2,383 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2020
    1. And that’s where the real problem may lie—not with student semi-literacy but with that of their teachers.
    2. They face huge challenges,

      No shit. Just think of all the literacy modalities that someone younger has to deal with. Memes. Data visualizations. Tweets. Tiktok vids. Instagram stories. Digital annotation. Video annotation. YouTubes. Akkkk. Emojis. Gifs. Think of all the lateral communication modalities written, read, spoken that our students face daily. And the success with which most of them navigate these...well, it is extraordinary.

    1. what do we lose when we don’t read laterally, when we passively scroll information feeds and accept what seems to be true and dismiss what seems to be wrong.

      I read for me first. I read my way second. We all have reading blind spots. I think reading laterally reduces these blind spot, but it adds others. When I read people like Green it puts my back up and I say, "Who the fuck made you king of the lateral reading hill?" Another expert/sociopath rises up to keep me down. I teach to make people more powerful. Reading tools help, but the idiosyncratic ways we use those tools are grandly variably. I want it that way not one way.

  2. May 2020
    1. Thinking of these margins as a raised bed in a community garden. Share the wealth, the commonwealth.

    2. We have to gain skills and fluency in reading differently.

      It seems that many of my students have done exactly this:

      emojis memes vids for instagram, etc. FB Twitter

      All of these have a grammar and a lexicography and many constraints. Aren't they already doing this? Isn't this already much more difficult now than it ever was? Hence, another argument for reading differently bu perhaps one that applies equally fo teacher and learner.

    3. Changes to our reading habits are constantly happening and accelerating in comparison to previous speed of changes.
    4. Teaching Hyperlinked Reading and Writing (2008)

      Am I supposed to read all of these hyperlinks or are they supposed to show a mountain of posts as proof of "changes be happnin"?

    5. to read differently!

      Code switching literacy.

    1. Flexibility and adaptability

      Whose flexibility and adaptability?

    2. The safety of students, faculty and staff on our campuses is paramount.

      Finally, we get to what should be the first thing we read and see. Not a big red corpuscle/virus marketing icon. So very tone-dead.

    3. Should conditions dictate a departure from this focus, our plan includes contingencies that will help ensure the safety and well-being of our constituencies.

      Blatant--the tripwire is more deaths. If we have more deaths then we will contingencies for making people safe.<br> Roadmaps? Seriously? You need to go back to your literature classes and do a re-start on metaphor and its significance as a frame for shaping meaning. A roadmap is not the frame we have or want. Isn't that obvious?

    4. on-time, on-campus reopening this fall semester

      Start with this assumption and you end in tragedy. You start with humanity and its safety, then you ripple out to your mission statement, but not before you have secured everyone's safety.

    5. wku.edu/restart

      Did anyone do any UX work on this site before it went up? It tries to come across as expert, but all it seems to me to do is weigh in as heavy-handed and...useless. If you really wanted this to be interactive, a true back and forth, then the site might look more like a Discord or Slack site. I don't think WKU really wants feedback. If they did this site would be better and it would have been better all along. There is mos def NOT a crowdsourced document. This is a missive from on high written by a committee begging for us all to buy in or at least to not rock the boat. It is almost as if it was intended so that the virus of free thought and critique would not infect the university body politic.

    6. playbook

      The metaphor here is strikingly bad. We are not playing a game where COVID 19 is the opponent. We are talking about human lives not touchdowns. The brain is a metaphor machine. As such the metaphoric frames can control our entire response to a crisis. If we characterize it as a game with finite rules and goals, well, that's what we get. BE CAREFUL.

    7. remote instruction

      Not sure this is what the result was. It is important to realize that this shift was more a stagger. Anybody can stagger if their job depends upon it. And the authors (whoever they are) say that we learned something from our students. Was a study done? Surveys? Analysis? I have seen none of this. Without an indication of how they decided what is "clear", it is abundantly clear that this is an unproven assumption. No one I know actually looked at the blind spots revealed by the virus as it struck our campus.

    8. the institution rethought and temporarily reshaped almost every service we provide.

      The institution didn't do a thing any more than BigRed did a thing. People did things. And why this attempt to frame this as a heroic effort? Isn't this a waste of effort? Doesn't this reveal the sense of inadequacy that the authors are trying to hide? BTW, who the hell are the authors? What are their professions, fields, disciplines? What is their "cred"? What is their bias? Who gets paid? Cui bono?

    9. aggressive and unprecedented measures

      Is this assumption true?

    10. INTRODUCTION

      Is anyone else disturbed by the use of branding in this? What does BigRed, a fictional entity used solely for selling the image of WKU, have to do with something so deadly serious as COVID 19?

    1. Finding the Past in the Virus

      It is all intertwined like bamboo corms, all the stories from the past.

    2. I wonder what my Dad would say about all this right now?

      Maybe he would say, "Don'b be a hero."

    3. And, together in the silence, we thought about the future.

      My father ghosts in and out of my life like this. My wife was fixing our bird feeder the other day when she told me she lost the lock washer for the nut that held the whole thing together. I said, "I know just the thing." I went to my shop, tugged open a multi-tiered drawer with thousands of bits and bobs my father had scavenged for me. I found the washer and saw my Dad's satisfied smile as we both considered his real legacy to all of his children. I gave the washer to my wife and she said, "Thank you." I responded, "No, thank Dad." She smiled, knowing and grateful for his legacy.

    1. Questions (please add them as they occur to you).

      1. What are the long and short-term consequences of C19 on the ground level for folks on the inside? Folks on the outside? The country? The social fabric?
      2. What would you give up to fix it short term and long term.
    2. An aside: witness the superiority of digital annotation (@Hypothes_is style) to Twitter threads.

    3. Anyone who cares about education as an engine of social mobility and a tool to broaden our horizons needs to pay attention.

      Attendez! Certainmente. But the cliches need to be run through the chipper and used for mulching and fertilizing some better ideas.

    4. Even if states don’t shift cost burdens to students, rising unemployment and surging rates of poverty will take a toll on the most economically vulnerable student populations; we should expect to see higher than average drop-out rates.

      I predict lots of "set-aside" versus "drop out". Work then back to school then work then back to school. What we need to do is to be the place that recognizes this and makes sure that every re-entry is frictionless and...easy.

    5. There are countless unknowns that will impact the severity of the effects.

      Emergence. Unpredictable in its effects but predictably disruptive.

    6. “to decide on the core principles that should orient our judgments about what will bring about safety and happiness.”

      It doesn't appear that these values have won the day. Probably why Silicon Valley values have won the day. There is never a values vacuum--a post-truth consciousness.

    7. To give you a sense of scale, 25,814 undergraduate degrees were awarded in history in 2017, versus 488,539 in business and management.

      Five percent. What does that number even mean?

    8. After a decade of steady declines, the humanities’ share of all new bachelor’s degrees fell below 12 percent in 2015 for the first time

      What are the numbers at WKU? Should we ask the obvious market-centric questions like: how can we sell this degree better? Or should we just accept this as the zeitgeist, the river that we can really push against? I don't know, but I think that general education courses will need to become integrated into the other disciplines. I envision an English instructor like me being a team teacher with a business teacher and showing students how to do effect research or how to write a business plan that does what you want it to do. So, English teachers would be part of a real writing and reading across the curriculum program.

    9. Whatever the case, I usually feel depleted rather than energized at the end of an online class session.

      Zoom Enervation Syndrome (ZES). It is ZEST without the T. Low T zest? Maybe zoombombing is a necessary element to ZES, adding the T to it.

    10. MOOCs have been around for almost a decade.

      MIT's microcredential AI needs to be something we are thinking about as we add value to our courses. Why couldn't our Intro to Lit students get "added value" by taking a piece of a great online program like UPenn's ModPo MOOC. We might re-design Intro to Lit as a "buffet course" where we have main course work and then side dishes. Students would have to complete the main course stuff but they would have agency over the side dishes. I know, I know, how would I make it work. Probably by walking it through one semester and seeing what blindspots are revealed and what anti-fragilities exist.

    11. The lack of a personal touch may be one of the reasons Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have not lived up to their “revolutionary potential.”

      I think this is true, but I spent three years facilitating a MOOC for the NWP and all of my work was on building community with others. This is where we fail building community in Blackboard. We need folks whose job is to not only do pedagogy and content but others who are group facilitators who can encourage students to be facilitators. And I don't want to hear how that would cost time and money. I know it works and it is so hard to be teacher, facilitator, trainer all at once. That is one of the big changes I am contemplating for my embedded tutors in Fall 2020--training them in online facilitation.

    12. Personal interaction increases student satisfaction, and by extension, motivation to learn and succeed.” 

      I know this, but I have almost 120 online students this semester. I have encouraged them to use virtual office hours, but I am unwilling to have my whole life be available as a virtual office. That is a prescription for total burnout.

      This is why helping students create their own networks (of which I am part) is so important. And I wish these academics would stop using words like "robust" because WTF does that mean? Or my personal bugaboo, "rigor"

    13. On average fully online coursework has contributed to increasing gaps in educational success across socioeconomic groups while failing to improve affordability. Even when overall outcomes are similar for classroom and online courses, students with weak academic preparation and those from low-income and under-represented backgrounds consistently underperform in fully online environments.

      We need to teach everyone how to succeed online, especially ones who are ill-prepared for online college work. I am thinking low-income students coming from schools who do not have the resources to prepare students.

      One area I find disheartening for me is that students, especially under-resourced and thus underprepared students, don't know how to create their own online personal learning networks and don't know how to plug in to existing networks of peers and mentors and others who are doing what they like to do. This is a disastrous failure. I think my freshman comp class needs to emphasize how writing and reading can be tools to create these network and to extend them year-by-year as you go.

    14. As far as I can tell, there haven’t been any major research studies on OPEN SUNY, which is a shame because it’s a giant case study that could shed light on many significant questions, from student learning outcomes to the market value of an online degree.

      WKU needs to be part of consortia, state-wide or regional or national or all three, We would have the same kind of online footprint as OPEN SUNY.

    15. Unfortunately, watchdogs of the for-profit sector are already seeing signs that the “overaggressive recruitment of students by bad actors among for-profit colleges” witnessed in the Great Recession is returning in the coronavirus era.

      https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/17/new-recession-sets-stage-abuses-profits-critics-fear

      Vulnerable student populations. Aren't these the ones we have targeted for recruitment and retention the last several years? These are what Tressie Cottom identifies as "single mothers, downsized workers, veterans, people of color and people transitioning from welfare to work' I might add veterans, re-toolers, retired but not tired.<br> Will they be picked off like antelope from the herd by the for-profits? Yeah, I think so.

    1. To offer digital diplomas via blockchain, MIT partnered with Learning Machine to develop an open-source app for students called Blockcerts Wallet.

      Now Hylands Credentials.

    2. Originally designed for the digital currency Bitcoin, blockchain is essentially a public list of records, also known as blocks, that are joined together through cryptography. Each record—let’s say, a microcredential—is a time-stamped transaction between the student and institution. Once a record of the credential lives on the blockchain, it can not be altered (e.g. hacked or replicated) by other users without disrupting the entire blockchain system. In theory, that makes the record virtually impossible to remove or disrupt.

      IN a nutshell, blockchain

  3. Apr 2020
    1. There are plenty of good farmers out there

      I have no doubt that this is her generous attitude, but the biggest problem we face in the "grass community" is that the culture has been forcibly ripped out of agriculture. There are not plenty of good farmers out there by anyone's definition. I am not virtue signalling here. I don't count myself as a good farmer. Aubrey is a good farmer by almost any measure but especially by her mighty fine milk.

    2. you realize she is in constant motion

      The motion is of one piece with the quiet.

    3. only milk

      That word speaks volumes. It made me laugh out loud when I read it.

    4. relentless

      This is an abstraction for most folks or if not they only understand it in terms of their own work. Dairy relentless is different than sheep relentless is different than teacher relentless is different than..... The word is an abstraction masquerading as being one thing, having one meaning. Such is the foolishness of dictionaries and lexicography. I have known dairy relentless. It has a special feel that I know you have tried to capture in your photos, GG. I can guarantee you that while the physical aspect of this is important, it plays second fiddle to the concertmaster, the mind. If the mind can't handle it, no amount of metabolism and stamina is going to help. Your emphasis on focus (another one of the futile abstract words) is better, but there is also an un-focus that is absolutely crucial. None of this work happens without a balance and by-play between the two. In other words if I don't have a certain amount of what appears to be looking to the distance while I am also focused on checking on the health of each lamb, then I am not a good sheepfarmer.

    5. a good farmer is one that takes care of her animals and land.

      I love the word "usufruct" in regard to farming. It is a term from Roman law that asserts that we don't own the land, we only own the fruits. Anything that diminishes the usufruct is against the law. For me, that law in a natural one. I do think that modern agriculture is just as sick as everything else in our 'post-truth' world. Aubrey does it right. I try to do it right. Wendell Berry tells the story about how a good farmer walking out of field always scrapes their boots onto that field before they leave it. I live by that.

    6. raw milk

      One fine cold winter evening

      this city boy

      working on a dairy,

      walked down to the milk tank

      in the January dark.

      The electric lines

      sang and snapped

      in the cold

      as I greedily skimmed

      the cream from the tank

      for next morning's breakfast.

      Until that moment

      walking home

      I did not know one thing.

      I thought I knew many things,

      but they all had condensed l ike cream

      into one moment.

      Now I knew one thing

      and then I knew nothing.

    7. Family Cow Farm

      Love the name. Our farm doesn't even have a name. Here's a sheep-level view of one or our pastures. I see what you did here. Trying to inspire us to look at our own "farming" lives. Tricksy.

  4. Mar 2020
    1. I'm sure that this moment will be one of transformative change that will finally spur political policies to support more nimble educational practices. 

      I'm not so sure. COVID19 has revealed so many cracks in the system. Can we really build on top of that creacked foundation? We need to document the results of this stress test so that we can answer the question. I put my trust in nimble teachers first. NImble admins? Not so much.

    2. We (all the institutions) are so not ready for this.

      Call the empathy police. We are going to need them.

    3. labor intensive. 

      And imagination intensive, too. The idea of feedforward comes to mind

    4. there is no sound pedagogy in moving courses online quickly.

      This is quite a trope.

    5. I'm not afraid of the Coronavirus.

      I am. I am 65 with an impaired immune system. I am afraid.

    6. March 10, 2020,

      I took words from your previous paragraph to create a found poem. Just trying to honor your text with close reading.

      Impact.

      Ground Zero,

      a whirl,

      learning to cope and console,

      suspended,

      like dust

      in a new reality

      of not knowing.

      No airplanes.

      Nearly deserted highway

      Marking another forever day

      that changed

      the way

      we live.

      https://diigo.com/0h1y3v

    7. colleagues - college professors - on how to use Zoom

      I am slated to take a similar one from our unis Center for This and That Online.

    8. It's the end of the world as we know it...

      A slightly different cover of R.E.M.

      https://youtu.be/Az_ULnL2Cw8

    1. The rationale for calling an action cruel rather than merely describing it in more neutral terms is to tune into this evaluative aspect

      I like this sentence. Helpful.

    2. Thick concept

      https://youtu.be/KrAqO9F-12A Clear and succinct examples. Thanks.

    3. Meaning (semiotics)

      An interesting follow up link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(semiotics)

    4. a kind of concept that both has a significant degree of descriptive content and is evaluatively loaded

      Gonzo journalism

    1. worth listening to,

      evaluating

    2. t young and needs to learn from its present failures to build a better infrastructure

      What kind? Federated?

    3. learn from its present failures

      Learn from failures:

      What are these failures?

    4. The net i

      What are we calling "the net"?

    1. Where will we tag this?remind me.Where will we tag this?And with what?remind me 
    2. I've lost more than I ever found ... 
    3. we were us

      https://youtu.be/dlFEJ-Ctpjc

      Rearview crosses Railroad ties Oh, Hail Marys Friday nights Heartbeat baby Low-beam lights God, I miss when you were mine Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us Shotgun sunset A cool mint kiss Backseat promise Breaking it Floorboard feeling County lines God, I miss when you were mine Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us In a sleepy town, just jumping in Far too young to know that summers end We were us, we can't go back It's what it is, but God I miss Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us Every beat, every line, every word, every single time I just close my eyes and you're ridin shotgun You and me, baby, on the run I can feel your heartbeat, baby

    4. a thousand bees
    5. all is forever

      or not ever

    6. Eternityas Mobius
    1. "should"

      When someone says should

      I withdraw into my shell.

      I have so little power against

      the hierarchy

      that it is way safer to hide than fight.

      I have done way more

      for my students by hiding in plain sight

      than ever i have fighting

      the People of the Should.

    2. "teacher's role"

      Pre-sets. Teacher as pre-set. Pre-set to "teacherly". i sign. This future is not now nor is this now the future. No. Not liminal. No. Not thresholds. The Shakers built thresholds in their sleeping quarters so that each room could be swept clear every day. and the dustbin could be hung up on a wall peg next to the broom. Done. Dusted. Now Not in some God-forsaken future. God lives in the daily dirt. Forgiving and forlorn.

    3. Crystalizing.Hard.My jaw clenching,

      This is the source of my feeling and sensing and thinking and knowing.

    4. I feel something.

      It all starts now. Feel. Sense.

  5. Feb 2020
    1. horses of instruction

      I find myself being a "horse of instruction" way too often. I think it is fear and a lack of faith that make me not be the "tyger of wrath" more often. What are you?

    2. in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe

      Again, faith. We think of catastrophe as monolithic, but it has flaws, capacities for failure.

    3. a sublime generosity is coming toward you

      Such faith. Defines faith. This is the faith we need in the face of existential threat. This is the faith that will redeem us in Gaia's eyes.

    4. Eternity is in love the creations of time.

      Taken from Blake's "Proverbs of Hell", a mind-blowing read.. Here are a few more of my favs: What is now proved was once only imagin’d.

      The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

      The cut worm forgives the plough.

      In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

      Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

      No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

    1. Keep doing the Maui Habit in your life.

      I finally remembered to do it this morning. I remembered by practicing just before I went to bed, rehearsing what I would do in the morning. I will keep rehearsing and then gradually I will do the "Reverse Maui" where I say, "What a great day it has been!" "What a great night of sleep it is going to be!'

    2. like teaching FBM to someone)

      I am planning on doing this using app Explain Everything.

    3. biggest surprise from today to social with #TinyHabitsCourse

      There is a certain amount of goofing around--Fogg's words. That reminds me of Mimi Ito's acronym (HOMAGO) to which I add (SO): hanging out, messing about, geeking out, sharing out) A certain amount of experimentation and loose play in devising and implementing tiny habits.

    4. the session evaluation

      It would be super helpful to share the feedback you get from the Google Form with the class. I do this in my own classes and students seem to appreciate it.

    1. I was hoping that more people would read this, look through Wakelet, and be prompted to consider the role of ritual in their workplaces. Gonna keep looking at this myself, especially in my own life.

      https://youtu.be/yiKFYTFJ_kw

    2. I’m still on my island, but I’m less alone.

      Amen. Amen. Amen.

    3. seemed a bit lonely

      If you have ever watched any of my zeegas you know how important and sustaining the lighthouse metaphor is to my personal and creative life. You never know what ship you kept from being cast onto the rocks. All you know is that you were steadfast at best or as others even my own children regard me--obdurate, flint-headed. Folks like us have "keep on" hard-wired into our DNA. I can see damned well your lighthouse and I can only hope that our respective beams cross and amplify for all those sailing the dangerous seas.

    4. But they, too, ultimately moved on. As that happened new students and volunteers were always joining.

      I can gin up the empathy to imagine what you are saying. I feel it most when someone cares enough to drop back by, poke their head in my door and say thank you or just a kind hello. I can feel that and I know you can, too. Most people on the outside don't know who we are. They don't even know they are on the 'outside'. I say this more in sorrow than in anger. And I realize that the anger I feel is easier to feel than this sorrow. I wish I could keep the connections but the entire structure of school WORKS AGAINST LONG-TERM CONNECTION. And those caps are the anger in me, open and raw. The sorrow I feel is altogether something...different, harder to feel, internalized into depression if not dealt with. So...thanks for the mental health moment. I certainly need it.

    5. Does this feel like your experience?

      When you do this long enough, yes, this is exactly the deal. I have always wanted to keep up connections, find ways to create useful tools, say newsletters, for my grads, but the zero sum day thwarts all. Only enough hours in a day to do what I do? I teach five university general education courses this semester. Three of them are comp courses. That means roughly 700-800 papers, a smattering of unusual projects, and 3500-5000 pages of material to read and respond to. I work harder in one semester than I can be bothered to explain to most people (except you). Why not be bothered? Because they would not believe me or they simply could not urge forth the imagination to generate the empathy needed to understand what I do. Yet...I feel it is important work and hard to stay connected to the fine folk who raft down the river of my course. I am grateful for the question, Dan. Very grateful.

    6. each student could create their own Wakelet

      One of the important discoveries I have made about using tech in the classroom is that I can model its use, show how I use it, keep using it in a public way, and generally hope it gets adopted. What I know from the population of students I teach (underprepared, first generation, working class) is that they've got quite enough tech in their lives. They are terrific people but they have busy lives. No time for new stuff that doesn't solve an immediate problem. I get a few privileged students in my classes who do adopt tech readily. Classic case of the rich getting richer, seeing past the minimal amount of time and attention needed to adopt a tool like Wakelet. I have three or four students out of 65 who are adopting this tool in the way you so astutely suggest. I find the same issues with Vialogues and Hypothes.is in the classroom. Mostly I get respectful students who clearly are not buying what I am selling, hence my soft sell, a wing and a prayer.

      Maybe instead I should always be closing?

      https://youtu.be/AO_t7GtXO6w

  6. Jan 2020
    1. thankfully was mostly enhanced, rather than stamped out, by my education

      So a liberal education is one that doesn't stamp out curiosity? I would love to see the data supporting that students are incurious "these days". Ok, boomer?

    2. my day job at Willow Research 

      Who do these people work for? Who funds them?

    3. John Warner's blog: https://www.johnwarnerwriter.com/

    4. Here is his email address: johnw@mcsweeneys.net

    5. Here is some info about the author:

      "John Warner, writer/editor/speaker/consultant with more than twenty years of experience teaching college-level writing. His newest books are Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing. He is editor emeritus of McSweeney's Internet Tendency and you can read his weekly column at the Chicago Tribune. "

    6. writing process

      I love writing process posts. I am reminded of my work with high school students where I had them create "Instructables" to post on their blogs.

    1. chance

      A Chance Haiku

      Chance.

      A verb.

      A noun.

      The way in which things fall out.

      A cadence.

      A step.

    2. in their heads …

      This is the operative phrase. It is what I mean by providing the simplest set of initial conditions from which their heads and my head can merge and emerge. I am not doing my job if there isn't some initial confusion on both our parts.

    3. edges

      Mr. Margins...hmmm, great rapper/poet name.

    1. Four
    2. Three

      Might I suggest you listen to this discussion of 'trim tab' by Jeff Bridges? Start at 7:39 or listen to the whole thing.

    3. Two

      Are words the ultimate abstraction? Little porns made of pixels that when looked at closely enough cease to mean? One of my hopes for this poem was to honor Kevin's discoveries. Another was to sketch out further what one letter added can add. Another was to play further with his words--to play-gerize. I hate the word plagiarize. I just want to subvert the living eff out of it. To decolonize it from the inner margins of that moebius strip.

      Again, Mr. Margins raps true:

      Dystopia, it’s a word that's overused

      But that doesn’t mean its meaning doesn’t hold the truth

      The loneliest muse I’ve been beholden to you since the fallopian tubes

      My colloquial roots challenge colonial views reported as news

    4. One

      These are Kevin's words/worlds. I kinda fucked up the formatting. Forgiveness? Not permission.

      Here are phrases that come unbidden from these words into my world:

      the skin of history

      mindscrawl

      divisions come together

      ash and assignation

      echo lingers

      word crawl chiron

      mad voices

      crawling voices

      slicing voices

      skinned voices

      ashy voices

      bond of madness

      bonds of ash and possibility

      lingering bonds,

      echoes bound,

      assassination possibilities

      mad assassination

      mad assignation

    5. The reader can join in from the margins using Hypothes.is (or any other tool they wish. The headline and the word numbers in the post are open for business. Marginal and opened, 24-7-365. Or as Mr. Margins says,

      "When I get agitated, words are ma Ritalin If life’s a jotter then I’m living in the margins that I scribble in But sometimes when you’re on the outside looking in You get a better view of how the world spins."

      But make sure to

      Mind the gap when alighting from this place…

    6. I am 'splainin' from the margins.

      Best I can.

      "Splainin' from the margins.

      That's a plan.

      https://youtu.be/NahcSOrLCdQ

      Here's the lyrics.

    7. A Neo-Rhetoric

      I call it a neo-rhetoric in that I am an accursed academic at heart and sometimes jargon is worth having. I think that my job as a composition teacher has become super-constricted. I am a text guy left at the dock by the ship of digital rhetoric that is setting sail. I panic and race for the gangplank and leap. This is my leap--neo-rhetoric, image + text = whatevs.

    8. Image + Text > Every Little Thing

      I have been playing with image and text with my friend Kevin Hodgson. It is a game I wish I played more with all my friends. The point of using an equation here is as a metaphor. Like a gestalt...the sum of the parts is greater than the parts alone. I suppose that is the definition of meaning. The parts (in this case the words) take a flying leap off the cliff and on their way down they click together into meaning. Word becomes world. The word becomes flesh just by adding one letter.

    1. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

      Legislators of the Word

      Legislators of the World

    2. the influence which is moved not, but moves.

      Poets are the unmoved movers. God? At least demigods.

    3. the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;

      Poets not only don't understand the words that they use, but they don't feel what their trumpets are trying to inspire.

    4. the words which express what they understand not

      And poets have to live with the words they use, knowing full well that they really don't reveal understanding of the shadow that the future has cast on us.

    5. mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present

      The future casts its shadows upon the present. This is the opposite of what we normally think, Santayana's idea that those who do not study the shadows of the past are doomed to repeat those shadows. Nope. It is the future, what we want and what we want to happen, that casts those shadows on the past. Future shadows. Living in the backcast shadows ow the future.

    6. unapprehended inspiration;

      I think he means that the Muse (inspiration) cannot be captured but invited to appear.

    7. hierophants

      high priests of the word

    1. Here are ways to reach author Alex Corbitt:

      Twitter: https://twitter.com/alex_corbitt?lang=en

      Website: https://www.alexcorbitt.com/

    2. Super glad to have the author share here. It is risky business to make yourself vulnerable in a space like this. I am grateful.

    3. Together we can continue to revise resistance

      Robert Twigger has a great book about learning called "Micromastery"

      I am trying to figure out what the entry trick is for this discipline called "teen activism". This is some of what I am seeing, but these are not really entry tricks so much as abstractions.

      1.peer audience? 2.finding student capacity? 3.enlarging the field of possibility? 4.teaching for social justice? 5.navigate and negotiate with students? 6.research tools? 7.create media?

      Not being critical here, but I am looking for the entry level trick to get my students into activism much like Twigger explains here with cooking eggs as an entry trick into the discipline of cooking.

      Is this too big an ask?

    4. I began to sense that such rigid planning might inhibit deep student-centered inquiry.

      Good that you have both of these tools in your kit.

  7. Dec 2019
    1. “Who will say this was in vain?”Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015Tap to view full document

      the truth blazing a comet

      https://youtu.be/sJi41RWaTCs

    2. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action,
    3. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,”Bob Crowley | Lessons Learned interview | 8/3/2016Tap to view full document Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to
    4. “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,”Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015Tap to view full document Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”Douglas Lute | Lessons Learned interview | 2/20/2015Tap to view full document
    5. The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents
    1. Big bad quote:

      What the past quarter century has taught us is that there are five basic failure modes of commons-based strategies to construct more attractive forms of social relations.

      1. Companies and countries can usually sustain focused strategic efforts for longer and more actively than distributed networks of users. They can and do use these advantages strategically to re-centralize control over consumers and voters using mechanisms that are layered over or circumvent the still-open parts of the ecosystem. This is not true in all cases; Wikipedia has enough activated users that they are able to overcome concerted efforts to distort information; major FOSS development projects of core pieces of infrastructure beat out proprietary solutions. But, as Wikipedia approaches its 20th anniversary, we have to recognize that these major examples of successful distributed commons-based social production continue to be our prime examples. Time and again over the past twenty years we have seen companies spending money to harness relatively passive consumers— whether it is in carrier-operated WiFi networks that completely overshadowed the emergence of community wireless networks, or whether it is in the App economy that Apple introduced, based on the App Store model, that increasingly has displaced for most people the openstandards based personal computer running an openstandards based html browser. And in the past five years we have seen countries find ways of using the open nature of communications to engage in propaganda and manipulation, as well as to track dissidents and opponents by tapping into the surveillance capabilities that companies developed to continuously gather information about their users for commercial sale.
      2. Distributed social relations can themselves develop internal hierarchies and inequities (the Iron Law of Oligarchy), as current debates over Wikipedia and FOSS gender participation ratios and governance make clear. 5 See generally Julie E. Cohen, The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy, 31 PHILOSOPHY & TECH. 213 (2018). 83 A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UTOPIA? [Vol. 18

      3. Distributed open communications have provided enormous play for genuinely hateful and harmful behavior, such that we find ourselves seeking some power to control the worst abuses—the power of the platforms we want to hold democratically accountable, or the power of countries to regulate those platforms for us. As early as Gamergate, when networked gamers mobilized to harass and intimidate women: game developers and media critics, in the name of geek masculinity and free speech, and more prominently since the various elections of 2016, we have come to appreciate the extent to which fully distributed networks can underwrite abusive behavior.

      4. More fundamentally, as long as we live in a society where people have to make money to eat and keep a roof over their heads, markets produce stuff we really like and want. For all the broad complaints about Amazon, it has produced enormous consumer welfare. More directly, for all the romanticization of fan videos and remix, the emergence of subscription streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime has been a boon to professional video creators and underwritten a golden age of professional video entertainment and narrative, both fiction and nonfiction.
      5. States are still necessary to counter market power, provide public goods on a sustained and large-scale basis by using coercive taxing and spending powers, redistribute wealth, and provide basic social and economic security for the majority of the population.
  8. berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk
    1. The need to calculate and weigh and compromise, and adjust and test and experiment, and make mistakes and never reach certain answers or guarantees for rational action, must irritate those who seek for clear and final solutions, and yearn for unity and symmetry, and all-embracing answers. Nevertheless it seems to me the inescapable task of those who, with [216] Kant, believe that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
    2. he decline in power, wealth and influence of England has led to a preoccupation with sheer survival on the part of all political parties and institutions, and so diminished attention to the ultimate ends of life, and in particular to disagreement about them, without which politics cannot live;

      Politics cannot live without disagreement.

  9. Nov 2019
    1. Can we transform 'whiteness'? Or must it be cast off? What must we become if we are already 'white'? Is this just another example of impossible bootstrapping? Are we recognizing and acknowledging how difficult a prospect this is? I think the lessons of Daryl Davis are apt and practical.

      Are you familiar with Eli Meyerhoff's new book? Really 'noises up' my understanding of abolition. Maybe yours, too. I think this whole discussion tends toward what James Scott called "illegibility". It needs a whole lot more noising up and illegibility.

      [Who the hell am I kidding? No one will ever read this. Please prove me wrong.]

    1. kicking off
    2. Marking up a “text” is an act of love

      Marking up a text is:

      an act of empathy,

      caring for the future,

      sometimes angry,

      being open and vulnerable,

      keeping on

    1. the sheltered roof

      leaky roof

    2. picture dissolves

      into pixels?

    3. Nature is more complex than a picture

      Yes. The greatest understatement evuh!

    1. the king of jive capitalism

      You can dance

      You can jive

      Having the time of your life

      https://youtu.be/xFrGuyw1V8s

    2. curating my weekly newsletter
    3. I wanted to verify

      Yes, it does still ring true for me. Truer as I think on it.

    1. Fingers caress these holes, torn, of this blanket, worn; She threads time like a shoulder tucked close to the heart, the start of nothing at all

      caress

      worn

      holes,

      blanket

      torn,

      time like a shoulder

      tucked

      close to

      the start

      of nothing at all

    2. Skin plastered against tattered holes of a torn blanket. Rough threads of unwoven time scratching against frozen thighs She sighs, glancing beyond a shoulder tucked close to heart beyond the cold frosted window she see nothing nothing at all

      plastered

      tattered

      torn

      rough

      unwoven

      scratching

      frozen

      cold

      nothing nothing

    3. Untitled Poem, No Title Till its Done
    1. Heather Garcia

      Connected with Ms Garcia via LinkedIn. Grateful for work here although I have a colleague who was not so enamoured of the article. He might or might not be ready for the "OK, boomer" meme.

    2. the potential

      Quite a caveat: a hole has the potential to be a posthole or a sinkhole.

    3. However, feedback is an important consideration for all learners, instructional designers, future teachers, technologists, academic deans, and others.

      Feedback and feedforward are terms adopted from systems theory and should be adaptable to learning and instructional design.

    4. Holly Fiock

      Here is her website.

      Here is her professional email address taken from that website: hfiock@purdue.edu

      Here is some of her research: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mqd1IPUAAAAJ&hl=en

    5. But that doesn’t mean you know how to use them to improve your feedback.

      Or that anyone knows how to use them. I don't see very much happening.

    6. a powerful force

      Not sure I want powerful forces. In nature they tend to be destructive.

    7. How did you experience feedback from your own instructors?

      I share two of my earliest college papers with my students. I show their feedback. I also note that I got no chance to revise for improved grade. How's that for feedback? Get it perfect the first time. Old school is just dumb.

    1. Kevin, playmode

      "And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die."

    2. when the world blinks

      Unthink it through?

    3. What are we to do

      Undo? Re-true?

    4. I ask you: true

      what do we do?

    5. looking for a clue

      with an attitude.

    6. I find myself all askew –

      I find myself en-queued

  10. Oct 2019
    1. Give us this day.

      Implicit is "our daily bread" and "forgiving us our trespasses", but I left them off on purpose because all I need at the end is one more day. That's all I want. All I want.

    1. It has always bothered me that I cannot annotate an annotation. I can reply to it, but I cannot create that recursion I love so much in a mirror.

  11. Sep 2019
    1. Disappointing echo of crickets.

      https://youtu.be/U9c_KttvQPU

    2. It could be your neighborhood or city.

      Or maybe you live in the hills and hollars. No wait no one lives in the fucking hills and hollars. Hollar got no cred. Hollars just a shadow slipping in the greater dark.

    3. you write.

      I just did. Didn't you see it?

    4. they hope for

      If you have read this far, and you still have hopes and you are at Dante's verge midway upon the journey of your life and finding yourself within a forest dark and from the straightforward pathway been lost and seeing this above the lintel of doorway to somewhere: "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate" then be disabused. I am empty of expectation. I don't even use the word hope. If you do use that word, you better be ready to die to back it up and go all the way through every bolgia of hell shouting hope at every denizen and out Satan's bunghole just like Dante and Virgil

    5. What do people fear in your home?

      We fear being unable. Unable to remember words and people and our own children. Unable to cut our own firewood Unable to grow our own tomatoes or worse Unable to grow our own sunflowers We fear one of us being left behind by the other as one of us enters the undiscovered country We fear a globe that cannot be home to our children and their children We fear that perhaps this farm will be the last line of defense for all manner of DNA, family and otherwise. We are afraid to be the object of someone else's envy. We have no guns. We are vulnerable. We wish to have no guns. We fear what that means.

    6. slang do people use in your home

      My wife and I have an entire lingo that has arisen from living in one place for over thirty years. I would tell you but it would not make sense. This slang will die with us like some language with only two speakers. And what will anyone care when one of us is the last speaker standing. In the end we are left with no slang, no words, no thoughts, nothing. I am afraid of that I am not afraid of that. At some point my mind won't care. Finish line.

    7. important historical figures and/or events from your home

      You have got to be kidding. Maybe there were some minor celebrities passing through, but mostly we are notable for being unnoticed. In an attention economy we are neither a debit or a credit, we are the lines that mark the boxes on a spreadsheet. As near to nothing as we can get yet still be on the board. Not even a pawn, just one of the infinite number of squares on the board that is the rest of the world.

    8. sounds you might hear at 10pm on Saturday night

      The diesel electric trains that no longer carry people unless you consider corporations are people. Season sounds: Cicadas, the silent blink of fireflies, the dusty whirr of a hummingbird moth, automatic rifle fire of our neighbors a mile away because it's open season on the moon, the creak of ice cracking open another red oak weakened by ants and climate change, the silence of our nearest neighbor's home, abandoned by family and mind and sent to a another 'home' that no one in their right mind would call home.

    9. difficult social issues your home faces

      Difficult. I would like to say, "You think you have problems..." But I know we all got problems. Here they don't tend to be First world problems. They are our problems Rural. Flyover. Crumbling social and physical infrastructure. Bad net access. Opioids on top of the karst of misery and poverty Dead agri-culture. Our kids leaving us behind and telling us to get off the farm and see the real world before it is too late. And this layered on the extinction and all the signs of catastrophe: bats gone pollinators gone planting zones changing ash trees and red oak and so much die off that we never see and will never know because as a race we are just as ignorant as a box of creek rock.

    10. streets and intersections

      The old Wilson Right of Way, Rocky Hill Road that used to be a mule wagon trail and then a gravel road and then a chip and seal road and then a paved road and will I assume become a vanishing track in the coming apocalypse. And Raider Hollar Road where I have been the first one to come upon my dead students in auto accidents. I call upon their ghosts to warn next generations of students of the futility of trying to be on time to school or job or any other goddamned deadline. "You will die," they should screech, "you will die. I know because I did." Over and over. And the old road across our friends' farm who we don't see anymore because they have locked their farm gates to everyone. Why? Who knows? See above. You have to ask them and they can't be reached.

    11. public places

      Willy's sawmill up the hill, Rocky's Convenience Story in Bonnieville, Free coffee on Tuesday's at the Amish Store in Cub Run, And a lot of nowhere ad hoc places where someone has just hunker'd down for some beef jerky and sip from a flask but not a Hydroflask, got it?

    12. people do for work

      Some of them are involuntary entrepreneurs. Some cook meth Some are retired (aka card carrying members of the precariat but not AARP because who can afford that?) Some farm Some hide from the rest of us down long pitiful snaking gravel roads with bad dogs and guns at the end of them. This is just what some of them do for work. What they really do, you will have to ask them.

    13. home smell

      Earth and green and all the smells that most folk think should be driven from our noses. There is always dirt and scroffle from the fields and the garden Get the fuck over it and learn to love the wild tang of life.

    14. fairly brisk pace

      And don't forget to be brisk, and fair, in your pace across this idea of home, yes, so far, it has been brisk unless I pause the pace to take my meatsack "I" into the realz to my homes, Holmes.

    15. Do not to think too hard

      No problem. Not hard to make that promise. I won't think too hard I am well-verse in being unversed in the universe. Those are the merciless words that bounce off the ether of this 'prompt'. LOL. Prompt. Thoughtless. skipping.

    16. Create a written list of words/phrases about home.

      Already done. Already doing. Already will do. I am a stone skipping across that pond each of these text boxes one more skip waiting to peter out and then to sink like the stone thought that it is into the murky dark below.

    17. fill in all of the lines

      adult coloring book Procrustean and potential and limiting and limited but oddly satisfying like the sound of water condensing on a metal roof and dripping down in random drops..drops.........drops.drops.........

    18. worksheet

      OK, I will worksheet my understanding into a series of corrales called text boxes, just so many sheepish thoughts milling about, Flocked and bleating, calling out to other thoughts in other boxes waiting to be sorted waiting to be bought by some slaughter house for consumption frightened by strange smells and even stranger others thougths in the worksheet

    19. where you live now

      I live in the seat in front of my computer writing this about homes. I live in the kitchen make a meal for my wife for work. I live on the front porch swing drinking coffee and watching and listening to the morning sensorium. I live in the care that takes me to work and back I live in the office.... so where is that aggregate called home. Home. What is this think called home?

    20. neighborhood or city

      A hill A hollar A home as I have watched trees grow from a whip to a giant. I have watched trees grow in a canopy cathedral blocking out the sun in thin thread of a field.

    21. a place you call Home.

      Home. Where I started. Home. Where I ended. My dad died in his home of 60 years. My sister will sell it. Will it just become a place where I once lived.

      How do all of these memories of places I have called home fit into a larger sense of home?

    22. My response is in the margins.

    1. It might also be fun to expand what "response" means.

      Gifs, images, memes, YouTubes, audio,

      https://archive.org/download/questionnaire_201909/Questionnaire.mp3

      <iframe src="https://tellio.h5p.com/content/1290788696479213238/embed" width="1088" height="637" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allow="geolocation *; microphone *; camera *; midi *; encrypted-media *"></iframe><script src="https://tellio.h5p.com/js/h5p-resizer.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>

    1. How do the spaces and places of your area and your connections inspire and build memories?

      Here's one way it does it for me.

  12. Aug 2019
    1. let’s also respect one another

      Perhaps we don't need to tolerate the intolerant?

    1. mbedded Tutor P

      Anybody else reminded of a tick firnly embedded in the skin? wonder about this word. Also reminded of embedded reporters in war zones.

    1. his writing was “quite incomprehensible.”

      And what has changed? Still rhizomially turgid acaspeak.

    1. The review period will close on Friday, August 23, 2019, at which point all commentary will be archived.

      LOL Not really closed, is it?

    1. Questions for my students on the first day of class this fall:

      1. How do you feel about being called on in class?
      2. Why am I calling on you in class?
      3. How do you feel about being called upon in class?
      4. How can you avoid being called upon in class?
      5. What might we do to create an ecosystem that is good for participation?
      6. What kinds of questions might you think are safe ones to ask?
      7. How might you help monitor questions in class?
      8. What do we do when the crickets come a-calling?
      9. What can we do in small and large groups to answer questions?
      10. What have you seen done to promote safe and friendly questioning?
    2. Asking Questions

      I think we need to have more open discussions about how we use any pedagogical tool in the classroom. My god I use so many that I don't even reflect upon anymore.

    3. a favorite weapon for class participation

      I have never thought of questions as a weapon or a tactic to be weaponized. I know that it is a powerful tool and as such is capable of abuse. I think the point here is that we need to consider or own intent in asking a question AND that we need to consider the different kinds of questioning we might do. I have had students answer questions on twitter, on index cards, in Google forms, through pair and share and more.

    4. as a student listening to a lecture

      Yes, and even yesterday at a PD for the newest version of Blackboard. As the Buddhists say, "Monkeymind." Interesting that they start by asking a question. Of course, if you have a social bookmarking tool like this one, you can answer the question. My question back atcha: Is asking F2F different from asking online? Do same caveats suggested in the rest of this article apply to here?