ELT notes

“...the symbolic portrayal of each concept must be such that the human can work with it and remember.”

Doug Engelbart, 1962.

When you touch a deeply rooted memory in your brain, you unperceptively alter it. Your mind is not the same who had a starring role in the scene, it is a mind quickly shifting to director's mode. Our most treasured memories -for better of worse- suffer structural alterations every time we revisit them. So do our brains. You think you link to a memory. You actually create a new experience, which, in turn, you will evoke, like music, only to edit loops of future memories. And round and round you go carving on the vynil of your brain.

I secretely keep a couple of paper photographs I took of my only brother about 25 years ago. They are not on any portrait in the house. They are hidden. My elder brother left this world in 2003. Since then, I have kept a lonely ritual of looking at those two photos once a year only, on his birthday. Why? Because if I saw them every day on a portrait on my desk, for instance, his image would risk becoming as meaningless as any other mundane object. But, most importantly, because the revival effect of seeing that face again in all its details would wane and I would forever lose the beauty of its effect, the sense of newness in those highly evoking traces of who he was -as well as who I was behind those lens. Those photos are like great poems for me: rereading them surpases my best word by word recall of them. I do not just see them again; I experience them again.

Yet, neuroscience would quicklycontradict me. I cannot keep old photos in the hope of making an instant eternal. Apparently, every time we revisit learnt or memorized events, we alter them by making fresh neural connections. Our autobiographical, episodic memory is not passive at all. It is one of the most creative actions our brains can engage in. The context of retrieval is key. We build new relationships with the memory of the scents, voices and photos of our most cherished times lived. Accepting that it is impossible to go back and relive, all there is left is a hyperlink between past and present, which is by no means less fascinating than the paradise lost we long for.

I think it was Virginia Woolf who said in a book here on my shelves -alas, I cannot google in it, so I will rely on my memory- that she could get a sense of sadness mixed with anxiety every time she realised that a good sentence not written at the first moment she conceived it could get lost in her mind forever. All she could be certain about, all she could distinctly remember, is that the never born sentence was a very good one, probably a great one, but sadly lost.

Writing as annotating is a process of taking snapshots of your ideas here today. Many a note in this blog has been written in an attempt to capture what my own thoughts were before I got in close contact with someone else's mind. Something important, something I did not want to forget. A prompt, a writing plan, a road not taken in my brain. So that after reading what other annotators say you may, after all, go back to your  ownfledgeling - private- thoughts looking for a spark of a lost direction. Like a sepia photo that smiles back to us from a distant time, to foster the illusion of revisiting ideas, yet imperceptively modifying the deepest layers of our thinking around them, creating new paths of thought, as we may remember.

Here are the collected photos of the 365 photo project. I had reflected before about the Dailyshoot project in another post. That was more about technique discoveries. Now I have other questions on my mind:

What does this project say about learning? About photos in my day to day routine?

I think that the learning can go on daily as long as you make very, very personal. Technique goes to the background sometimes. It probably must do so, or perfection mania could take you to a photo paralysis.

As much as I like being kind of private online, at least compared to many of my friends, there comes a point where you simply show yourself (not literally, I'm not talking about self-portraits). I mean, if you have a keen eye and imagination, I guess you can see myself or even be here with me. Learning, the kind of authentic learning we passionately seek in edublogs cannot help but reveal the learner, it's the the process that remains elusive.

What do my photos say about me? Let's see.

I love food. I wish I were better at cooking. Registering the process or moments of success like this one keep me encouraged.

I simply cannot get enough of these tomato photos. My father takes care of these from his chair. They mean a lot to my mind, my heart and my mouth. Best tomato salads evah. Food for the soul.

I like football. Particularly at the Bombonera Stadium, the day Boca Juniors, my team, wins the championship :-) Anyway, there is always time to pause the cheering and look around to capture the faces of the most passionate fans.

I have learnt to see beauty possibilities in the things I would normally simply throw away, unnoticed.

For the love of shooting, I have gone back to playing childhood games.

I've become more bold and now regularly approach strangers for permission to take photos of their pets. Particularly when their eyes are begging for making new friends. Wouldn't you?

I've learnt to interrupt myself from my lesson preparation and endless correction pile to mark the magic sunset hour and rush to the terrace on the 27th floor to see what the light does to my corner of the world. I cannot believe I used to miss this.

There is something I have learnt that does not come out in any photo. It's the perspective you gain when you switch your eyes to photo mode. It's a decision to watch things differently, under their real light, a pleasant obsession with details, a new perspective, something that had never before been seen quite like that. For a few minutes, nothing else is.

I heard someone say the other day that when you are on holidays, you cannot be taking pictures all the time because you miss seeing and enjoying being there by putting a lens between the scene and you. I think I get their point of being more concerned about having a record to show your friends, to prove that you actually were in, say, Paris, because you appear in a photo with the Tour Eiffel in the background. An artificial and over constructed photo. And yet, little do they know how much they miss out.

I think I haven't shot any of the examples here for an audience. Not even to exemplify a photo technique. I did not detour from my daily obligations or wait for the weekend to have time to do them. I have done this for myself and for being there in the flow of things as they happen, making a half-concious decision to capture the vision. I think I would have regretted not taking them, although I am not sure why.

So far, so good. I'll keep shooting. Expect more tomatoes, sunsets, dogs and food in my next excursion of 365 photos. I will probably not vary the photo subjects. You see, they are so worth it. They are intertwined with who I am as well as who I want to be. They are part of my overall learning, not just acquiring a few skills. This photos amount to something bigger than I can understand today. There'll be a day for pattern finding. Today I just want to pause before I go on.

There is a lot in the way I've learnt photography that I wish I had a clue about how to teach it to my students. All I can do is write it out and share. It feels so not enough although I know this is important.

Happy New Learning Year, friends. May you be surrounded by beauty and a camera to show me the way you see the world.

Look forward to your thoughts.