Tag Archives: #storycenter

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

Learn to edit Wikipedia

Join me at the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) in Berkeley, California, next Monday, January 15th at 6 pm

Learn to edit Wikipedia!

Bring your laptop and we will all sign into the online course and discuss the eventual creation of a WISR Wikipedia page.

Click on the flyer to enroll or download the flyer below.

Download pdf: Wikipedia_course_flyer pdf

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

California Sociological Association Annual Conference

Network Map of Nugan Hand Ltd private bank and connections by Mark Lombardi.

I was recently in Sacramento, California, at the annual meeting of the California Sociological Association. Two years ago I attended the meeting in Oakland, where I live. I again saw none of my sociology teachers or classmates from any of the four Peralta Community Colleges. I did run onto William Ochoa, a former colleague and Senator in the Associated Students of Laney (Community) College, now working on his Master’s degree in Sociology at Mills College in Oakland, California.

I attended all seven sessions of the two day conference including; the Popular Culture & New Technology panel, the Community College Roundtable, Critical Perspectives in Education, The 2016 Presidential Election Revisited panel, Making Sociology Matter, Social Movements and Sociology: the Big Picture. The panels included many interesting presentations and many I attended were student driven. The highlight for me was an unusual and memorable presentation by Frank Roberts from Mt. San Antonio Community College on his project to unify the major theories of sociology. The last session of the conference, there were only five attendees which allowed a lively and prolonged discussion.

PP slide by Frank Roberts

First Roberts mapped Donald Brown’s Anthropological catalog of 369 “Human Universals” traits to Robert Nisbet’s “Unit Ideas of Sociology” using an Excel spreadsheet. Balancing Nisbet’s conservative, community oriented approach, Roberts added sociological Agency to Community, Sacred, Authority, Status, Alienation units. This accounted for many personal and creative traits. Then Roberts mapped these six unit ideas to the three major sociological theories: Structural-Functionalism, Comfit Theory and Symbolic Internationalism. I imagine the resulting integration of sociological theories can be used to describe and possibly clarify many intersectional positions. This is an idea I will continue to reflect on and try to use in my future sociological studies.

The official theme of the California Sociological Association annual meeting was “A Legacy of Sociology”: the keynote presentation was “Who rules America?” by William Domhoff, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His latest work is as co-author of Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America? (Routledge 2018). Dr. Domhoff summarized his long career in researching America’s elite and focused on the rise of think tanks (and policy discussion groups) in influencing policy and politics. This corresponded with the waning of Marxist theorists’ influence in academia and resulted in a lessening of criticism of corporate influence. Dr. Domhoff didn’t mention Louis Powell’s 1971 memorandum for the American Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System” but I couldn’t help wondering how Dr. Domhoff would characterize its influence. He’s inspired me to read the book that started this line of inquiry, C. Wright Mill’s 1956 book The Power Elite. Researching the interlocking nature of corporate directors, first with excel spreadsheets and now with powerful computers running social network analysis software, Dr. Domhoff has tracked how corporate power has fragmented from being centered in banks to a more distributed system of endowed academic chairs, corporate funded policy groups and think tanks, foundations and emerging industries. Dr. Domhoff concluded optimistically; there’s a new wave of power structure researchers using larger databases and the final chapter of the story of “America’s Power Elite” has not been written.

Network Map of World Finance by Mark Lombardi

Open Participants, Syndicated

Why Open Matters

A global network of social media and open resources, including Liberal, Radical and Conservative educational “canons.” Remix by MCW

A retired American scientific glassblower, I started on my career journey at a California community college after I graduated from high school. On a whim I signed up for a glass class, the teacher was a ceramicist and designer who wanted to experiment with glass so we built the equipment, made the glass and learned together how to play with this fascinating material. I soon left college to learn more about glass. It never occurred to me to go to Alfred University like my teacher had, I sought out working glassblowers and made myself useful. Eventually I ended up in Silicon Valley making high intensity lamps and LASERs. I have worked with researchers, engineers and artists and no one ever asked if I had a college degree.

In the History of the Open University Lord Perry of Walton, OU’s first Vice Chancellor is quoted on his motivation to take the job of creating the open University in 1969:

“It wasn’t that I had any deep-seated urge to mitigate the miseries of the depressed adult; it was that I was persuaded that the standard of teaching in conventional universities was pretty deplorable. It suddenly struck me that if you could use the media and devise course materials that would work for students all by themselves, then inevitably you were bound to affect – for good – the standard of teaching in conventional universities. I believed that to be so important that it overrode almost everything else.”

Returning to a California community college during the Great Recession, I found that little had changed regarding the standard of teaching and mitigating the miseries of workers was not even on the agenda. Protecting the institution during a time of budget cuts along with the jobs of the faculty and staff were the highest priorities. Despite the fact adult learners make up nearly two thirds of California’s two million community college students, there are no programs to support the taxpayers that need to retrain during capitalism’s down cycles. Night and distance students fare even worse with financial aid offices, libraries, advisors and technical support staff that all work bankers hours.

I managed to graduate even after falling into the “Community College Trap” and am now designing my Individualized Studies Bachelor’s degree. As a distance student, I’m finding the same structural problems a the University as the community colleges. Open matters to me because I’ve learned to use other institutions, social media and the world wide web to gather the resources I need to learn what I choose. I intend to create an Open Heutagogy anyone with an data connection can use to gather free and open resources to create their own learning program. I think as the world economy continues to limp along and higher education divides into training for the masses and private education for the children of the elites, self directed learning will help the working class and those left behind learn what they need to build a diverse, sustainable and cooperative local economies. While the elites will still run the Universities and reproduce the managerial class to run the global economic and military empires, perhaps openness will help the rest of us survive.

Open Participants, Syndicated

My College Degree as a Digital Humanities Project

Digital Humanities by Craig Bellamy CC BY-NC-SA 2.0


I’m developing a new model for adult learners so they can avoid the experience I had while trying to improve my skills at a Community College. Combining Self-Directed Learning, Computational Thinking, Digital Pedagogy, Open Education and Open Social Scholarship theories with Open Education Resources (OER), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and ePortfolios, I intend to create a free platform for any adult learner to document and reflect on their diverse learning experiences. I think simplifying all these dense and often conflicting learning theories into an approach (Praxis) any adult student can use to design their own self-directed education pathway will be useful. (Heutagogy)

I’ve been working on these ideas for three years, starting with attending a presentation by faculty from Evergreen College in Washington on integrating individual courses’ homework assignments across institutional silos. That led me to eportfolios as a way to collect all types of evidence (digital objects) of learning. Learning about tagging and metadata for discoverability on the internets, I observed the need for a controlled metadata vocabulary to allow searches for emerging patterns. These new ways of looking at one’s learning has the potential to suggest new constructions of learning experiences and new areas of research.

I belong to the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) and have attended their conferences, including a session at this year’s 8th Annual Forum on Digital Learning and ePortfolios at the 2017 AAC&U conference in San Francisco. The ePortfolio Forum is jointly sponsored by AAC&U’s project, VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education; the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), the association of ePortfolio professionals; and the International Journal of ePortfolio (IjeP). At this year’s AAEEBL Conference I joined the Technology Special Interest Group and convinced them to take on my idea for an ePortfolio Ontology as their first project. I’ve also joined the Association for Learning Technology, the UK group to “advance education through increasing, exploring and disseminating knowledge in the field of Learning Technology for the benefit of the general public.”

The Hurley Information and Technology Convergence Center at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photo by MCW


I recently realized that my idea of ‘finishing a Bachelor’s degree while using Free and Open Source Software to create a learning eportfolio on my own domain and blogging about it in public’ is a Digital Humanities project. In 2016 I attended the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at the University of Mary Washington, VA, home of ds106 and the Domian of One’s Own initiative. I learned about UMW while attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, BC, where I took Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities from Jesse Stommel and Chris Friend. This year I took two courses during DHSI to support my project; ‘Open Access and Open Social Scholarship’ and ‘TEI and Metadata.’ That led me to explore metadata ‘triples’ which led to the concepts of graph databases and ‘faceted’ searches.

Lincoln as a boy reading at night. Library of Congress CollectionNow I want to learn how to integrate a FOSS graph database (Neo4j?) with FOSS curation tools (WP, Omeka, GitHub?) to utilize the power of humanities computing and the semantic web to document and reflect on my learning experiences. And then document my reflections and be able to do faceted searches of everything I’ve created together with everything I’ve curated into my database. I need to learn to appropriately tag all these digital objects with metadata so that they integrate seamlessly with the semantic web. Hopefully this can be automated to a large degree.

My plan is to structure my Metro State University’s College of Individualized Studies Bachelor’s degree as a Digital Humanities project using an eportfolio to document, reflect on and publish my learning. Which tagline do you like: Learning in Public or Learning Out Loud? Or suggest another.

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

In the Valley of Hearts’ Delight

Bronze bust of DeWissant by Auguste Rodin

 

I caught a ride to Stanford yesterday to discuss eportfolios with Dr. Helen Chen. We didn’t get a chance to talk at the recent Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) conference in Portland. My friend had an appointment at Stanford Hospital and being early for my meeting, I walked over to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. I wandered around the Rodin sculpture garden and then sat on the cafe patio to wait for the museum to open.

Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University

 

I signed into the free wifi and checked my phone to see if the orientation hold had been lifted on my account at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. One morning at the AAEEBL conference Paul Wasko had introduced me to Marcia Anderson, the director of Academic Advising in the College of Individualized Studies at Metro State. She encouraged me to apply that day in order to be enrolled for the fall semester. Metro State was founded in 1971 as a ‘University without Walls’ “serving adult students by recognizing demonstrated learning gained outside the classroom” while working toward their higher educational goals. I applied and during the one day I was home from Portland before leaving for a weekend training in LA, I went online and had my transcripts sent. From all of the eleven colleges I have attended!

Ocean Park No. 94 by Richard Diebenkorn

 

The email had arrived, inviting me to register for “Educational Philosophy & Planning” the foundation class all Individualized Studies students take to create their personal learning plan. I had been working with Jane Kreuger, my admissions advisor, and Marcia had contacted Dr. Tedder, the Chair of Individualized, Interdisciplinary and Life Long Learning in the College of Individualized Studies, and convinced him to enroll me in his already full class. I went to the website, selected the class (the override worked!), finished enrolling, went to the payment site and paid my fees. I still had five minutes before the museum opened so I called Jane and told her I was sitting on the Cantor Arts Center patio at Stanford and had successfully enrolled using my phone! It was Friday afternoon in Minnesota and classes begin the following Monday.

Glassblowers hand torch

 

I toured the main exhibit, Creativity on the Line: Design for the Corporate World, 1950–1975, and had lunch on the patio; a Cobb salad and iced tea. (only $20!) I was reminded by the planes overhead, that on Friday afternoons the private jets leave San Jose International Airport every ten or fifteen minutes. I then saw the Modern & Contemporary exhibit and some of the main collection, Object Lessons: Art & Its Histories, before meeting with Helen in her office in Wallenburg Hall.

Hoover Tower and Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University

 

We discussed my ‘controlled vocabulary (ontology) for eportfolios and the semantic web’ project (the reason I joined AAEEBL and went to the conference in Boston two years ago) and I shared that the AAEEBL Technology Special Interest Group had decided to take on this project. I also shared my newest project: creating a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) stack for any learner to have the tools to create a lifewide eportfolio, on their own domain, to collect their lifetimes of learning. It all come together after I learned about semantic triples in Beyond TEI: Metadata for Digital Humanities at the University of Victoria, BC, during this years’ Digital Humanities Summer Institute. But that’s another story. Helen asked if this had anything to do with “Linked Data”, so I took out my phone and showed her the picture I had taken earlier that morning.

Recent additions to book pile on my desk

 

As far as I can tell (I’ll never have a degree in Library and Information Science nor Computer and Information Systems), having an ontology and using semantic triples are the basis for the latest graph databases, being able to discover fellow researchers on the internet and structuring one’s eportfolio to take advantage of ‘faceted’ (semantic) searches. It’s my theory that creating a properly structured database for an eportfolio of one’s lifetime of learning projects and products can lead to perspectives only made possible by computing. These unique clusters of data should help generate the deep reflections that are central to eportfolios function of supporting lifewide learning.

High-intensity short arc mercury vapor lamps used in the production of computer chips

 

Aint digital technology amazing? I’m glad I spent most of my glassblowing career supporting California’s computer industry. I regret that the term ‘Silicon Valley’ is now being used in place of ‘predatory venture capital.’ What we workers created in Silicon Valley has linked together the entire world (with some areas and peoples yet to be connected). Workers are not responsible for how their products are used, nor who buys the companies we work for. Capitalist predation is a centuries old problem. I look forward to using these new technologies and sharing FOSS platforms with everyone, especially under served adult learners. It was a good day in the (former) Valley of Hearts’ Delight.

Seaweed by Georgia O’Keefe

Open Participants, Syndicated

Day 100 of the Trump Presidency

It took 100 days but President Trump finally spoke a truth. I don’t think he intended to be honest, so I made a 1 minute video to commemorate this milestone and the fact that in his first 100 days he accomplished exactly none of the things he promised during his campaign. Today’s speech will undoubtedly produce the same results.

 


Open Participants, Syndicated

Networked Narratives: Fair Use

The internet is down, again. Another annoying phone call, another appointment made. This time the technician found a connection problem outside my apartment and thus, no charge for the service call. After four months of international phone calls, emails, surveys and chats. Have I been talking to bots all this time? But that’s a different digital story…

This is my first attempt to reflect on the Digital Alchemy of Networked Narratives. On America’s Presidential Inauguration Day. Is this an omen? No, that would be digital augury and I’m interested in transformation, digital and otherwise.

That’s how I found the Center for Digital Storytelling, now StoryCenter, in Berkeley California. Learning to use story circles to explore my life and to increase my ability to listen with compassion has transformed me. Last week I had the honor to assist StoryCenter founder Joe Lambert teach a group of facilitators to continue story work in education, non-profits and social services.

 

In the same week I received the invitation to participate in netnarr, finished my Copyright for Educators & Librarians Certificate through Coursera (in anticipation of taking the new Creative Commons Certification class), and got an A in my Physical Geography class. It was a four week intersession online course that covered sixteen weeks of material. I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of academic fraud, but I’ll take the four units I need to finish my Associates degree in Sociology. Spring semester starts next week and I’m looking forward to my last SOC class, taught by my department chair; The Sociology of Death and Dying.

My main project this year is to finally create the structure for an eportfolio. I’ve been trying to understand how I can use one to document all my learning and experience. A retired scientific glassblower, I have so much experience to document that isn’t text based (implicit or tacit knowledge) that I don’t know where to begin. I’ve attended one AAEEBL conference, read several books and interviewed some portfolio users. Anyone else going to the AAEEBL Conference in Portland this year? My takeaway is that by building a digital portfolio (data base), one can reflect on their learning and experiences to make new connections and reach new understandings they didn’t realize at the time they were creating their digital artifacts. I look forward to including everything I make and learn while participating in Networked Narratives.

Long ago I set up my own domain. I tried blogging. No one cared, especially me, but I was just a cranky old returning Community College student pissed off at the Financial Aid Department. Lately, I’ve made many ds106 Daily Creates and cross posted them to my website, Twitter, Google+ and facebook. CogDog has inspired (shamed?) me to try and give proper attributions, but I’m still not sure if I’m tagging things in the best way. I know I’m not including the necessary metadata for the semantic web. (anyone else taking the Metadata Workshop at DHSI in Victoria this summer?) I’ve tried and abandoned all the other social media sites (who else has thousands of del.icio.us bookmarks and no followers?) with the same result, except facebook: Now I stay in touch with a half-sister I’ve never met because she found me on facebook.

The first thing I saw on facebook today was a reminder of my first ds106 post: Cow Punk. I love serendipity!

Punkwith mohawk feeding Scottish cow in Dalwhinnie, Scotland.

Dalwhinnie, Scotland Photograph by Jim Richardson
https://t.co/AmLSFcWa1M

 

I wasn’t sure it was my first post, so I googled how to search my twitter posts. In settings you ‘create archive’ which is emailed as a .zip file. Unzipping the archive you can view it many different ways, the easiest for me being through a browser. (Any JSON enthusiasts want to explain how that search works?) First I searched for #ds106: it wasn’t there. Harrumph (rhymes with Drumpf). How do I search my images to find which one was first? Google says just type modified: into the file explorer search box and files are automagically ordered by date. Then you can type a range after the colon if need be. There it is. I called it Cow Punk after the musical style popularized by The Beat Farmers, Lone Justice, Rank and File and X. I was born in Hollywood and lived in Whittier (home town of Richard M. Nixon) until I moved to the Bay Area. I included a link to Rank and File’s song/video “Ever see a sheep in a pork pie hat?” in my tweet. I was (hopefully) alluding to Scottish sheep (and cow) herders and their American cousins (cowboys) [should have left the typo ala CogDog *cowbots*], 60’s British Mods and today’s hipsters (pork pie hats), punks and edupunks. (google it)

It was my first post, why wasn’t it in my twitter archive? Doh! I started by playing with #western106, Alan Levine’s 2016 fork of #ds106. Back to search my twitter archive with #western106 and there it is! @ds106dc #tdc1472 #western106

A quick search of my gmail reminds me of the #tdc1472 prompt: “An old Western saying tells us not to approach a bull from the front, nor a horse from the rear. It also tells us not to approach a fool from either side. Make one image/drawing or several (like in a comic).” I just googled for an image I liked and downloaded it. Now, an image search of my tweet reminds me that I misappropriated a National Geographic picture from “30 Years in Pictures: Celebrate National Geographic Traveler’s first three decades with flashes from the past” It was from “”History in a Bottle,” a look at the Scottish Highlands—and its single malt whisky—that appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of Traveler.” Ooops. And I didn’t attribute the photograph as “Dalwhinnie, Scotland” by Jim Richardson. Since all I did was crop and reverse the image, I can’t even honestly claim it’s repurposed. In my Copyright for Educators & Librarians class I recently learned to go through the Four Factors used by the US courts:

Four factors of Fair Use law in US.

Nope, nope, nope, nope; this doesn’t augur well. My only defense is that I’m a student, a really old student. All I can do now is wait for a letter from the National Geographic and perhaps the Scotch Whisky Association. Good thing the Dalwhinnie Distillery isn’t a member. Ain’t google grand?

I’ve learned that I don’t have to do anything to secure my copyrights, so here are images I do have the right to use.  I took them on Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2016 while at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association annual conference. I didn’t get a signed release, but the young person was sitting on a public sidewalk so I’m not worried. He was a block away from Maisel’s Indian Trading Post, built in 1939. Visiting Maisel’s reminded me that I was 11 when I started working during summers in my aunt and uncle Pobar’s Chevron Service Station And Sawahu Trading Post in Organ, New Mexico, southwest of White Sands Missile Range and National Monument. That’s Maisel’s politically incorrect antique sign.

I didn’t see the obvious connection between the photos that afternoon on Central Avenue. Today while looking looking for Cow Punk it jumped out at me. And all I did was resize the originals, so now I’m reflecting on the reflections!

The night before President Trump’s Inauguration, there was thunder and lightening in Oakland, California. This is rare for the Bay Area (after taking GEOG1 I could explain why) and I took it as an inauspicious sign for living under the new regime. Last week I made a commemorative thing and I’ll use it to close my inaugural post. Look closely for the shadow. I’ve learned that what I see on my 4K monitor isn’t what everybody else sees, especially on their phones.

President Donald John Trump - with text Super Callous, Fragile Sexist, Extra Braggadocious. Triple chins in ornate gilt frame.
President Trump Inauguration January 20, 2017

 

 

 

Notes

“30 Years In Pictures: Celebrate National Geographic Traveler’s First Three Decades With Flashes From The Past.”. Traveler 2014. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.

“Augury”. En.wikipedia.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.

“Cowpunk”. En.wikipedia.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.

“Inauguration”. En.wikipedia.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 Jan. 2017.