Banfi Days in Davis

On Saturday 9th I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Symposium of the MA students of the School of Education at UC-Davis. I had met many of the students beforehand and I had even seen their work and provided them with feedback to improve on it. The Sumposium was a presentation of the research projects they had conducted in their schools (they are all teachers in the area) and was presented in the format of posters. This all took place in a large room in the Arts and Recreation Center of the University. The room was organised with panels that were used to hold the posters, some tables where students could keep their supporting material (their students' work, laptops to show further material, etc.) and enough space for everyone to circulate. A floor plab was distributed to everyon who came in: Other than the posters, students also had extra supporting materials, which included their lesson plans, their students' work and their own analysis of their inte...

The Language Center at UC Davis is a wonderful place. As his director, Bob Blake, told me, it is housed in a basement of the Olson building, a part of the building nobody wants because the rooms don't have windows, but which is ideal for their purposes in terms of security and sound proofing. I was lucky enought to get a guided tour with Bob and  Fuqiang Zhuo, the Associate Director.  The first thing I saw was there latest acquisition: the Active Learning Space. Here are some pictures I took:               Some of these features are the latest in what technology can offer (e.g. bluetooth connection for linking a computer to the interactive whiteboard) but others just seem like good ideas (e.g. special paint on the walls that turn them into whiteboards. Others fall somewhere in between and appear to rely heavily on ingenuity rather than material resources although they are materialised as objects (e.g. the swivel ch...

California being an agricultural state, I kind of expected agricultural produce to be more 'spontaneous', less manicured than I'd seen in places like New York or Washington. What I see when I go to supermarkets, however, is shelves like the ones below with a careful display of fruit and vegetables that almost resembles the shop windows of a jeweler. What is not visible in these photos is the sophisticated water-spray system that is activated periodically and that makes sure that all the produce looks as fresh as possible. Another display format can be found in gas stations were, again, perfectly simple and ordinary pieces of fruit are displayed in carefully tended shelves, trays and other containers. The strange thing in both cases is the fact that the produce goes practically untouched. The supermarkets seem to be empty all the time, or at least  every time we've been there. In the case of the gas station, fruit is overlooked in favour of doughnuts, ...