This may be a statement about our lithium culture where things seem to be over-determined in ways not always to our liking. Sometimes, we become the gadgetry we carry, and let our lives and our selves be driven by it. There is, however, no denying the fact that those machines can serve good purposes. This piece represents such an ambivalent position.

LITHIUM MEN

A man I know
always on the go
Carries a time machine on his wrist
It ticks and ticks and ticks and ticks
It's ticking its day away.
Before he succumbs to sleep,
He hears it tick.
Its lithium battery
Has a lifetime warranty.
The battery, though ostensibly
The heart of our lithium culture,
Is the only friend who's kept him company
For the past eighteen hundred
And thirty-three days.
Watch doctors have declared
The battery days numbered
And her cells nearly dead.
A man I know always on the go
Carries a time machine in his cells
No doubt so close, so dear, and so vital
To his heart.
It ticks and ticks and ticks and ticks
It's ticking his days away.
When he looks
At the unperturbed waters of the lake
He sees it tick and gets perturbed.
The lithium battery doctors could
Conceivably tell
How long it will tick.
Their lithium screens
Could principally declare
His years numbered
And her cells nearly dead.

Ali H. Raddaoui

BURGLARY ON THE FOURTH FLOOR

For a person to lose possessions may not mean much, especially if that person hasn’t got much to lose, to start with. Loss of significant others, on the other hand, is not the easiest of predicaments to deal with. Despite the many good things of life, like nurturing hope, sometimes, you wake up one morning to find out that that hope has slipped away, and all you have to retrieve it is to capture an image of what it was before it made itself conspicuous by its absence.

BURGLARY ON THE FOURTH FLOOR

Whoever it was
That broke into my universe
Through a window in my digs
That was let loose
As a matter of practice!
Three months ago
I brought a coleus
Sang to it, watered it,
And placed its pot on the edge
Of the window
So it captures dawn
And the passing of day
And the chirp of the nightingale.
I tucked a note
With a street address
Was it a palm, was it an olive
Was it a cedar or a citrus?
My mind went blank
As I arrived from a night’s trip.
I all but tripped
On the debris of my coleus:
Is roots were naked
Its leaves asphyxiated
Its soil scattered
And the pot shattered
On the ground
So hard was the thud
Below the window;
The note was gone
With the wind.
The ink of the address
Was withering
The postmaster
Wouldn’t know
The zip code or the street
Or the district or the town.
Sender’s address was blotted
Beyond recognition.
Standing on the verge of sanity,
I was grateful
The burglar hadn’t done much
Beyond wreaking havoc
On my plant.
****
Ali H. Raddaoui Spring 2010

I often wonder how some things momentarily populate the screen of your mind then quickly evaporate, leaving little trace or print. Other impressions, however, have a way of colonizing space of the mind, and cannot be washed away despite repeated attempts to unseat them.

INDELIBLE INK

Everyday I spend
I shake many a hand
Oftentimes I hold the hand
That shakes my hand
We share our germs
And a smile
And catch the flu
Many times in a lifetime.
When I go home, I put my hand
Under the tap
And wash
I then shake my hands
And the drips fly around;
My hands are germ-free.
***
Everyday I spend
I have many handshakes
Of a mental type
Some I enjoy
Some I forget
And some impact me
To the point of compunction.
When I go home,
I put my head under the tap
And wash the inside
Then I shake my head
Some drips fly around
And some cling with their hands
To the core of the mind;
No matter how hard I shake
They will not be shaken away.

Ali H. Raddaoui. Laramie, March 7, 2010

ICT-BASED LEARNING AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ASSESSMENT: A VIDEO PRESENTATION

This is a video presentation titled: ‘ICT-Based Learning and Implications for Assessment” that I gave at the Mednine Higher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities, University of Gabes, Tunisia in the Spring of 2008.

In this presentation, I propose to discuss the emerging ICT-based learning paradigm based on content management systems, mobile learning, social software, and constructivist learning and to delineate in rough outline the corresponding changes at the level of assessment. I begin with an overview of the features of traditional assessment, which, for the most part, consists in an individually-constructed, paper-based, teacher-oriented, reproductive, archive-destined, word-based, in-class assignment. Then, I argue that ICT-enriched assessment is a collaboratively authored, digitally hosted, public and consumer-oriented, multimedia-rich creation. This creation is subject to updating and involves a geographically dispersed, networked community of contributors. Finally, I focus on the challenges in the face of implementing such changes at the levels of learners, content managers and service providers.
Please address your questions and comments to: araddaoui@gmail.comh

A pair of negative and positive numbers with the same absolute value are plotting to bring down Zero and establish an equation where they both coalesce on an 0-X-Y graphic, despite the distance. They each have their personal reasons for wanting to ditch Zero, but the latter knows knows its value, and is not ruffled by the conspiracy.

NUMBERS SHOWDOWN

Plus Seven and its mirror friend
Below the X line
Spoke by LAN
And hatched a Zero-less plan:
To squeeze the span
Dividing them,
Sandwich the Zero in-between
And banish it in a no-time zone
Until after the end of time.
***
Plus Seven foresaw
Zero could go
It was, after all, a pedestal
Of Six steps ago
With time passing, she thought
The ladder got firmly glued
Its base only a foot from the bottom
In the event it were to sustain a fall,
There wouldn’t be much to fall
Slide down it would
Or elongate just a little.
***
Minus Seven
Was mindless of Zero
Treated it as distance
To fold until
It reached Plus Seven above
With no feelings to harbor
Except the thought
Zero was a spatial landmark
In the middle of the path
So Seven Below agreed,
without ill-plan
For zero to be banned…
***
But Zero was oblivious
He knew, without Him,
No Equations could stand
He tucked Himself to a belt
And hurled it a measure to the left
And blew a spell
On the trail
Where the twain
Were to melt.
****
Ali H. Raddaoui. Laramie, Wyoming, February 27, 2010