I propose that the words "even if" be a catch phrase every time we enter into a service act.
I wonder how we set expectations for this kind of service. I suspect one answer is that we change from talking about tools we support, to talking about tasks we support within tools.
This is so wise. Move from nouns to verbs. Valorize the act of serving--the tools will get their due as a matter of course.
I think there will also be a new kind of community growing up. My neighbor once told me that he couldn’t fix my riding mower’s starter, but he could show me how to hotwire it with a screwdriver. I think some part of our job will get more “neighborly” like that.
In a vibrant community we all have important roles. Most of us, however, won't get into the history books. The privileging of the big man or woman in history is one of the most profound blindspots we have in American culture. We just gotta start casting our eyes around to work with those at arm's length, virtually or actually.
In a vibrant community we all have important roles. Most of us, however, won't get into the history books. The privileging of the big man or woman in history is one of the most profound blindspots we have in American culture. We just gotta start casting our eyes around to work with those at arm's length, virtually or actually.
This might just have the capacity for levelling that I am looking for in the classroom. We all are learners and while we may also be a box on the office hiearchy we are also nodes in the wirearchy.
This might just have the capacity for levelling that I am looking for in the classroom. We all are learners and while we may also be a box on the office hiearchy we are also nodes in the wirearchy.
Schools are compulsory for the poor. Not so much for the rich. A school by design is a lot of other things as well most of which has little to do with opening doors so much as shutting them and sorting the rest into where they need to go.
As children solve problems in an authentic and sustainable way–this particular problem and this particular family in this particular context in this particular community–the school crystallizes into something else.
Schools could become like this: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/12/covering-miamis-rising-seas-sensors-public-data-politics/
But I don't think this zombie from the past can be reborn, do you? There are issues and problems and ideas that schools in general will not tackle, many of them they cannot tackle. For example, how can schools become think tanks for keeping students in rural communities?
That brick metaphor is cock-eyed. The problem being that we assume it has to be a brick. It is this straightedged linear hierarchical nonsense that is the bane of modern architecture. It is the Frank Geary/ Frank "Loud" Wright brand. I ain't buyin' it. In fact most of the things of the world don't require anywhere near the amount of topdown brick-headed, lego instructive bs than we think.
Where I live education is a business inspired by desparate dreams and harnessed by professional despots both for-profit and not for profit. I will sell you a dream not your own. I am little George against that dragon, Smaug. And not the Benedict Cumberbatch voiced dragon either.
nononononon a thousand times no. If anything we need to be making our own bundles not someone else's fasces. We all know where using someone else's bundle leads.
Connected in our heads, in the connections we share with other folks heads, by the universal experience of power and lust and empathy and fear and joy and oblivion. I know how you connect because I do so in much the same way. I recognize you in me and me in you. Self same same self, mirrored and beaming out of that glass like the blooming idiots that we are.
The map is the brick. The map and the brick as dominant metaphors is the problem. They should serve us,not master us. Expertism is rampant and everything I have ever learned well has been when they have served my curvilinear, my randomized, my self-serving chaotic self, not vice the versa. Lest we forget, we have changed the temperature of the oceans by building with bricks and maps.
"In this session Kim Jaxon, Jaimie Hoffman, Danielle Astengo, Jeremy Wallace, and Jim Groom will be discussing various approaches to building a connected courses infrastructure for individual assignments, or an entire course. This session will showcase various sites faculty and graduate students have created over the semester, and hopefully inspire others to create their own connected course hub."
(made a comment and lost a comment) Is this more of our loop conversation that started on twitter? I like Simon's words of "You are just on a longer loop" to Susan. Looping around.
I found that the way it appeared to be militated
and implemented within institutions wrung out all the joy and potential of that
which technology could bring:
They were bad - we were bad... all bad!
(Just heard on the radio: When shepherds get hungry - they will eat their sheep... I think this is it: when we punish the teachers they eat their sheep!)
This is an example of joyful learning for me: listening to Wendell Berry's poetry in his voice. This is joy rising up from the ground, not power raining down from above.
Didn't want it to feel all Moses and messianic. I did not want to bring the learning from the tech mountain - but to say - hey - this mountain is here - there could be beauty - there is some danger - there is risk - go on - check it out for yourselves...
This so typical, no matter the learning institution ... even in elementary schools, where you would think play would be the heart of learning. But not for teachers, apparently ....
OED
rear, v.1
(rɪə(r))
Forms: 1 rǽran, 3 ræren, 3, 4 reren, 5 reryn; 4-6 rere, 5, 6 reere, (3) 6 reare, 7- rear; (6-7 rair, 9 dial. rare).
[OE. rǽran (:-OTeut. *raizjan) = Goth. -raisjan, ON. reisa, to raise. OE. had also árǽran arear (in use down to the 17th c.).
The main senses of rear run parallel with those of the Scandinavian equivalent raise, but the adopted word has been much more extensively employed than the native, and has developed many special senses which are rarely or never expressed by rear. Hence, on the one hand, rear has in many applications been almost or altogether supplanted by raise, a process which is clearly seen in the usage of the Wyclif Bible (see note to raise; in the version of 1611 rear is found only in 1 Esdr. v. 62, while raise is freely employed). On the other hand, it is probable that rear has sometimes, esp. in poetry, been used as a more rhetorical substitute for raise, without independent development of the sense involved. As in the case of raise there is some overlapping of the senses, and occasional uncertainty as to the precise development or meaning of transferred uses.]
I.I To set up on end; to make to stand up.
1. a.I.1.a trans. To bring (a thing) to or towards a vertical position; to set up, or upright. = raise 1.
Frequently with suggestion of senses 8 or 11, and now usually implying a considerable height in the thing when raised.
a 1000 Cædmon's Gen. 1675 (Gr.) Ceastre worhton & to heofonum up hlædræ rærdon. c 1205 Lay. 1100 Heo rærden heora mastes. Ibid. 17458 Mærlin heom [the stones] gon ræren [c 1275 reare] alse heo stoden ærer. 1387 Trevisa Higden (Rolls) V. 455 Þe place þere Oswaldus knelede and rerede a crosse. c 1400 Sowdone Bab. 2658 Thai rered the Galowes in haste. 1530 Palsgr. 687/2 It is a great deale longer than one wolde have thought it afore it was reared up. 1571 Digges Pantom. i. xxix. I j b, Fixing o
Lyrics to Winter Blue
Kiss your lashes, hiss you low
I'm driven to you like the driven snow
There's a place for us to lie
For every lover there's a piece of sky
To every life a light that shines
To every heart a beat that's true
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
You know that this was meant to be
Long ago a hundred years from now
Tossing on an open sea
Love so good it's easy to go down
To every life a light that shines
To every heart a beat that's true
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
To every life a light that shines
To every heart a beat that's true
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
Love you like a jungle fever
I'll never never never, I'll never leave
Through every vein and every fibre
I'll never never never, I'll never leave
To every life a light that shines
To every heart a beat that's true
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
Baby you're my yellow summer
Baby you're my winterblue
Winterblue, winterblue ...
Winterblue, my yellow summer ...
I could see where this would be very handy way to make an assignment by using the annotation links as guided reading, asking questions, embedding Google Forms, well...just wow.
I was born by the river
In a little tent
And just like the river
I've been running ever since
It's been a long, long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh, yes it will
It's been too hard living
But I'm afraid to die
I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long, long time coming
But I know a change gonna come
Oh yes it will
Then I go to my brother
I say brother help me please
But he winds up knocking me
Back down on my knees
There's been times that I thought
I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come
Oh, yes it will
Sam Cooke - It's Been A Long Time Coming Lyrics |
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
These three book along withDeschooling Society, any John Holt book, Whitehead's The Aims of Education, and Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution (an outlier here I admit) were my guides on the road to unschooling all three of our kids. Oh yeah, and Neil Postman and the Whole Earth Catalog,
I have been experimenting with the word 'substrate' as the bare minimum structure upon which a bare minimum of content (there can be many growing media). I am thinking just enough, vetted for bias as much as possible, and willing to be remixed as needed.
how fiction can be a person’s (inner) reality, that it’s not a lie to a child.
Our kids used to have a big box of legos, blocks, plastic creatures AND they called them their 'guys'. And they would go play guys. And we were not allowed to play guys with them. It was their domain. We could play in other domains, we could read aloud to them, but their guys were their guys, not ours. They owned their own imaginations and still do. If imagination be fiction, then let us have more of it.
And his idea is to leave them to build on their own and figure out what the role of teachers/schools would then be, if it is not to impart knowledge/content.
Is the internet really a new thing? isn't it just another iteration of the human need to connect? Isn't it just laying down a new network over the old, but the old tunnels are still there (actually in Paris with pneumatic tubes).
I see it as a a rich space where I am responsible for my own learning and knowing. But I am also responsible for those who are with me. I worry that I don't get more of a sense of who has skin in the game and who doesn't. I am trying to use these tools in my own connected courses, I am trying to connect with students here and in those classes. How do I make connecting as routine as a syllabus AND how do I make it as valued as a syllabus. I want to know more about how I can navigate the existing sharky waters of hied. How have others used aikido moves to enable connected values and principles in what amount to mostly unconvivial sharing tools.
My only wonder/concern is that other than you, Howard (and Alan, to some degree, earlier), facilitators seem to be absent from the online conversations, other than the scheduled video hangouts.
It can feel a bit ... like the classrooms that Connected Courses is trying to remix, where the knowledgeable person in the front of the room (or in the hangout on my screen), talks and shares expertise, but then is not all that active in the ancillary conversations going on outside of the classroom (hangout).
Tell me I am missing those conversations, and I will be happy/content in that knowledge.
When I bounce around the blogs, I am most often likely to see you (Howard), Terry, Mariana, and a few others in the comment sections. Maybe more plans for projects like #WhyIteach are in the mix (hope so) and ways to get folks to make content (a shared ethos of open learning? A collaborative letter to a Dean about the need for more connective learning? etc) connect deeper will emerge (doubly-hope-so).
You just reminded me: I see nothing in the course design that helps people who are TEACHING students and involving them in #ccourses to help those students interact with each other. I am mostly seeing other educators here...
Agreeing with Kevin here. There are a couple of other facilitators active in some spaces. Helen on twitter and blogs (did not realize she was a facilitator at first, though); Mia Zamora (she's a facilitator, right?) and Jonathan on Google+ and Mimi is starting to respond on Twitter now. But in general, I would have expected the facilitators to be active throughout and across. The only ones who are really doing that are Howard and Alan. As in, they were there from the very beginning (pre-pre-course) and everywhere in all spaces, "listening" & responding. Not every facilitator can read/listen to everything (though Alan/Howard almost seem like they do! don't know how!) but given the sheer number of facilitators their responsive presence has potential to be so much stronger.
I realize, too, my comment goes against the grain of Connected Learning. While I appreciate all the facilitators, I shouldn't sit around and wait for them. As Howard notes, "What it is, is up to us."
I don't think its going against the grain, exactly, Kevin. It's a kind of speaking out. And it's also the case that some learners need more direction, or more support or explicit permission in knowing they can take their own direction... If that makes sense?