine, KF University Graz. Issue 21, pages 20-21. April 2011.
Labels: books, flickr, JAWS, literature, photography, reading
