When you talk about open, I feel like what you mean is “public” or even “collaborative.”
Comment by onewheeljoe: This is a conversation I heard as I worked with Karen Fasimpaur on various projects beginning with P2PU. She used to hold to a rigid conception of the word open that prevails in web design communities, before accepting more nuanced definitions of the word as she worked more with learners in open spaces.
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.
This is pretty fascinating to me ... thanks for surfacing this concept.
As Sarah points out, “my Twitter handle is now as much my name as my given one”
same here (I think), although my name predates my time on Twitter ...
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.
This is something we often forget - that it was never free and never really ours .. I wonder, though, if networked dispersed platforms like Mastodon -- places not run by a corporation -- will be different. I don't know.
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.
This is so true -- and while there has always been some talk about permanence on the web, the reality is that we forget so much of what we have done. Still, these are breadcrumbs of our past creative lives.
It already Feels like I am going to war.
Shred-mulch, or is it mulch shreds, multi-colored confetti fluttering to the ground. Spreading a blanket to feed, to enrich the soil that feeds us.
Ouch! A rigid bit of plastic, ripping a gash in the foot of the conqueror treading the ground.
I fear much less the war of massaging words on the page than the war to eradicate the “forever” toxins we, Homo Sapiens, have inflicted upon Mother Earth.
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.
Or the sweet stillness of a blushing sunset, the majesty of tall trees silhouetted against the falling dusk, the sound of a great horned owl announcing the beginning of her day.
Visible
Thank you to everyone conversing here, it is rich and rewarding to read and think about. It makes a new visibility, a new light on these words.
laminar flow
ripe for metaphor, smooth flow now twisting in eddies as frozen truths reach to see..not sure
September 24, 2021
This picture deserves to be a poem
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.
Community, creed and cultus
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.
Yes to informality! Informal, low-stakes opportunities can communicate that:
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.
I appreciate this notion of developing roles that participants can play in networked learning.
What roles do you start with? What roles do participants suggest? How can distributed leadership help monitor for whose voices are underrepresented, or who isn't able to access the learning or interaction?
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.
This is such a powerful idea that can be messy for the teacher, leader, or designer (I'll go with facilitator). What are some ways the facilitator can provide these choices and monitor the various channels?
As a learner and MOOC enthusiast, I love the opportunity for participant-to-participant interaction in various channels.
songs of paradox
Your lyrics
stretch the known,
into the unknown,
this heliosphere,
always our home
until the time of disintegration
when our songs get buried
as bones
obtuse orbits
Acute orbits, too,
the way my legs
fold into you, my dear,
the blankets tangled at our feet;
for when we connect, we speak,
complete
sip from the sun
By morning's first light,
when the Earth's forever orbit
brings us closer together,
we sip from the sun,
a drink of melted night
brewed from falling stars and
lost darkness
History slips
Margin notes
fill the gaps;
the pencil marks
of students, past,
grappling to ignore
the printed page
for beneath the gloss,
the people rage
coaching toward imperfection
interesting phrasing .. I like it .... certainly striving for the "imperfect" is not often what we hear in educational circles, is it? This is the other side of the coin of the standardized testing era we are in -- and also, the more true way of seeing learning as a process forward ...
designing for “connection”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/j1loyk2U6yU?rel=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1loyk2U6yU&feature=youtu.be
open as a design ideology is necessary but not sufficient in providing conditions for transformative professional learning
Important insight ... which points to some of the weaknesses in the whole MOOC wave that has sort of fallen apart because open was never enough for transformative practice ... I think ....
CLMOOC
“emergent, iterative, collaborative, critical.
This is the definition of CLMOOC that I recognise.
So what do you think?
Thanks for sharing ... this does sound like CLMOOC to me ...
pretty
pretty but not too pretty ... there's always a sense of "draft" in the work of the community ... I think it's important to articulate that most of CLMOOC is always "in process" and the reflection element is key to the experience, not the finished products ... I'm not sure if I am articulating what I am thinking ... It's a compliment to say CLMOOC always has some rough edges ...
Communicative conversations
I'm glad this element is surfacing ... sometimes, I feel like I get so wrapped up in the fun and creative work that I lose track of the meta-thinking of it all ... and how it might play out for students in classrooms (which is one of the aims of CLMOOC -- get educators into the field of play so they bring their students into the field of play).
I can never remember the actual title of my thesis
CLMOOC Name the Thesis Contest ....
40K tweets
Wow .... that's a lot of stuff ...
CLMOOC
Word Cloud from these words
emergent and thus unplanned
The "planning for the unexpected" is the best part of the CLMOOC experience (at least for me), and the most difficult, and requires facilitators to be ready to highlight an unexpected thread of conversation or creativity, and go with it, supporting both the initial spark and the map that suddenly appears.
creative playfulness
here is a key phrase, I think. If it's not playful, people won't engage. And if it's not creative, they won't continue. The first year of CLMOOC, this was a key conversation because we knew teachers in summer wanted to do something different, something fun, something interesting. All of the Make Cycles were designed with this in mind (in hopes that this ethos would then shift into classroom experiences later on for students)
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
While my gut reaction is not to monetize learning, this viewpoint of mine seems naive when you take a larger look at why people do what they do, and why finding economic success with creative endeavors is important.
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.
I find this interesting -- that the child's interest sparks the interest of the parents. I'd love to hear their story about what they saw unfolding with Amy and Ravelry.
it is unlikely that she would have found a critical mass of knitters who are also Harry Potter fans
This is the narrow element -- of finding others with your niche interest -- that makes online Affinity Networks potentially so powerful. It is also empowering to find others of your tribe when you didn't even know your tribe existed.
Ravelry
This is now the third or fourth reference to Ravelry that I have come across in the past month in terms of spaces that are incredibly supportive as Affinity Spaces for all newcomers and mentors. It's been referenced in Networked Narratives, and in DS106, and now here. I wonder what attributes Ravelry has that make it such a powerful experience for so many? And is it replicable?
knitters
Harry Potter
Introduction
Start annotation here ...
This is a way to annotate part of the book for CLMOOC book club. Go down about halfway and a first section is shared here.
BOURDIEU
I don't know who this is. So, I am wandering away for a bit to try to figure it out.
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.
This applies in classroom settings with teens and in online professional learning networks with adults who write about their work in public.
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.
I found this theory of action that I drafted for the consideration of participant facilitators. I would hesitate to say that it was the theory of action of CLMOOC, because our intention setting and planning was messier than this, but I remember it being well received, generating discourse across the planning team and being regarded as helpful. I clearly brought a working definition to the work evidenced by this draft.
open-ended invitations
This is an example of a specific place where designers can reflect on the design and the participation that resulted. Instead of asking if a MOOC achieved a utopian ideal that it never endeavored to, we can ask if the invitations were open-ended. We can ask if they still are.
National Writing Project’s Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC)
That little apostrophe holds a world in it. Who owns CLMOOC? I raised this question very early on in the many iterations of it. NWP paid the first couple of groups of facilitators. Does that mean they own it? Or is this more of an example of 'usufruct'--we all get the 'use of the fruit' of CLMOOC. The question of 'open' cannot be answered to my satisfaction until we know the answer to this. Personally, if any one entity owns it then the idea of participatory design is a bit of a hoax, perhaps a mass-delusion. All the overt levers of power and participation seem quite open. Maybe the progenitors should have issued a DNR order at the very beginning or even an agreed upon closing/sunset date?
participatory design
open, online platforms, learning about connected learning
I am okay with people calling places like Twitter and Google+ open in the ways they were used in clmooc. Are you? Can open learning happen on closed systems?
The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility
We welcome you to share thoughts and ideas as we come together and reflect on so many years of #clmooc Just remember to tag posts clmooc, plus any other tag you want
Diigo
I've never explored Diigo. My instinct would have been to use Canva.
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.
This seems like the fundamental question for this writing. But what is the 'mutual definition' that is assumed at this point?
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.
"empower all who want to share..." a great goal for all us us.
The proud dependence on school is gone
Hmmmmmm, not where I live. There is a significant focus on being in the "right" school district and reliance on sports.
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.
A scene from Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by JD Vance, has stuck with me. It was not about educational attainment, but social class, which I posit is intertwined with everything else in our lives. Vance was attending Yale Law School, and went to a dinner for soon-to-be graduates being wooed by a variety of law practices. As he surveyed the dining room, he was aghast at the proliferation of cutlery surrounding the dinner plates. In a panic, he went to the restroom and called his girlfriend to get the lowdown on cutlery protocol. As someone who comes from a working-class background, I totally identify with this scene. We are products not only of our access to quality education, but overall environment. I don't have magic answers to how to mitigate the chasm between classes, but I am convinced that most parents want their children to have lives that exceed the limitations (economic, educational, social) they have faced. How do we achieve this?
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.
autodidact noun au·to·di·dact \ ˌȯ-tō-ˈdī-ˌdakt , -dī-ˈ , -də-ˈ \ : a self-taught person
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them.
“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.” ― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
"People"' from the book Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
men
hard to get past this narrow gender descriptions ... even understanding the time period ...
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.
Even as he acknowledges the role of teacher, he then goes on to say, maybe teachers aren't needed at all (cassette tape replacements). He's really quite bitter about teachers, isn't he?
Remember this?
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.
Ok. Interesting, these mostly connect nicely with Connected Learning principles.
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.
This is at the heart of Connected Learning -- students following their own muse for academic exploration, using peers to guide thinking and tapping into mentors in the field to provide a path forward into inquiry.
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.
Her, too.
Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma.
Choice.
What counts is that education is assumed to be the result of an institutional process managed by the educator.
Teacher, Sage on the Stage.
The free-school movement
Technology provides man with discretionary time he can fill either with making or with doing.
Making vs. Doing seems like a false dichotomy here.
Schools are based upon the equally spurious hypothesis that learning is the result of curricular teaching.
I suspect this is his main thesis and argument.
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.
Did you know Illich invented the term "iatrogenesis", sickness induced by medical activity. Is there educational iatrogenesis. Yes. Anyone who teaches knows this is true. That is why it is so important to hand over the reins of learning to your students as soon as possible. As Blake noted in "Proverbs of Heaven and Hell", the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. This is why we 'unschooled' all of our children. Exactly why.
deschooled milieu
love the rhyme Sorry, can't help by add this just for the...giggles.
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
Teachers, doctors, government employees, police and military all believe they are more important than the workers who produce the wealth they consume with their lifetime jobs, lifetime health care and big pensions. Only working class life expectancy is declining.
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting
Another connection to Connected Learning: production-centered. You do it to learn it.
School teaches us that instruction produces learning.
True.
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.
Interesting ...
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
Here's a connection to Connected Learning ... of being academically orientated and of reaching out to those with knowledge, no matter the geographic distance, to gain more understanding of issues. The mentor element of master/student is still important and maybe thriving more with video conferencing and skyping and even youtube.
A degree always leaves its indelible price tag
I know he does not mean this literally, but with one kid in college and another on the way, I only see this literally. The cost of college in the US is staggering, and a huge barrier that no politician in the US takes on.
Connected Learning
Schools create jobs for schoolteachers
Hackles up now ... :) (of course, I have a biased view here, as a teacher)
Pupils have never credited teachers for most of their learning.
Really? I don't think so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAptLbNPZ5A and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV1mwXJhhWM and ...
idiots
Wow. Don't see this term anymore (thankfully), and feel startled to see it here.
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.
Here is probably another connection to Connected Learning -- although I would still argue that a teacher's role is important. But, the "interest-powered" strand -- not the studying for the test -- is what can motivate learners. School has a role (sorry Ivan) but it is balanced with the interest and needs of the learner. And does not need to happen in school.
I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.
Lots in there ... lots of confined space ...
Matching people according to their interest in a particular title is radically simple.
But ... but ... can lead to echo chamber effect ... we only hear what we want to hear from people who think like us.
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.
I read this as vocational education? Is that right? I think our society -- here in US -- has devalued vocational training schools (my wife teaches at one), and I wish there was a better balance between the academic high schools and the vocational/tech high schools. And I wish there was more overlap between the two. Everyone needs more skills-based hands-on learning experiences (see: Maker Movement) and everyone needs challenging academic explorations.
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.
Exactly. How can CLMooc and DS106 help us to improve formal learning
although faster if their parents pay attention to them
This is important, though. It's not that there is no role for a teacher even in casual learning.
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.
"think rich and live poor" -- I thought this was a great line, until I realized that I don't think like "rich" people-- I don't have the knowledge and resources they do; I live under the knowledge and resources of the middle class, and that's not the same thinking.
Is this the new policy in the US --- education of a few and control of many? [school to prison pipeline?]
The poor need funds to enable them to learn, not to get certified for the treatment of their alleged disproportionate deficiencies.
How do you unpack this whole paragraph? So, fortunately for my students who lack the experiences of most middle class children, many also have rich experiences in their cultural and historical past, in providing for their families through hunting and fishing, in caring for their elders first. They have knowledge most don't. Unfortunately, lack of opportunities for jobs and easy access to the negatives of society hinder healthy choices. But again, this again focuses on the learning goals and agency of each learner.
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
exactly: these are the "mandates" that the top-down "experts" demand, yet it is the local that knows the students.
yet no significant improvement can be detected in the learning of these "disadvantaged" children.
What is the measurement? And we know school is not the solution to the situation outside of school that keeps people from improving. This goes back to my first comment in this stream. I think where this could be heading is that the local communities need to be more active in developing their communities-- accepting and open communities.
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.
What am I missing here? The poor shouldn't receive health care? Going to the doctor makes you more dependent on the doctor? People aren't helping each other on what they can in their communities?
hidden curriculum
My classes often discussed the "hidden rules" of how the world works. As a minority, my students know the rules are not the same for everyone---yet, we can understand and work around hidden rules to succeed.
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
Hmmm. Looking at this statement that wants the opposite of institutionalization [yet the next sentence still says "create institutions"] but in today's American political world, the values of acceptance and tolerance are thrown out; the policies of discrimination and fear-mongering are implemented against noncitizen and "the others" in dehumanizing efforts to elevate a certain group. So, will this paper offer a way to counter this? Is this what other countries must do to maintain an open, accepting, peaceful society? [Sorry to bring this up, but I just read about ICE and Greyhound collaborating without warrants to arrest human beings. ICE is operating on an institutional change against humanity.]
their improvement
My initial thoughts in this paragraph is back to "you get out what you put in" and "put in for what you want and need." So, though the institution has one goal, the individual participates for his/her own goals. Unfortunately, the measurement of success is for the institution's goals, despite the individual goals, and so that creates a seeming lack of success and, therefore, mandates for improvement that then change the institution's focus and the ability for the individual to meet his/her goals.
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.
The blog post promoting this reading asks a question I like:
How might CLMOOC be an answer to Illich’s critique? Are there other answers?
The professional learning experiment he describes in this paragraph has been taken up in a way by CLMOOC and others leveraging hypothes.is. The CLMOOC community's interest in CL principles constitutes his "intellectual match." The discussion we're having here in the margins is also further distributed across email inboxes when we reply to each other. Discussion might also take place in synchronous webinars if we choose to organize them.
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.
This f2f meetup is an important notion to consider. The affordances of the web and the digital footprint innovative educators leave behind as an OER is key to the specific learning opportunity we're engaged in here in the margins.
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.
Also
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.
Early Betsy DeVos? I have found that School Choice here in my region happens at the detriment of the public schools, since money follows kids, leaving the urban schools struggling even more to keep up as white families move their kids to Charter Schools.
Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction.
I wonder how the digital age has either enforced or altered this statement. Are kids learning more others in social networks and platforms? Places where teachers are not?
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.
I wonder what this would be today?
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.
I suspect this is still true today -- 40 years or so after this was written. That's depressing.
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More here Paulo Freire
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Early Betsy DeVoss? I have found that School Choice here in my region happens at the detriment of the public schools, since money follows kids, leaving the urban schools struggling even more to keep up as white families move their kids to Charter Schools.
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I wonder how the digital age has either enforced or altered this statement. Are kids learning more others in social networks and platforms? Places where teachers are not?
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I wonder what this would be today?
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I suspect this is still true today -- 40 years or so after this was written. That's depressing.
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.
This paints a picture of a very active lurker who is a really active learner but inactive from a community participation perspective.
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...”
Collaboration
if they are in read-only or consumption mode.
These are really active labels for lurking which suggest that learning is likely occurring for these folks, which I believe to be true.
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].
These two points suggest to me that the informal tone and frequent posting of active contributors can raise a barrier to entry for some. The feeling that everyone knows each other is both concerning from an organizing perspective and a mark of strong community development. Hmmm....
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.
This section also indicates to me that the people surveyed had a level of familiarity with the digital tools required and that the distributed nature of #clmooc - the way it occurred across platforms- didn't limit participation. I wonder if that is a fair conclusion or an area that the survey didn't address?
that the main concern of lurkers appears to be a loss of privacy.
First time posters in #clmooc often reported nervousness or a lack of confidence in what they were posting. They didn't want to be contributing incorrectly.
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?”.
This is both a design consideration and an acknowledgement that all learners have agency and the ability to disengage and opt out. Based on my experience leading online work, and my interest in complexity theory, I think it might be useful to determine a set of "worst practices" for fostering community participation in order to establish an ethos for leaders and to allow for novel discovery, which the introduction of "best practices" can discourage.
They further elaborate that lurkers have different motivations and behaviours as compared to individuals who are posters in a community.
Understanding the motivations of learners is really vital. The digital footprint of online collaboration allows us to study interactions and ask questions about motivation.
this unquestioned assumption of non-participation
Agreed. I'm glad this research seeks to hear from them.
active participants
I'm interested in how the research defines "active." I'll be interested to find out if lurkers reject the notion that they are inactive as opposed to private, or locally networked.
lurkers
“memorably active participants, moderately active participants”, and “lurking participants”
They're active from the perspective of the network analyst or from the perspective of the active participant.
lurking is a complex behaviour
Therefore, you must probe, sense and respond to lead lurkers, per the Cynefin Framework.
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.
Pareto Principle
Community of Practice
we used a mixed methods approach
When you talk about open, I feel like what you mean is “public” or even “collaborative.”
This is a conversation I heard as I worked with Karen Fasimpaur on various projects beginning with P2PU. She used to hold to a rigid conception of the word open that prevails in web design communities, before accepting more nuanced definitions of the word as she worked more with learners in open spaces.
The ironies abound
Indeed. Yet. Yet I am more apt to read a book by Troy (and just about anyone, really) away from the technology. I don't think I am Old Skool, like that, but the seamlessness of an ebook connecting to media beyond the book have not yet captivated me as a reader (for the most part). Am I not a digital reader?
he uses the computer as a key actor in the text, but it is all controlled by him.
This is an interesting observation. "using the computer as a key actor" -- and yet, not losing the human agency behind the technology that creates the piece of "writing" (text,composition) that might transform it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
"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.
I think these two words -- intentional and deliberate -- guide how we should be teaching digital writing yet part of me, the one who identifies as a "digital writer," also wonders if "chance" and "experimentation" aren't key elements of how we discover what digital writing is. Is this the tension between the teacher (Students should know this .. and this ...) and the writer (I have something to say but I don't quite know how to say it ... yet ... so let me try this ... and this ...)
Troy Hicks
I just wanted to point folks to Troy's blog
Hello everyone .. as part of the CLMOOC/DigiWriMo Pop-Up Make Cycle, we thought it might be interesting to dive into this interview with Troy Hicks about the nature of Digital Writing. Troy may join us in the margins, too.
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?
Key questions we should always be asking ourselves: I use Google Apps for Ed with my sixth graders ... but I don't always feel I do a great job with having them notice the entire ecosystem of Google. Partly, it's because I worry about putting all of our eggs into the Google basket (and that brings up privacy issues and OneToRuleThemAll concerns, and worries about PlugGetsPulled). So I feel as if I don't have a fully articulated sense of the ecosystems of online components of our writing and media spaces. Maybe I should ...
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.
Wondering about this ... I could use an example of what this looks like in practice ....
Communities of Interest:
Big fan of this idea ... we find our people (but try to avoid the echo chamber so that all our people don't necessarily think just like us)
Communities of Practice
These, in my experience, are often mandated in schools by top-down decisions. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn't work. You often don't have a choice. You meet with your COP.
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.
Intrigued by places where these overlap, too. And you have me wondering about where CLMOOC fits? Digiwrimo? Rhizo? My colleagues at school? A twitter hashtag as place for connection?
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?
Excellent probing question -- one we may be taking for granted? I'm not sure. But I appreciate the deeper look here at what we not just call these clusters of peeps but how different variations of those clusters may provide different opportunities ... and how we often dip our toes into various elements without wondering what each brings to the table.
Hmm .. page notes? I guess I would note that this page is a post about digital writing. Or not. It's a debate playing out in the margins of the post. Karen kindly represented some interesting criticisms of digital writing.
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.
I need to bookmark this sentence and remember it anytime I am involved in some open learning system. Thank you for expressing this in strong terms.
Who should I talk to next?
Looks like it's been happening right here ...
Go look at it now!
You mean, literally, right?
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 would be very careful here. I am not suggesting that you not do this. Do it! Be aware of the unknown unknowns that lurk in every one of these visualizations. This is my grain of salt lecture, sorries. What is revealed is amazing and lulls us into the bias of WYSIWYG. I just listened to a grand podcast on Radiolab called from "Tree to Shining Tree" It is a must listen in order to recalibrate our hubris meters. You will love it and I think it is a way to leaven the work you are contemplating here. I look forward to hearing more.
I’m thinking about the big picture of connections and community rather than the small, one-one conversations
Nice.
se it to improve my podcasting ideas
been wanting to do some podcasting myself, don't know how to start, especially don't know how to carry forth after the first one.
Community Connections
Week Three theme for #clmooc
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.
How is this similar to geocaching? I just learned to geocache a couple of days ago and this feels very similar. While I bring background knowledge about geocaching, mobile phones and the Pokemon card game, Hailey brings deep knowledge of the card game, the tv show and other video games. She has also had thousands of conversations at school- mostly with boys- about Pokemon. She brings deep background about the mythology and backstory.
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.
This type of commentary by someone who saw #PokemonGO's potential while playing Ingress leads me to think about the concept of Reading Ladders.
PokemonGO might be higher on the metaphorical ladder because the story is built on a popular mythical cartoon and video game.
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.
Acknowledgement, following by action.
I would love to know whether it could or already does constitute a separate path, a countervailing force within the establishment institution.
This morning Trump's tweets and Wikileaks' DNC email bombshell are in the news. Different than a separate path, these informal media become central to the popular media's efforts. As the 800 lb gorilla of informal media enters the room, he becomes central to the story at the same time he's throwing his weight around and taking up more and more space.
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.
The anytime, anywhere affordances of the web and digital tools mean that teachers who can't attend policy meetings can influence those conversations.
Students interested in civic opportunities that are geographically inaccessible can participate in social media channels where they can organize efforts and amplify messages.
Elite print still wins.
This characterization of a contest between the elite print vs informal publishing frames the issue poorly. Instead we need to understand how the informal meshes with the formal and how a savvy reader leverages both to gain knowledge. The rising importance of informal publishing has much to teach us if we don't get stuck looking at a non-existent horse race.
And I want to be able to trust them so I am so burdened with fact checking them.
What kinds of citations and resource citing earns this trust? This post, that embeds and responds to an article, makes plain Terry's thinking about a mainstream media article, which is sufficient to earn my trust. It is important to note that the original research is "gated," meaning that the LSE piece and this blog enjoy a life of circulation that the inaccessible formal research won't
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.
More than a call to become something, this recognizes the importance of these inexpert voices woven together in online networks. It is an acknowledgement of the power of informal writing and reading that education minimizes or maligns.
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.
Informal policy expert is a vital concept- it should accompany the rise of informal publishing and commentary. How can identity be understood as expertise?
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.
Concurrent docs? Hmmm.
paper storyboard
I love this storyboard! Funny, right? The paper planning process notes are something I want to dig into almost as much as the collaborative story itself ...
The comments section buzzed with ideas and then some brave souls started brainstorming on the document itself.
I am curious to know how many waited for the first words to appear before jumping in ....
I used the comments feature of Google Docs to ask questions.
This is where the margins are important -- sort of like here, I guess, we comment. Having two texts (and now three?) running concurrently is an intriguing thought, made more accessible with digital (but of course, you can do the sam with paper)
Many students today move fluidly between digital and physical spaces, but not all.
And, in fact, many students still need guidance on navigation of those spaces. They can find them ... but can they use them to the fullest limit? We still need teachers!
It began with a blank Google Doc.
As everything does ... the blank page ... the collaborative element is what changes this dynamic, though. We're, together, staring at the same blank document, and then ... words appear.
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.
This inequity already exists in the game with the in-app purchases for coins. I appreciate the article because it highlights inequity but I'm wondering how many authors are writing about the game without a familiarity of the game content.
“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.”
The competition dynamics right now are tuned for wealthy. Some questions I want to ask are: Who can play? Who can engage in the fitness aspects and goals? Who can collect cards and access the text complexity in the game?
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.
If systems replicate in games then they are also mirrored in games and can be studied through games.
“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.”
Also a dream come true for community health experts interested in prevention, and marketing experts, I would guess, interested in in-app purchases.
“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.
This speaks to the importance of surfacing those economic theories for learners playing a game.
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.
Why is this easier to imagine? Perhaps because we've been busy as a culture scolding youth for interest in media while we devour it. We should be translating the tipping point that Nintendo seems to have hit upon culturally and asking what they think. Teens in my neighborhood are interested in the cultural phenomenon and they're also excited to talk about Nintendo's motives. We've adopted such a deficit view of mobile game players, and smartphones that confronted with evidence that a game based on a Japanese cartoon is encouraging family activity, we imagine the worst.
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.
The bigger question is how will organizations that seek to educate a community respond to such a powerful example of AR? Will they experiment and iterate like the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas? Or, will they adopt a deficit view of players and seek evidence of players rushing past monuments in search of Pokemon? What answers will educators look for?
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?”
I'm a little dubious about the expert's response here. My daughters and I are talking about the game and learning together. The question I'd ask is, does this shared experience lead to engaged, interest-driven dialogue?
“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.
This is consistent with what I'm seeing with my own daughters and the other youth in my neighborhoods. They've definitely come out to play even in some oppressive heat. I appreciate this article's approach, which is a little more measured.
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.
I think this analogy of a kiddie cock-fighting fantasy lays the author's bias bare. Isn't it more helpful to notice the connection to Japanese culture? 
Godzilla's popularity explains global interest in monster vs monster fiction in a much more understanding way that doesn't deficitize fans.
Lastly, why spin Google and Ingress' iterations with the game as failures? Isn't it more important to understand the tipping point that resulted in global game craze?
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.
Such an important point. Educators can dig in their heels and engage in pedagogical debates about theory and approaches (see the reading wars) When we work with teachers, do we fall into place in these familiar battle lines and dutifully serve theory? When we pursue equity I think that requires that we think a lot about love.
Wonder is a black box. Technology won't save us other than to amplify our screams.
Technology won't save us, nor will the latent glue on an envelope that awakens and seals a message when we moisten it. What will save us is this groundbreaking practice of sharing seeds in the mail. What will save us is this landmark innovation of sharing a poem publicly and convening conversations in the digital margins. What will save us is tinkering in the interest of connecting. That taste on your tongue when you lick the glue on an envelope and send the toy you've hacked to someone you've never met? That taste is connection.
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.
This, a favorite scene from a favorite book, also sums up the experience of the teacher bent on control of students and sure that his instructional methods are air tight.
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.
There's a lot here, in this sentence that I like.
sandbox
I wonder how this step -- Hackpad -- went.
marginalia
like me, right now. There is something powerful about notes off in the margins, and the processing power of our brain to make those notes and read those notes ... and share those notes? Collective? Individual?
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.
This is a key component, right? Showing how one goes forth, but leaving enough space for students to do it their own way, too. Yeah. That's always the tricky balance or we risk automatons.
out of last week’s work with memes/gifs and political candidates arose classroom work with… annotation and memes and gifs.
This is what we want to have happening ... moving from discussion and sharing with teachers to the classroom stage.
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.
This is where the argument gets really thin. While the potential for abuse is there, this seems to be taking a logical leap or two. In this hypothetical, how did social annotation draw unfriendly readers to the blog post of the person who doesn't want their blog widely read? Is this scenario a reach?
“But your blog is public! People can comment on Twitter, Fb etc; Genius is in its simplest form a more efficient tool for this.”
This strikes me as a fair argument. No one is marking her blog directly, nor are they putting their comments where readers have to encounter them. Respectfully, this blogger sounds conflicted about writing in public space. 
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
