Multilitteratus Incognitus

This week has been rough in the office.  We learned that our colleague - and my former professor - Pepi Leistyna passed away. Details are scant at the moment and everyone in the department is in a state of shock as his death was quite sudden and unexpected.  I was going to write a blog post about about my history with him, how I knew him as a person when I worked in Media Services (good ol' AV department) where he used to pick up VHS players on carts to show clips of films in his courses; how he influenced my development as a learner and a scholar; and finally as a valued colleague when I started working in the department of Applied Linguistics.  While I think this is valuable, and certainly part of the process, I think there is another area to home in on, thanks to this week on #HumanMOOC: Social Presence! Social Presence is defined as : ...the ability of learners to project their personal characteristics into the community of inquiry, thereby presenting themselves...

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group. One of the elements that has come up is that each person, and each culture, are in fact shaped by various socio-economic-political-historical (and more) powers that are in effects in the regions where they grew up, where their parents grew up, their friends, families and coworkers. Within this shaping we have the creation of artifacts that are relevant to that culture. Now snap forward to regular life outside the classroom. I was catching up on my reading of the FAIL blog, and I saw this image (you need to follow the link since it may not be appropriate for work). This is a picture of a road si...