Time to Celebrate

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Wow it is hard to believe but a year ago Sarah and Ray were newly hired at the EMC. We were not in the Champlain Mill. We did not know Michel. We were not working with Peter Bingham on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to create games for patients with CF. We were not working with the marvelous crew at Population Media Center and Aminata and Leyla at the UNFPA on the game to address Violence Against Women. Heather Kelley was not with us. And Megan Frenzen was not at Champlain! South Africa was a distant place with people we did not know. Ken was not working with us. We had not worked with Paul, Tom, and Paul at IBM. There was no Teletrust or "Disaster Master". We were searching for funds to work on the Info Lit games and did not know Andy! 

Wow! We have a to celebrate—the efforts of hard working Champlain faculty, staff and administrators. The incredible creativity and work of 114 Champlain students! The commitment of all our partners, who now are our friends. And celebrate we shall! Please join us  Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:00 PM-9:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) for a party in the Mill—games, art creation, pizza, and I hear a disco ball. I am especially looking forward to sharing the video magic of our video blog crew! Come join us!

The sad piece is that Champlain graduation is May 9th and we will miss those students we will be losing!!!! Come celebrate what they have brought to us all!

Night caller

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Pardon me if this post is due to flights of fancy resulting from a mere four hours of sleep (ah weather and air flight!)...or perhaps to thoughts tossing in my head like bright fall leaves in a windstorm:  Red Burns—her life discoveries critically shaping "computational media"; our soon-to-be graduating seniors—we will miss these key individuals who in growing have shaped the EMC and us alongside them; a summer suddenly blossoming with new, future focused projects; and the puzzle pieces of learning being positioned for a new Masters based within the EMC. All these ramblings swirl around the question of wisdom and wealth: how we come to possess it and where does it lead? 

Then propelled out of the darkening forest under the power of a 4 foot wingspan, wise Athena alights upon a pine that keeps guard over my backyard pond! Or is she perhaps the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, purveyor of wealth and generosity? 

Is she not one and the same—wisdom and wealth? Or does this owl symbolize our graduates on their journeys (is it coincidental that Spring owls are most easily sighted and in Spring graduates fully fly the nest)? Or as a dusk-to-night visitor, is the owl a metaphor for the sorting of our dreams, of our selves? Whoo? Or as a night caller is she a portent of where our technological dreams may lead us? What the day lit future will reveal? 

Thoreau writes in Walden

 "I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and underdeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have."