What's Next?

I did it for Haiti. When I began to read about the terrible earthquake in Haiti last week, I realized that social networking was --in the beginning--the only way for information to leave the island. What a great communication case study for my students, I thought. And then I thought,"oh, drat! I'm not on Facebook. So I taught the first two classes with students pulling up the pages and demonstrating. Then I went back to my office and signed up for FB. I heard back immediately from my daughter, who wrote "Aren't you supposed to be working?" My son-in-law also accepted me as a friend, so I thought, "Good. Easy access to grandchild photos." And closed my computer. When I opened it again, I had 10 friend requests. When I opened it again, I had another six. I told my students not to friend me, but it seems my nieces and nephews (all 46) and my great-nieces and nephews (all 72) are on there. The great-greats are still too young, but it won't be long. Act...

On a New Year's walk, my daughter and I talked about the number of trips and the distance my granddaughter, Lily, has traveled in her short 7.75 months. It turns out that Lily has traveled from her home in Savannah north to Lake Erie, south to Boca Raton, and up the east coast to Baltimore. This distance involved three separate, weeklong or longer trips, and involved visiting more than eight different homes and a variety of hotels and motels. I, on the other hand, never got further south than Harrisville, Pa. until I was 12. The 60-mile trip to my mother's parents' home seemed as though it took forever, and it was all farmland. Stopping at Isaly's ice cream in Grove City was always the highlight of the trip, which took more than 2 hours. When I was 12 my parents took me to Washington, D.C. - not to see the nation's Capitol, but for my father to buy guns at the international dealers in Alexandria, Va. The closest we got to a landmark was the Smithsonian's Air and...