Syndicated, Virginia Group

SOMETHING NEW!

Teaching #HISPinParis is really engaging as a teacher in large part because I get to introduce students to new places, some of which they probably wouldn’t see otherwise. That said, it’s pretty rare that I get to see something completely new to *me*. I lived in Paris for the first 15 years of my life […]

Open Participants, Syndicated

IP Matters – New Resources for Students and Faculty

We are excited to share a set of open modules introducing critical elements of intellectual property (IP), developed by University of Toronto Entrepreneurship (UTE) with support from Digital Learning Innovation and the Office of the Vice-Provost, Innovations in Undergraduate Education. … Continue reading →

The post IP Matters – New Resources for Students and Faculty appeared first on University of Toronto – Digital Learning Innovation.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Breathe

In the spring of 2021 I participated in “Elder Circles: Fierce Words of the Third Age”, StoryCenter’s (storycenter.org) first workshop for those over 60. I joined founder and Executive Director Joe Lambert and Linda Parris-Bailey, playwright and Founder of ParrisBaileyArts.com, who also served as the Executive/Artistic Director of the Carpetbag Theatre for 45 years, in a six-week workshop to examine stories of life as an older adult. The screenshot (above) of the Google Site I made for the workshop explains the approach we took.

The first four weeks we responded to the prompts and shared our stories of each facet of our experiences in a virtual writer’s circle using Zoom. For example, I shared these thoughts on “Invisibility”:

I’ve been thinking about invisibility this week. I’ve always felt hypervisible, especially outside of my native coastal California. Only now, being older, do I experience invisibility. In this new cultural environment, I feel more erased than invisible. I even have a term for it from my ethnic culture. Scotched: to be canceled, or erased, or diminished.
I imagine the English came up with this use of the word. Once the Scots helped Unite the Kingdoms, they were erased from history. They became British. At different times their language, manner of dress, and other cultural expressions were outlawed. The image we have of the kilt wearing military soldier or bagpiper was invented by Walter Scott for the amusement of an English king visiting Scotland for his first and only time. Erased were the sheepherders and weavers that had been forcibly removed during the preceding century so the English Lords that owned the land could replace the peasants with sheep and move the weavers closer to the London marketplace. Perhaps this is the origin of the use of scotched to mean cancelled or removed. Thus you can scotch a person, an idea, or a people.
I recently read HG. Wells The Invisible Man for the first time. I’m glad I waited, as many of the references would have been opaque to my younger self, being written in the late 19th century. Some say it is the first science fiction story, who knows? As one who has studied optics, I can confirm it includes an accurate description of the physics of light and color and refraction.
I was disappointed in the protagonist Griffin’s use of his invisibility as a weapon.
I’m thinking about the possibilities of invisibility. Being able to move between groups or places unobserved. What opportunities would be presented? To be helpful, by being unrecognized.
What I want to consider is the affordances of this new invisibility, and how it can be used to contribute to the common good.

The facilitators selected one piece from each workshopper for our Zoom ‘performance’ the final week. They chose my COVID poem, “Breathe.”

Open Participants, Syndicated

An economy of care

When I went to sleep last night I meant to write about ethics this morning. I woke up early and turned on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s “All in a Weekend” on CBC Radio with Sonali Karnick to hear her interviewing Judy Rebick about how women economists in Canada and around the world are transforming economics to focus more on social impact and an economy of care, as opposed to growth for its own sake.

Judy Rebick: Women Economists Changing Economics | All in a Weekend with Sonali Karnick | Live Radio

Ms. Rebick suggested viewing Mariana Mazzucato’s 2019 TED talk “What is economic value, and who creates it?” Ms Mazzucato points out that we’ve lost our way on the questions about what are the differences between value creation and value extraction, productive and unproductive activities.

She suggests we recognize the state as a positive economic force & questions the financialization of the economy. COVID has highlighted who the essential workers really are: healthcare, child & elder care workers (paid and unpaid), and food producers, transporters, and distributors.

Ms. Rebick then talks about Marjorie Griffin Cohen and other feminists and their theorizing a Care Economy. In their Rabble.ca article, “It’s 2021 and it’s time to care about care”, Mses. Cohen and Armstrong state “the conditions of work are the conditions of care” and recognize “the care infrastructure is the biggest employer in the [Canadian] economy, with the industrial sectors of health, social assistance and education accounting for at least 21 per cent of the total paid labour force” and that it “accounts for at least 12 per cent of the GDP, contributing more to the total income of the economy than sectors such as manufacturing, oil and gas, and finance.” They conclude that the Canadian government should provide universal care coverage so secure that it will become considered a right for residents of Canada. 

They then provide a link to “The Care Economy” statement by the Care Economy Initiative Team: Pat Armstrong, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Laurell Ritchie, Leah F. Vosko, and Armine Yalnizyan.

It states:  “Future budgets and public policies of all governments must address these core principles:

  1. Care, both paid and unpaid, is a fundamental component of our basic infrastructure. Paid care in health and education alone is a key engine of the economy, generating at least 12% of GDP and 21% of jobs. A well-functioning care economy is key to the functioning of all the other parts of the economy.
  1. A care economy includes those who need and those who provide care, both paid and unpaid, and recognizes that our care needs and care provision vary throughout life.
  2. Care is skilled work that requires ongoing skills development, appropriate compensation, and adequate supports. The conditions of work are the conditions of care.
  3. A care economy includes the entire range of health and education services, including child and elder care. It also includes other social infrastructure such as employment insurance, labour standards and their enforcement, immigration policies, and paid sick leave.
  4. A care economy requires public investment in public services to ensure equitable access to quality care. Public spending on social infrastructure is as critically important as building and maintaining our physical infrastructure.
  5. A care economy promotes inclusion when its design is rooted in a feminist, intersectional, anti-colonial, and anti-racist approach. (emphasis in original)”

The statement concludes “For the past year, our governments emphasized that we are all in this together. We would add that to get out of this together we must care for each other. We need federal leadership to carry these hard-earned pandemic lessons into a recovery by investing in a care economy that supports both those who need and those who provide care.”

I’ve been made aware of teaching and learning with care in higher education by the work of Drs. Mia Zamora, Maha Bali, and Lee Skallerup Bessette. Last summer I joined Drs. Zamora and Bali in their Digital Pedagogy Lab course “A Critical Digital Pedagogy Buffet” where we covered Community Building, Critical Open Pedagogy, Decolonial & Antiracist Pedagogy, and Ethical Ed Tech.

Placing the duty of care in education under the umbrella of an economy of care ties the concerns of the academy, workers and the public together. Creating an economy of care will require a restructuring of the economy to serve the needs of the many rather than the needs of the financial (1%) class. I’m looking forward to exploring these topics in the cMOOC “Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care.” Finding the political will to enact an economy of care is the larger project.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Saudade in Santa Fe

It’s been 20 years since the last time I was in Santa Fe. My mom was from New Mexico and we used to spend one month each summer visiting her parents in Silver City in the southwest corner of New Mexico. We traveled around visiting our many relatives and exploring the beauty of the landscape, so I often got to Santa Fe as a kid.
As an adult, I was fascinated by the history and culture, and visited Santa Fe as often as I could. This year, after the director of storycenter.org in Berkeley, California, suddenly moved to Santa Fe, I decided to attend Story Center’s first in-person workshop in nearly two years and visit its new home.
Coincidentally. I’m taking a class on intercultural communication and the week before the digital storytelling workshop we had been talking about words from other languages that have no direct translation into English.
I had used saudade as an example in my weekly essay. It’s a Portuguese/Brazilian word I had learned about while living in Half Moon Bay, California, which has a large Portuguese population (relatively) who still fish commercially. There is also a musical style associated with saudade: Fado (fate) is a haunting and slow vocal music performed world-wide.
Many have written about saudade and saudade culture. Being a seafaring nation, the Portuguese, as I understand them, long for their home land and at the same time their grandmothers long to see the grandchildren they may never meet. More than nostalgia, saudade is the constant presence of absence, a bittersweet state of desire for what once was or may never be.
I called the digital story I made at the “Stories in Motion” workshop “Saudade in Santa Fe.”

I hope you enjoy it.

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care

I’m looking forward to participating in Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care cMOOC created by Stephen Downes.
Join in the fun!
https://ethics.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm

My learning philosophy in a graphic I created. Click for more.

AIRT is Scots Gaelic word meaning direction. It is also an acronym for Appreciate, Include, Reciprocate. and Trust.
AIRT is Scots Gaelic word meaning direction

I’m interested in connectivism, personal learning networks, graphing my learning – both formal and informal, FOSS, and heutagogy. A retired craftsman, with five decades of experience unrecognized by higher further education, I have taken dozens of online courses, accredited and not. I’m particularly interested in how working class people can document, organize, and present their informal learning for assessment and college credit.

Last summer I attended Drs. Mia Zamora and Maha Bali’s Digital Pedagogy Lab course to learn more about their work on open education, ethics, and care. I’m looking forward learning with all the participants, growing a learning network, and creating open educational resources to be remixed and reused by anyone interested in open access to education.

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Picking Out The Highlights of The Scenery

Pickin’ out the highlights of the scenery. Some some little clouds they looked a… little … like… me.

Gord Downie, New Orleans is Sinking

So I’ve been just sitting here working away on an eCampusOntario funded project, with a multi-institutional team of people whom I like to refer to as radical pedagogues, and an unexpected treat has revealed itself. This post, I hope, will serve to reveal it even more.

But first, how about a little bit more context, yes? Ok then! The project itself is called something like Ontario Extend: Liberated Learners Edition. We have not actually settled on the name’s final form, but the idea is that it is Ontario Extend, But For Learners This Time. So, whereas Ontario Extend for Educators has the Empowered Educator Framework which includes modules in teaching, collaborating, Curating, Technology, Experimenting and SoTL, Ontario Extend for Learners has the Liberated Learner Framework including modules in learning, technology, collaborating, and navigating.

That multi-institutional team (Trent, Cambrian, Nipissing, Seneca, McMaster, Brock and Windsor) of rad pedagogues is oh say about 10% of the way to completing the development at this point. One piece of our plan, the one I think that we value the most, is to have students co-designing with us at every level of the development. So we hired a bunch of student co-designers to join in on the fun. Once the co-designers were in place, we had a bit of a realization: We have budget for subject matter experts. The subject matter is basically “How to Student”. Hence, the students ARE the subject matter experts. That’s their money. Let’s get it to them.

And thus was born the Liberated Learners Design Sprint. It ran in late June, and it invited students of all stripes to join us and we’d pay them tell us the stories of the “wicked problems” that they’d faced in their journey before/during/ after/between their programs. The sprint sessions were held at lunch time every day of the week. Monday was a more traditional kick off what-the-heck-is-this webinar where we told them what we were asking them to do, and then Tuesday to Thursday were opportunities for everyone to come and “try out” their stories. They would join breakout rooms aligned with whichever of the four modules their story best aligns and to tell them, and listen to the others. Student co-designers lead these rooms and these sessions really served us well in drawing out rich, authentic experiences. Friday was then a showcase event in which four people who were able to already complete their stories shared them to everyone. And then we asked everyone to have their written stories in to us by the end of the next week.

And now we have 110+ stories of the authentic issues learners have faced, that we’re working to align to and inform the content and activities that go into the modules that we will now begin to create. A rare few were some pretty weak submissions. Very short, not-well thought out. Bummer. But on the other end, and completely overshadowing the weak submissions, are these rich tales of the trials and tribulations of the learning journey that we would never have had a sniff at including into the program without first hiring student co-designers and then asking them to take the lead in the sprints.

Just look at some of the titles of the stories:

  • Anti-Social Sociology Major
  • Crayola markers got me through the first year of University
  • Captain Depresso
  • Teaching Incon-(ass)istant
  • Extra-Curricular Extremist
  • Fake It Till You Make It
  • The Social Caterpillar
  • zzZZzzzzZoom University
  • Fishing for 60’s

You know you want to read those stories! Well, as luck would have it, there is a place to see these stories coming out, one at a time over the next (many) weeks! I’ve had the Open Learner Patchbook sitting a little dormant for a while, but it dawned on me slowly that the stories we’d drawn out of these students are the same types of stories that the Open Learner Patchbook had originally invited, so I all of a sudden had a bunch of new fodder for the site!

So, while we comb through all the stories we’ll align them to and allow them to inform the upcoming Liberated Learner modules. But, we can also pick out the highlights of the scenery and share them out one at a time on the patchbook. We’ll pick a new one and work with its author to turn their stories into a post, and release them pretty much weekly for the next many weeks.

In fact, go have a look at the last two posts, which came from the design sprint:

Patch Twenty-Eight: Pressure Cooker

Patch Twenty Seven – Shoebox Shuffle

Oh and one final update. The Liberated Learner project was funded as an eCampusOntario Virtual Learning Strategy project. They are kicking off a series of community webinars with a student panel discussion about this very design sprint on July 22 ant noon Eastern. Wanna join in? Register here: https://vls.ecampusontario.ca/community-of-practice/

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

The network is the deliverable