A Fatal Grace: A Three Pines Mystery by Louise Penny

  rating: 3 of 5 stars
A well thought out mystery with a uniquely Canadian slant.

Quaint and complex but far from the gritty, urban crime novels that populate most bookstore shelves, this novel will satisfy mystery fans but it certainly lacks the depth and creativity I find myself most attracted to in contemporary fiction.
 

View all my reviews.

via Pundit Kitchen

Regardless of political affiliations, congrats to America on a history-making election.

Personally, I’m on a quest to catch as many documentaries as I can over the course of the festival and I’ve been surprised by just how strong a lineup there is. For those that have missed out, here are some of my favorites thus far. All of these are up for an audience award and a theatrical run in Kansas City, otherwise keep an eye out for screenings in your area.

Art From The Streets

Art From the Streets is a documentary about homelessness, art, and community service. It tracks the lives of five homeless artists who participate in a unique art program. Viewers visit homeless camps and the weekly art classes and will see first hand how this grassroots program changes lives for all involved.

In Art From The Streets, director Layton Blaylock not only tugs at the heartstrings with his exploration of the art program at the Austin-based A.R.C.H., but he also takes pains to humanize the homeless individuals in the program. This film moves beyond an outsider perspective to capture the lives and struggles of it’s subjects as well as the excitement and opportunity they find in creative expression.

Driving Men

Susan Mogul goes one on one with ex-lovers, almost lovers and her dad in a constant search for identity in Los Angeles. Sassy, iconoclastic, and never-married, Mogul rides shotgun as she films her men exactly where she wants them — in the driver’s seat. Part documentary, part memoir, the film is in essence a road movie. While the men may be in the driver’s seat, the viewpoint is strictly female with Mogul behind the lens.

A highly self-reflective documentary, Driving Men directly injects the audience into the life of video-maker Susan Mogul in a quest to understand why she’s been single for so much of her life. This isn’t your typical PBS or BBC documentary, rather it’s an extremely subjective movie that doesn’t place boundaries between the filmmaker and audience. For some, this is an unwelcome intrusion not unlike a stranger’s personal diatribe unleashed while stuck in line at the local market. For others, myself included, this is an entertaining and uncensored look at personal relationships and how they impact our lives.

Indestructible

When 31-year-old Ben Byer is diagnosed with ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, he begins documenting his life on camera. What begins as a series of video diaries grows into a three-year journey that takes him around the world looking for answers — and a cure.

Thus far, Indestructible is my favorite film of the festival. This intensely personal journey is gripping, heartbreaking, and unforgettable. At once a search for a cure, a journey of personal discovery, and testament to a corrosive and unapologetic disease, the film takes the audience, along with filmmaker Ben Byer, across the world in an exploration of the illness and a search for hope.

Photo by EverJean

Starting this evening and through next week, I’ll be taking a break my day-to-day life to focus on the 2008 Kansas International Film Festival, a film festival I help organize each year. While I may be out of the office, there’s a chance I’ll still be posting here though I strongly doubt the topic will eLearning. 

As this blog isn’t explicitly focused on education technology, I don’t suppose a brief change in topic will be terribly bothersome, but for those reading only for education-related content, tough luck for the next week or so. Still, stay tuned, as we’ll return you to your regularly-scheduled programming shortly.

In celebration of quality design and to commemorate the 2008 Kansas International Film Festival, which I assist in organizing each year, I thought I’d take an opportunity to showcase the 2008 festival posters which were created for us by Kansas City design firm +Muller Bressler Brown+.

Enjoy.

Photo by Fredrik Thommesen

While I have the good fortune of working with some brilliant faculty, both academically and technologically, I’m beginning to see the future of online and technology-enhanced education (that’s a somewhat redundant term, huh?) as more and more of a question mark.

There’s very little argument that the education system in the United States is experiencing somewhat of a downturn - or crisis - one aspect of which is that most new teachers are leaving the profession within five years. While this predicament deserves it’s own post, or even an entire blog, my particular point involves the delay this places on technological improvement in education. While the tools of digital education continue to improve as more and more great technological minds step onto the service side, fewer and fewer tech-savvy young teachers are leaving their mark within the education system.

All this talk of a digital divide between educators and their audience becomes moot when the natives are both teacher and student but we seem unable to make this reality. Meanwhile, as the level of comfort with technology between teachers and students widens even further, the ability to communicate and understand one another in the classroom becomes more of a challenge for instructors and more isolating for students and the time it will take to correct this issue grows exponentially.

Image via CrunchBase

Over the last few months friendfeed has been making it’s way more and more into my online existence, both as a personal communications tool and an eLearning tool. I’m not as addicted to the service as many bloggers and tech junkies seem to be, but I think it’s a really smart application with a ton of uses.

What I do find slightly confounding, however, is the lack of discussion regarding friendfeed amongst the eLearning and EdTech bloggers.  While it’s a very real possibility I’m simply missing the discussion or I’m paying attention to the wrong blogs, I’ve seen fewer than 8 posts mentioning friendfeed and the role it could play in eLearning. With all of the discussion going on elsewhere, I think it’s time we start paying attention and getting creative.

So, here’s my question to you: how are you using friendfeed or why aren’t you?

As for me, you can find my friendfeed here and you can check out how I’m incorporating it into Def Items at Social. For me, friendfeed allows for both aggregation of content and provides a platform for discussion and that’s the value I don’t find at other social bookmarking and content sharing sites. While the primary risk seems to be the migration of discussion out of individual blogs, I find that to be a worthwhile sacrifice when considering the ease of posting new tools and tips that don’t necessarily warrant a standalone blog entry. On the work side, we’re beginning to adapt the tool into our eLearning arsenal in a smattering of creative ways to make life easier and provide new resources for internal use.

So, now for the rest of the community. Where is friendfeed on your radar? Will it become a resource for educators and students or will it fade away as so many other over-hyped web apps?

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Image by luc legay via Flickr

As I cover eLearning off and on here at DefItems, I thought it would be daft of me not to mention the new online eLearning community, Learnhub.

In their own words:

LearnHub: for people who love learning and sharing knowledge with
others. It is a set of tools that make learning online fun and
engaging, and teaching online easy and effective.

While it’s a promising idea and a solidly developed community, I haven’t spent the time exploring enough to provide a thorough review. Those that have please feel free to comment about what makes or breaks the community and I’ll try to come back with more in-depth excavation soon.