When you talk about open, I feel like what you mean is “public” or even “collaborative.”

This feeling of digital nostos, a longing to return to a digital place where we felt at home, is as much predicated on the digital space, the platform that hosts communities, as the communities and the members that comprise that space. Our digital nostos is a place frozen in time, with people, networks, and interactions that occurred that may no longer be there.

As Sarah points out, “my Twitter handle is now as much my name as my given one”

Social media platforms are about capital and the enclosure of spaces that were never designed as a commons. Users built communities on these spaces, but the debts are being called in, and user displacement is only collateral damage.

the promise of portability left out the important element of accumulated social capital, such as followers and your digital image (i.e., reputation). While you could have moved some things, some intangibles were always going to be left behind.

It already Feels like I am going to war.

And it all starts with coffee on the porch swing, a form of time machine that keeps the day at bay for just a few minutes longer just by oscillating to the amplitude of our wind chimes.

hearing

Visible

laminar flow

September 24, 2021

we succeeded not just because we were dancing to the same tune, but we were constructing shared meaning and getting tuned to the same harmonic.

Structure informal activities that people can engage in if they want. These don’t have to take a lot of time to design – you might ask students to share something unique about where they are living, to tell others about their hobbies, pets, or family. You could ask them to do this by sharing a small image, a link to a website, or a forum post. These help participants to feel that they belong and can build a sense of community over time.

Think about the types of roles that might be needed to build a learning community: as well as you (the teacher), you might look for particularly active and/or knowledgeable students to become mentors.

Don’t force anyone to use a particular platform (other than official, institutionally supported ones). Your students might well have ethical objections to using a particular one. Respect those. Never require anyone to sign up to a (non-institutionally supported/“official”) platform in order to participate. Data rights are human rights.

songs of paradox

obtuse orbits

sip from the sun

History slips

coaching toward imperfection

designing for “connection”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/j1loyk2U6yU?rel=0

open as a design ideology is necessary but not sufficient in providing conditions for transformative professional learning

CLMOOC

“emergent, iterative, collaborative, critical.

So what do you think?

pretty

Communicative conversations

I can never remember the actual title of my thesis

40K tweets

CLMOOC

emergent and thus unplanned

creative playfulness

The online affinity network of Ravelry, and opportunities for online distribution and sales, vastly expanded Amy’sability to pursue a specialized interest, develop expertise, and connect this interest

Her passion for the fiber arts has even sparked a similar interest in her parents. Her mother has started to crochet,and her father has picked up knitting.

it is unlikely that she would have found a critical mass of knitters who are also Harry Potter fans

Ravelry

knitters

Harry Potter

Introduction

BOURDIEU

FREIRE

One consequence of this is that, when you can’t rely to much on structure that trust and empathy come more into play. In a very real sense you are only as good as your last refusal to betray someone’s trust.

The “O” for open in MOOC was essentially the only term that participant-designers held in high regard as they imagined the possibility of designing for emergence and responsiveness rather than predetermined outcomes.

open-ended invitations

National Writing Project’s Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC)

participatory design

open, online platforms, learning about connected learning

The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility

Diigo

I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language.

It would provideopportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions.

empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.

The proud dependence on school is gone

As long as the relations continue to be those between a supplier and a consumer, educational research will remain a circular process. It will amass scientific evidence in support of the need for more educational packages and for their more deadly accurate delivery to the individual customer, just as a certain brand of social science can prove the need for the delivery of more military treatment.

It should be obvious that even with schools of equal quality a poor child can seldom catch up with a rich one. Even if they attend equal schools and begin at the same age, poor children lack most of the educational opportunities which are casually available to the middle-class child. These advantages range from conversation and books in the home to vacation travel and a different sense of oneself, and apply, for the child who enjoys them, both in and out of school. So the poorer student will generally fall behind so long as he depends on school for advancement or learning. The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one's own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.

"People"' from the book Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

men

A guitar teacher, unlike a guitar, can be neither classified in a museum nor owned by the public nor rented from an educational warehouse. Teachers of skills belong to a different class of resources from objects needed to learn a skill.

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours. 2. Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as modelsfor others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached. 3. Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry. 4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.

The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares.

Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door.

Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma.

What counts is that education is assumed to be the result of an institutional process managed by the educator.

The free-school movement

Technology provides man with discretionary time he can fill either with making or with doing.

Schools are based upon the equally spurious hypothesis that learning is the result of curricular teaching.

Only by channeling dollars away from the institutions which now treat health, education, and welfare can the further impoverishment resulting from their disabling side effects be stopped.

deschooled milieu

imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting

School teaches us that instruction produces learning.

The school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.

Masters and students gathered to read the texts of other masters, now long dead, and the living words of the dead masters gave new perspective to the fallacies of the present day. The university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest

A degree always leaves its indelible price tag

Schools create jobs for schoolteachers

Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning.

idiots

Everyone learns how to live outside school. We learn to speak, to think, to love, to feel, to play, to curse, to politick, andto work without interference from a teacher.

I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.

Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple.

Potential skill teachers are never scarce for long because, on the one hand, demand for a skill grows only with its performance within a community and, on the other, a man exercising a skill could also teach it. But, at present, those using skills which are in demand and do require a human teacher are discouraged from sharing these skills with others. This is done either by teachers who monopolize the licenses or by unions which protect their trade interests. Skill centers which would be judged by customers on their results, and not on the personnel they employ or the process they use, would open unsuspected working opportunities, frequently even for those who are now considered unemployable. Indeed, there is no reason why such skill centers should not be at the work place itself, with the employer and his work force supplying instruction as well as jobs to those who choose to use their educational credits in this way.

But the fact that a great deal of learning even now seems to happen casually and as a by-product of some other activity defined as work or leisure does not mean that planned learning does not benefit from planned instruction and that both do not stand in need of improvement.

although faster if their parents pay attention to them

physical pollution

Their fanaticism in favor of school makes it possible to exploit them doubly: it permits increasing allocation of public funds for the education of a few and increasing acceptance of social control by the many.

The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.

The money was incompetently spent: different curricula, better administration, further concentration of the funds on the poor child, and more research are needed and would do the trick; or

yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these "disadvantaged" children.

the U.S. poor can count on a truant officer to return their children to school until they reach seventeen, or on a doctor to assign them to a hospital bed which costs sixty dollars per day-the equivalent of three months' income for a majority of the people in the world. But such care only makes them dependent on more treatment, and renders them increasingly incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities.

hidden curriculum

most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen

their improvement

Let me give, as an example of what I mean, a description of how an intellectual match might work in New York City. Each man, at any given moment and at a minimum price, could identify himself to a computer with his address and telephone number, indicating the book, article, film, or recording on which he seeks a partner for discussion. Within days he could receive by mail the list of others who recently had taken the same initiative. This list would enable him by telephone to arrange for a meeting with persons who initially would be known exclusively by the fact that they requested a dialogue about the same subject.

At a first meeting in a coffee shop, say, the partners might establish their identities by placing the book under discussion next to their cups.

The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.

IVAN ILLICH

There is currently a proposal on record which seems at first to make a great deal of sense. It has been prepared by Christopher Jencks of the Center for the Study of Public Policy and is sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity. It proposes to put educational "entitlements" or tuition grants into the hands of parents and students for expenditure in the schools of their choice.

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction.

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school

In the United States it would take eighty billion dollars per year to provide what educators regard as equal treatment for all in grammar and high school.

It is probably most intensely felt in U.S. cities. Nowhere else is poverty treated at greater cost. Nowhere else does the treatment of poverty produce so much dependence, anger, frustration, and further demands.

(6&! T%0*%0! S

!"$!B%&B&202!$&!B($!0'()4$*&#46!\0#$*$60:0#$2\!&%!$(*$*&#!;%4#$2!*#$&!$.0!.4#'2!&<!B4%0#$2!4#'!2$('0#$2!<&%!0+B0#'*$(%0!*#!$.0!2).&&62!&<!$.0*%!).&*)0K!7().!*#'*J*'(46!0#$*$60:0#$2!)&(6'!*#'00'!50!4#!*:B&%$4#$!2$0B!*#!$.0!%*;.$!'*%0)$*&#K

1&2$!604%#*#;!.4BB0#2!)42(466/O!4#'!0J0#!:&2$!*#$0#$*&#46!604%#*#;!*2!#&$!$.0!%02(6$!&<!B%&;%4::0'!*#2$%()$*&#

!20)&#'!:4Z&%!*66(2*&#!&#!I.*).!$.0!2).&&6!2/2$0:!%02$2!*2!$.4$!:&2$!604%#*#;!*2!$.0!%02(6$!&<!$04).*#;K

"#!$.0!L#*$0'!7$4$02!*$!I&(6'!$4S0!0*;.$/!5*66*&#!'&664%2!B0%!/04%!$&!B%&J*'0!I.4$!0'()4$&%2!%0;4%'!42!0P(46!$%04$:0#$!<&%!466!*#!;%4::4%!4#'!.*;.!2).&&6K!

$!*2!B%&5456/!:&2$!*#$0#206/!<06$!*#!LK7K!)*$*02K!]&I.0%0!0620!*2!B&J0%$/!$%04$0'!4$!;%04$0%!)&2

A hypothesis could be that LPPs are in part a result of participants multitasking and joining a variety of communities, being involved in them to the degrees that satisfy their own immediate goals.

An individual joined because of a course at university [Participant 18], and previous participation in a previous version of CLMOOC seemed to indicate motivation for keeping up a certain level of participation in CLMOOC 2016. The uniqueness of the course itself was another motivating factor. For instance, Participant 6 writes: “The change from ‘Course’ to ‘Collaboration’ for the final C was crucial. Everything that’s good in CLMOOC flows from truly embodying the deep meaning of that change. There have been other attempts – DS106, for example – but none were truly open and egalitarian the way CLMOOC has always been...”

if they are in read-only or consumption mode.

Feel part [of the community], but [they are] not sure [if they are] worthy” [Participant 16]. Another participant indicated that they “feel as though [they are] on the edge, where there is a central core of people who appear to know each other really well, and an enormous group like [them] dabbling around the edges” [Participant 13].

In addition, some participants have strong feelings about how they engage in using social media and this can result in them behaving as an LPP on some platforms.

that the main concern of lurkers appears to be a loss of privacy.

This might suggest a need for learners to have the freedom to lurk, and to determine for themselves what interactions are valuable, and which ones are not. Walker et al. (2010) suggest that in order for lurkers to modulate their behaviours and go from not posting to posting in the context of an online class, the instructor, or the facilitators of the class, needs to provide appropriate external motivators, in other words provide an answer to the common question of “what’s in it for me?”.

They further elaborate that lurkers have different motivations and behaviours as compared to individuals who are posters in a community.

this unquestioned assumption of non-participation

active participants

lurkers

“memorably active participants, moderately active participants”, and “lurking participants”

lurking is a complex behaviour

We then analysed the data by using social network and content analyses and interpreted the research findings using the concept Community of Practice, with the Pareto Principle used to delimit types of learner.

we used a mixed methods approach

When you talk about open, I feel like what you mean is “public” or even “collaborative.”

The ironies abound

he uses the computer as a key actor in the text, but it is all controlled by him.

"Teach the writer, then the writing, then the technology."

Troy Hicks frequently uses the words "intentional" and "deliberate" to highlight the need for writers to conscientiously think through composing digital texts.

Troy Hicks

What is the relationship between virtual learning spaces and the pedagogies being enacted? And what are students actually doing while they are learning anywhere, anytime?

Incorporating all of these modes and hybrids are Collectives where the crowd acts as a single user. In this circumstance, collectives organise learning through the use of algorithms, allowing the user some amount of control and autonomy.

Communities of Interest:

Communities of Practice

Groups are social forms where individuals deliberately join others with shared goals and identify with group norms and behaviours. Nets are social forms where the connections between individuals and sometimes clusters of individuals are what bind them together. Sets are social forms where people may have no knowledge of others in the set but are clustered by commonalities between them. This may lead to strong identification and trust in some cases, but not typically.

However, I wonder if the focus on anywhere, anytime overlooks the complexities of the pedagogies and practices in these spaces? The question that seems to get overlooked is what do the complexities within these spaces look like, how do the different roles and relationships change and what are influences and expectations on pedagogy and practice?

However, for most of us not in the US (or the UK), this vision has often signalled top-down, US-to-world, Anglo-oriented, decontextualized, culturally irrelevant, infrastructure-insensitive, and timezone-ignorant aspirations, even when the invitation for us to join in may be well-intentioned.

Who should I talk to next?

Go look at it now!

Read the post. It’s about seeing which student to student connections are there and seeing which student to student connections are NOT there

I’m thinking about the big picture of connections and community rather than the small, one-one conversations

se it to improve my podcasting ideas

Community Connections

Get on your feet and step outside to find and catch wild Pokémon. Explore cities and towns around where you live and even around the globe to capture as many Pokémon as you can. As you move around, your smartphone will vibrate to let you know you're near a Pokémon. Once you've encountered a Pokémon, take aim on your smartphone's touch screen and throw a Poké Ball to catch it. Be careful when you try to catch it, or it might run away! Also look for PokéStops located at interesting places, such as public art installations, historical markers, and monuments, where you can collect more Poké Balls and other items.

Now, if you are me? You were moved by that. And I can explain why. Because I played a lot of Ingress in a major city. I got to see people make the most friends they've ever had in their life, learning what teamwork is, sometimes for the first time in their life. You become part of a massive positive feelings engine. It's a great game. Yes, it's technical as hell. But it's so great. And you meet so many new people. I can't even begin to count how many Ingress marriages there have been. 7 milllion active players all over the world. That's Blizzard Entertainment level numbers. Now, Imagine how well something that isn't technical that's tied to one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time is going to do.

Start by admitting that it exists, then begin to develop simple, easy to use ways to tap into the flow or to use existing channels (social media, email, online communities) to do so.  If we don’t, then we still have the status quo with its secret backchannels and old boy/old girl networks.

I would love to know whether it could or already does constitute a separate path, a countervailing force within the establishment institution.

We are all potential hyperlocal policymakers and the adjacent possibility here is that fat and untapped channel of policymaking that could rise up from the everyday field of ‘classroom’ work.

Elite print still wins.

And I want to be able to trust them so I am so burdened with fact checking them.

In other words, this is a clarion trumpet blast for readers and writers to become expert readers and writers. If this is not a supreme justification for liberal arts principles and values I don’t know what is.

I came across this in my RSS feed (Inoreader) and could not help but see adjacent possibilities flash before me. Duncan Green makes an open invitation to anyone out there who could be seen as big time, informal policy experts. I see his blog post as a call to our students at university (and younger) to become expert in at least some aspect of their discipline (or their lives) as it applies to social policy.

Teachers ought to seek out ways to engage students by finding educative uses for both spaces, especially when those spaces can converge on a single project and then expand to share that experience with a broad audience. If we want authenticity from our students, we need to take authentic risks that allow student voices to prevail.

Watching and listening and reading gave me some insights into my students that I may have missed otherwise. The quieter students wrote more than I expected, and the students who seemed disinterested in class seemed to open up in this creative space. I didn’t have to tell any students to be respectful of ideas or their peers; students governed themselves in a surprisingly egalitarian way.

A second Google Doc contained the story as it emerged without commentary or multiple voices.

paper storyboard

The comments section buzzed with ideas and then some brave souls started brainstorming on the document itself.

I used the comments feature of Google Docs to ask questions.

Many students today move fluidly between digital and physical spaces, but not all.

It began with a blank Google Doc.

When trade is introduced, some people will be able to accumulate "capital" much more quickly. And the players who will benefit the most will be those with wealth -- the real-world funds to buy in-game items to get more Pokémon -- and the connections to trade them.

“Justice issues are huge,” says Castronova. “As a game player, nothing is more frustrating to me than to go into this environment where everyone is going to start out completely the same, and then you find out someone is getting ahead because their dad is a dentist.”

In China, perhaps 100,000 people worked farming virtual gold and selling it for real money in World of Warcraft, one of the world’s biggest online games. Many games ban the sale of in-game items for real money, but it can happen anyway in black markets.

“A multiplayer game environment is a dream come true for an economist,” Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister who worked as an in-house economist for an online game, once said. “In a video game world, all the data are there. It's like being God, who has access to everything and to what every member of the social economy is doing.”

“Every economic theory that’s true from the history of economics is true inside game economies,” Castronova said. That means that researchers can use economic theories to explain what's happening in a game, as well as use games to test such theories. Games may seem unrealistic, Castronova says, but “a rat maze is also not realistic, but you learn a lot about cognition through rat mazes.

But for now, it’s even easier to imagine getting just a little tired of children who’d rather hunt Zubats than enjoy a zoo.

For some families, the hunt has already begun to take over their travels — encouraging kids to walk and hike further, yes, but will they remember seeing the White House, or the Pokémon at its gates? On a positive note, Mr. Rohrs sees a future where the technology could be used to enhance our destinations “It’s easy to imagine a hunt for the great authors of London,” he said, rather than Pokémon.

His family loves to walk together outdoors. “Now you add this new wrinkle,” in the form of a game that may be more compelling than the conversation that forges bonds among them. “You have to ask,” said Dr. Freed, “will this facilitate that connection?”

“My 18-year-old and his friends walked and biked 25 plus miles in two days, outside, in the heat and rain,” said Lisa Romeo, a mother of two who lives in Cedar Grove, N.J. Phil LeClare of Salem, Mass., said that after three days of Pokémon Go while on vacation in Maine, his 11-year-old son proudly said that he’d walked 30 miles. Along with the stories of calories burned come the benefits of unexpected family time. The real-world component of walking and hunting for the creatures seems to make playing Pokémon Go alone unappealing. Instead, even teenagers are inviting siblings and parents along. Add in the likelihood of meeting other players at Poké-stops, and the game begins to feel like a social event.

Even Google couldn’t make Ingress work without reskinning it as Pokémon. And while Pokémon is popular and basically harmless, the alternating reality it offers is still that of a branded, licensed, kiddie cock-fighting fantasy. Even if paranoia fiction is aesthetically facile and retrograde, and even if location-based entertainment need not be serious and political, there’s still something fundamentally revolting about celebrating the Pokémonization of the globe as the ultimate realization of the merged social and technological potential of modern life.

It’s a brand new discussion we have here. Which has the greater effect on literacy: the method-and-the-text, or the affective quality of the relationship between the teacher and the taught? My hunch is the latter: that the emotional interplay between teacher and taught may one day prove to be the most important factor in the teaching of reading and writing. Needless to say, I have no quantitative research to back my claims, only stories. Many stories.

Wonder is a black box. Technology won't save us other than to amplify our screams.

Glumly I went back to my unproductive survey through the telescope. The esker remained deserted. The hot sand began sending up heat waves which increased my eyestrain. By 2:00 p.m. I had given up hope. There seemed no further point in concealment, so I got stiffly to my feet and prepared to relieve myself. Now it is a remarkable fact that a man, even though he may be alone in a small boat in mid-ocean, or isolated in the midst of the trackless forest, finds that the very process of unbuttoning causes him to become peculiarly sensitive to the possibility that he may be under observation. At this critical juncture none but the most self-assured of men, no matter how certain he may be of his privacy, can refrain from casting a surreptitious glance around to reassure himself that he really is alone. To say I was chagrined to discover I was not alone would be an understatement; for sitting directly behind me, and not twenty yards away, were the missing wolves. They appeared to be quite relaxed and comfortable, as if they had been sitting there behind my back for hours. The big male seemed a trifle bored; but the female's gaze was fixed on me with what I took to be an expression of unabashed and even prurient curiosity.

People could make of it what they wanted and they could look at it as a future way to share. Let us not make a big deal about learning. Let’s not make it so ponderous and heavy. It needs to be lightweight, flexible, and nimble.

sandbox

marginalia

my main purpose here is to model the work of close reading to my students and to show how you must pay homage to the reading in order to do justice to the writing.

out of last week’s work with memes/gifs and political candidates arose classroom work with… annotation and memes and gifs.

There’s a lot of truth to that. Female bloggers have a long, sordid history of harassment on the Web—Gamergate is just the tip of the iceberg—and while Genius-enabled annotations could theoretically bring a larger audience to unknown writers, some denizens of the Internet are not seeking to broaden their page views; they actively wish to stay in their own circles, avoiding potential readers who are likely to be unfriendly.

“But your blog is public! People can comment on Twitter, Fb etc; Genius is in its simplest form a more efficient tool for this.”

In those decades everyone, white and black, had jobs at the docks and the plants and the mills, and the middle class was prosperous and unions were strong and income taxes were high and inequality was low. But then those jobs were automated or went to the Carolinas and Mexico and China, and the middle-class and unions went soft and taxes went down and inequality shot up, and because of all this the cities declined.

$100,000 loan from the Baltimore Development Corporation to help cover the cost of the shuttle

“As much attention as we give to the trials of the officers who are charged with killing Freddie Gray, we should give to a decision that implicates 10,000 construction jobs and billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in Baltimore that were eliminated in a single day by a single decision made by a single person.

“What happens to the trees we were planning, the other designs? Who do we talk to?”

And Richard Chambers, a local transit activist, rose to demand why the cancellation of such a major project wasn’t being challenged from a civil rights perspective. He pointed out that the state legislature had voted on an increase in the gas tax with the understanding that it would be used for a transit project to benefit low-income minorities in Baltimore. Instead, the money was now being entirely redirected to road projects in wealthier, mostly white outlying areas. “It’s almost unprecedented,” he said. “This is a ‘fuck you’ to Baltimore.”

Not only were the gleaming new buildings — largely focused on stimulating tourism — not doing much to benefit those in nearby West and East Baltimore; the subsidized projects were, quite literally, capitalizing on their struggles: their private sector developers were qualifying for tax breaks from the city on the grounds that things were so bleak so close by that the only way these new projects could succeed was with public subsidy. The men who ran the Baltimore Development Corporation had a phrase for it: “the Baltimore arithmetic.”

When students got out of Frederick Douglass High and other nearby schools that Monday afternoon, just after Freddie Gray’s memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting, mobilized by social media rumors

Any fallout Hogan might have risked from his decision was quickly overshadowed by the events of the city’s terrible summer of 2015

the Democratic former mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, was more supportive, but over his two terms he didn’t act with much urgency — as much as he championed his city, he’d never focused closely on its inadequate public transit, and the NIMBY resistance to the line in Canton had given him pause

Schmoke’s efforts to de-escalate the campaign were the partial inspiration for the “Hamsterdam” episodes of The Wire, described by one commentator as its “bravest and most radical story line.

In these precincts, an air of liberal concern for the rest of the city predominated — these residents were, after all, willing to pay far higher taxes than they would if they moved to the County. But the extremity of the gaps was undeniable: life expectancy in Roland Park was twenty years longer than in West Baltimore neighborhoods like Sandtown-Wincester or Harlem Park or Upton-Druid Heights.

“And once they get to school and maybe don’t have their homework and maybe haven’t had their breakfast, what’s the teacher’s reaction to that student?” Ifill said in an interview. “What’s our reaction as a society to those children? We talk about that mother, about people not doing their job. But we aren’t willing to follow the thread to that bus stop on Edmondson Avenue — to understand the larger problems in the context of transportation decisions over decades, in the context of why Baltimore doesn’t have a city-wide system.”

a bewildering scattering of lines that typically followed the old streetcar routes, comprehensible only to those with no alternative but to rely on them

Baltimore had unraveled — had been unraveling for decades, unspooling itself over a wide expanse of central Maryland