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Little Wonderful Blast from the Past

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SummerBlogFest2020

Yesterday, I spent time catching up to the guidance for blogging and networking in our SummerBlogFest2020 course facilitated online through blogs by Laura Gibbs. 

I already had a partially set up fee InoReader account, and I spent some time adding and revising it to be current with the things I follow:

Notice, I have the Summer2020BlogFest InoReader feed by Laura at the top -- I can check it along with my other feeds. I probably won't get the premium version, although it sounds fantastic -- I just don't have the need--- yet.

A Blast from the Past


While setting up my InoReader for my own blogs and blog comments, - I found an old blog post from 2013 that referred to a Twitter friend's post about being contained within someone else's structure. 

Her post no longer exists, but I had felt a connection to it, and a connection to the sentiment even today when I reread it since #remotelearning is being inundated with many "suggestions" for best ways and structures for online learning. Many are spot on for my beliefs-- project learning, collaboration, feedback, student agency. But some suggest "templates" for lesson plans and structures for teachers to follow. 

A classroom is not something that can be handled with a template. A classroom is learning community with learners and a lead learner, the teacher; it cannot be standardized or scaled for mass control, structure, and surveillance. Ugh.

The comment I found on the blog post, I Will No Be Contained- was from the person whose words I wrote about-- Janet Ilko. I had created a visual poster of her words, and her comment mentioned that she was going to make a poster of it for herself:


It fit perfectly with the feelings I had just had while reading some tweets on those templates. So I tweeted to Janet to see if she remembered her words:

Note: I used Laura's trick to type in zzz  in the compose editor to search for zzz with command-F in the html editor to paste in the Twitter embed codes!  
Thanks for the tip, Laura.

And she responded back right away


with this image of her office:


How awesome is that? Seven years later, I see the poster! I thought so and tweeted to her:


and she replied:


So great to reconnect with like-minded people. 

Looking Back

Sometimes it's good and fun to look back on past comments and ideas --- sometimes we change our minds and sometimes, we're adamant about our pedagogy and philosophies.

Have you ever had an awesome reconnection?



Poster on Flickr

Go boldly and scatter seeds of kindness... Reflect curiosity and wonder... Live to make the world less difficult for each other. ~ George Eliot
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  1. Laura GibbsMay 20, 2020 at 11:38 AM

    This is SO COOL, Sheri! I had included that graphic in my May 18 Highlights post, so I just went back and updated that post to include a link to this story. And I have a fun reconnect story that happened as schools were announcing P-NP grading policies; I was engaged in lots of convos with different people at different schools at Twitter as a result of that... and one of the professors I heard from was someone who had been a student in my Myth-Folklore class back in 2005! Incredible! My school deleted all the projects from back then, but I remembered her project and I was able to find it at the Wayback Machine over at Internet Archive. And now I'm in touch with her at Twitter. Yay for re-connecting!

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    1. Sheri42May 20, 2020 at 12:10 PM

      Thanks, Laura. It is exciting to reconnect, and that is such a benefit of social media. The Wayback Machine is so awesome that way. Yours is a delightful story--- so warming to learn about and reconnect with our former students. The classroom community continues!

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