Microcredentials

 April 30 Word of the Day: Microcredentials

 

Remembering to turn the calendar at the end of the month is a subject no one learnt at school. A pinch and a punch for the first of the month was, at some stage, included in the one-hour microcredential course on offer, free of charge, on the domestic front.

 Later in life, that is to say the following month, it was unfortunate if you caught a cold and missed the class on hyphens, those compounding chemists of grammar busy forcing different elements into new formations. Life is dotted, even dashed sometimes, with the perennial challenge of when a word goes from being a micro-credential, finding its feet so to speak in a joint venture, to microcredential, the fully fledged latest addition to the vocabulary, or if you prefer fully-fledged. There is a lifetime of catch-up (see also, catch up) if you missed the class and find no one (see also, no-one) offers diplomas in hyphens nowadays.

 Accelerated learning is a lifelong practice, if you are alert and open to new experiences. In a single day you may earn degrees for such microcredentials as improved access to tinned goods, opening the jar screwed shut by a robot, or prising the thin plastic supermarket bag at the tear for your selection of peaches – all with no tears!

 Module seems to be the larger or governing term for every kind of microcredential, modules coming into vogue around the time of the first moon landing. An astronaut with microcredentials in moonwalking takes a small step in the belief this is an augury for a giant leap. Though his dependence on modules is too obvious to mention, certainly the astronaut can add small steps to his CV. Golfing on the moon is next level, where just teeing off deserves a microcredential of its own, let alone bunkering out of a crater.

 Some people complain that microcredentials has too many syllables, why not just extras, or skills, or add ons, or add-ons? Resistance to the idea of a Diploma in Details or Certificate in Specifics is observable, while others are too busy organising microcredential reading lists and one-hour interfaces to be concerned with semantics, let alone if microcredentials is a product of our time, or in fact something people do every day without any personal recognition whatsoever, and have done since BC.

Walking

 April 29 Word of the Day: Walking

 

Image: Fence graffiti along The Secret Way near Stevenson Street in Kew, Melbourne.

 At dinner we talk amusedly about walking in the early morning towards the station or, as it were, work. Of the different kinds of stranger, several of whom we recognise from years of walking past them early in the morning. As if they are not strangers, in fact, given their familiar face and dress and gait and attention, though we don’t know their names. We speak of them as though we know them relatively well and well maybe we do, vulnerable as they are at that hour of the day, waking up.

 Of those who never make eye contact, walking headlong or headstrong or something all-head as if we were not there passing them early in the morning along the footpath and they have nothing to say or are lost in thoughts (to be charitable) or just don’t say hello as a rule, or on principle whatever that principle may be, gone without a murmur past the shoulder into the past tense. Of those, contrariwise, who do say hello and always will even before daylight has filtered through enough for them to see who they say hello to and always will, just as we say hello briefly by way of reciprocal recognition of their existence and the existence of existence in general, for example birds starting to chirp and a vehicle careering along the street.

 Of those who jog, which is a step up from walking only that could twist an ankle, they are usually appreciative if we step onto the nature strip or gutter or available driveway and say thanks, not hello, as they lunge forward in a desperate bid at improved health when they could still be resting in bed, or just walking like us, rather than engaging in an excuse for running that demands people get out of their way. Of joggers and the like who do not say thanks, we speak over dinner, their fevered brows and wobbly knees, as they wonder if their personal best is worth this wordless, nay breathless almost, exertion, clearly with no time to think or even have a moment to notice us as they fantasize marathons.

 Of dogs, of course, some off course, and their owners dragged along behind, where the method for brief friendly encounter is to smile not at the owner but the dog, thereby eliciting a friendly smile and noise from the owners, in the well-founded belief that anyone who is friendly towards their dog must be friendly, by definition; the dog, or dogs sometimes twisting leads and nosing in the grass, being the connection that brings out the best in walkers, walking both ways down a quiet street early in the morning.         

 

 April 28 Word of the Day: Breathing

 

Breathing

 

            Effusions everywhere

slip from guards,

            light green

            figuring lines

surprised as day,

            dragging colour

out of night

and its grey

            brown presages.

Airy air fillers,

            lovely constraints

featured for water.

            Rain remembrance

from its first sign.

            Cool brain

fanned with green.

            Pure consolation,

            timely relief

attracting an isolated mind.

            Untimed foliations

spiralling around houses,

            edging streets,

hanging about places,

            soft watery,

just like gurgling.

Firm as thought

at the root,

up above high voltage,

            inscribing freeways.

Where are their endings?

            Brushed up

            vacant lots,

halved around wires,

            hilltop generations.

            Endearing survival

spreads into the sky

just like breathing.

What birds this way?

            Fringes sway

            colour pale,

frail as thought

reaching new currents,

its own pattern

            of itself.

 

[From ‘The Times’, a series of poems written in 2007]