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Post Category → the postmodern
Antigonish 2.0 – the plan
posted in	#antigonish2, adult education, democracy, digital pedagogy, dystopia, media literacies, misinformation, narrative, new literacies, polarization, social media, the postmodern	on January 7, 2017 15 Comments	by	bon
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories
I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
– Allen Ginsberg, America, 1956
The Backstory: Fifteen years ago, I lived in the suburbs of Bratislava, Slovakia, next to a corner store that sold absinthe.
Bratislava's medieval city centre was all cobblestone and Hapsburg extravagance, but the suburbs where the teachers' sublets were located were concrete sameness for miles, broken only by public statuary and tram stops and the requisite pubs and potravinys.
My apartment came furnished with an old secretary desk, two chairs, a bright red plastic rotary phone, and a folding couch that served as a bed. I thought of it as mid-century modern, even if was more Soviet than stylish. I loved that apartment.
In Bratislava in 2002, I drank absinthe and cheap wine and listened to mixtape CDs I'd burned on Napster: Tom Waits and Edith Piaf and Stevie Wonder and Allen Ginsberg reading America, aloud. I was thirty; a Canadian English teacher abroad. I only made $400 a month, but I'd paid off my student loans and I'd helped out my mother and I didn't know enough to know that I should aspire to more. I read Umberto Eco. I was trying to self-educate my way into getting a grip on the 20th century, even as the 21st was shaping up post-911 to be a spectacle of a different sort.
I walked a lot. In the middle of Bratislava, in a square near the Danube, there was a monument…a striking, harsh-looking modernist metal sculpture topped by the Star of David, and chains. It stood out from the other Fathers of the Revolution monuments.
This sculpture is Slovakia's monument to its Jews. It is a strange, stark public penance. A plaque tells its story.
In WWII, Slovakia sold its Jews.
The Slovak Republic – a client state of Nazi Germany established in 1939 after Hitler mobilized into Czech territory – made a deal. In exchange for keeping Slovak workers out the war effort, they agreed to deport their Jewish population, whose roots in Slovakia went back 500 years. In the deal, the "republic would pay for each Jew deported, and, in return, Germany promised that the Jews would never return to the republic." According to Wikipedia, the deal was initially for "20,000 young, strong Jews," but the Slovaks eventually agreed to deport the entire Jewish population for "evacuation to territories in the east."
In 1942, the first mass transport to Auschwitz came out of Slovakia. In total, in 1942 alone, 58,000 Jews were deported by the Slovak Republic. 99% of them are reported to have died in the concentration camps.
I took the above picture of the monument one sunny autumn afternoon, in black and white film on an old Pentax K-1000. I framed it in the frame with the little wooden doors, and it has lived with me on three continents since. I still don't know entirely why.
It makes me think of Allen Ginsberg's voice, intoning America aloud in that little Soviet-stark apartment, teaching me histories I didn't know. It reminds me of things I'd rather not acknowledge about human nature.
We sell each other out, we humans, the picture cautions me. Our better angels regret it later. But we sell each other out.
The picture forces me to ask what part I am playing in the world, what wheel my shoulder is turned to, or turned away from.
The Rest of the Story: Back at the end of November, I wrote about adult education and a piece of history far closer to my own part of the world.
The Antigonish Movement was, in the 1920s and 30s, an adult education & cooperative movement based out of the Extension Department of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Led by Father Moses Coady and Father Jimmy Tompkins, Irish Catholic cousins from Cape Breton, the Antigonish Movement fostered the idea that ordinary people could take control of their circumstances and their economy through critical thinking, scientific methods of planning and production, and co-operative entrepreneurship, taught in kitchens and community halls, and via radio and whatever means were available.
It had a huge impact. Even today, the legacy of the Antigonish Movement dots the Maritime provinces in the form of credit union buildings, which got their start through the cooperatives that Coady and Tompkins fostered.
I look at our media literacy and information literacy landscape – our democratic society, interconnected and border-blurred as it is – in the lead-up to Trump's inauguration as President of the United States on January 20th, and I shudder. Arms race tweets. Putin. Fake news. White supremacists gloating. Wikileaks uber alles. Basically, it's the West Wing version of what danah boyd calls the hacking of the attention economy, not just by trolls but by a Troll in Chief. Messy through multiple lenses…and by my lights, potentially terrifying no matter where one lives or what one's party affiliations are.
But I am not a foreign policy analyst. I am a digital literacies educator…and that is the lens I focus through.
So I proposed a new adult education movement for our times, an Antigonish 2.0. With a media and information literacy focus.
I said: To me, at this current moment, it is our societal lack of understanding and agency regarding media literacies and digital literacies – and thus the stories we tell ourselves about truth, decency, and each other – that is the poverty I know how to address.
And a whole freaking whack of you said…ME TOO.
So I've spent the past month in conversations with people – individual educators, people on the street, government folks, the excellent & quick-thinking Wendy Kraglund-Gauthier from the Coady Institute (yes, named after THAT Coady) at St. FX University – and we officially really and fer real *do* have an Antigonish 2.0.
We'll draw on the model of the original Antigonish Movement of participatory learning – see below – but re-tooled for the 21st century and the local and global connections that digital makes possible. It's particularly meaningful to get to do this with Wendy at St FX.
The Plan, As It Stands: As I noted in the first post, the Antigonish Movement had three key structural components: mass meetings, organized with community members from villages and towns around the entire region, study clubs, where community members gathered together in homes to study materials available, and the school for leaders, where members of the study clubs could attend six-week programs at the university in Antigonish, to prepare people for action and minimize business failures.
I see Antigonish 2.0 as having three potential layers or structural pieces, too.
The first layer will likely be mostly the people who commented on the original post – a distributed international network of people. Maybe mostly educators, with relatively high digital presence and the knowledge capacity to lead this kind of work, but in need of something to coordinate around and up-to-date resources on specific media/information literacy conversations. And the broader epistemology and truth conversations that we all need to work our way through to understand the times we're living through.
Building a site and awareness and a hashtag around this first layer – and getting people connected to the work that initiatives like the Digital Polarization Institute are on about – would be how this layer would get started. INPUT WELCOME ON WHAT IT WOULD ACTUALLY NEED TO FUNCTION FOR PEOPLE. But basically the first layer would be self-selecting and networked; our mass meetings, for people who might be interested in taking on aspects of levels two or three in their institutions or their communities or spreading the good word.
The second layer – from our perspective here in the Maritimes – would be capacity-building among local institutions as well as among any Layer One individuals interested in joining in with an eye to building institutional media/digital literacies and capacity. We're looking at a grant to hold a summer institute or mini-conference – essentially our school for leaders – that would be open both to members of Layer One but also focus on getting buy-in from Atlantic institutions, for faculty and staff development….for people interested doing media literacies and critical literacies stuff in formal classes. We're looking at August 2017. We have a lot to figure out (EDITED TO ADD: AMENDED TO JULY 2018)
The third layer is my real, original goal, the study clubs: getting past institutional boundaries to having the Layer One and Two people starting up localized workshops for people in their own communities, people not necessarily affiliated with higher ed. Workshops at libraries. Discussion series in bars or restaurants. Participatory art events. Kitchen parties. This is the part where people get – collaboratively – the kind of information they need to be critical citizens and consumers within an attention economy run from the top down; our Hunger Games mediasphere come to life. This is the part where people (maybe?) learn to rise and hold mass media accountable for the narratives we are sold. This is where, in whatever small part, I can put my queer shoulder to the wheel of spectacle that's turning our time, right now, and try to make a difference.
So that sometime down the road I don't find myself standing in a square in front of a sculpture, saying about some population being symbolized in wrought iron, Yes, a terrible shame. We sold them out, to Nazis. We even saw it coming. (shrug) What can you do?
If you'd like updates on this initiative as Wendy and I work to get it up and running…send an email to bstewart@upei.ca. We welcome you. :)
nasty, brutish, and short
posted in	digital identity, participation, social media, the postmodern	on October 16, 2012 22 Comments	by	bon
Lately, when I think about the internet, I keep circling around to the idea of the social contract.
I dallied with it in a quick video I made for MOOCMOOC back in August, where I talked about how MOOCS – especially distributed, connectivist-style MOOCS where you participate as you want – are disorienting in part because they challenge the implicit social contract we're all schooled in. I'll take that idea further, soon, as part of the xEdbook.com thinking aloud process.
But more and more, I'm thinking the idea of the social contract has value way beyond shedding light on MOOCs and higher ed. I think it's a framework that may be useful for talking about some of the things we most desperately need to talk about as a culture right now.
The idea of the social contract originates with political philosophy. Philosophy's finer points aren't exactly experiencing what you'd call a cultural heyday, at the moment, but suffice to say the idea's a relic of the Enlightenment, with earlier origins in the Biblical covenant and in Greece and Rome. It connotes the relationship we all have to the structures of power and order in our societies.
The social contract, at its simplest, is about what we expect from others and ourselves: the deal we believe we're in regarding the give and take of rights, freedoms, and responsibilities. Most forms of the social contract, historically, argue for the giving over of certain freedoms – though what these are and how they are expressed can vary – in exchange for protections of the state or the civilizing influence of society.
We used to, in short, make those deals with some kind of monolithic power – a God or a state or what have you. That was the old school social contract. At some level, most of us are still kind of inclined or trained in this direction, and the divide between God and state – or least interpretations of what 'state' means and what rights and freedoms are involved – may serve to explain the increasing partisanship and vitriol in contemporary postmodern politics. Red states and blue states aren't necessarily in the same social contract.
But it's even more complex than that. We now live in some crazy kind of incarnation of McLuhan's global village: the world's biggest small town. Most of us are wired into some kind of relationship with our capitalist, consumerist, media society, by our bank cards and our status as citizens of postmodern globalized nation states. Our society operates – as do an increasing number of us at the individual level – more on network logic than on the one-to-many logic of hierarchical monoliths like religion and the state.
So we are, in our day to day interactions as humans in the 21st century, constantly trying to establish and operate within the terms of unspoken and often hugely divergent social contracts. We are no longer just entering into an implicit deal with the powers-that-be. We are each others' powers-that-be.
And we need to learn to navigate those negotiations openly and explicitly; to own the power we have and not wait for the big and mighty to make it all better for us.
Two stories all over the news this week brought that home to me with a couple of unsettling parallels.
One is the story of Amanda Todd, the BC teen who committed suicide. It keeps being tagged as a cyberbullying story, but that seems to have more to do with the fact that she was young and Facebook was an instrument in her torment and we are, culturally, in the habit of making the equation of teen + FB + suicide = cyberbullying!!! than because we've actually heard and digested the lessons of her story.
Make no mistake, Amanda Todd was cyber-bullied. Her network of peers appear to have contributed to her shaming via Facebook. But if a kid were stalked by a pimp on a school playground and the pimp then manipulated the playground gang into participating in the abuse, we wouldn't frame the story as a bullying story, first and foremost.
This is a story about abuse of the power of the internet, first and foremost. It's about the ways in which anonymity enables people to prey on the vulnerable, and about the ways in which our social contract has not yet worked out the lines between the right to free speech and the ways in which anonymous speech *can* bring out the absolute worst in those who want to exercise more power than their embodied lives necessarily afford them.
Amanda Todd's stalker took advantage not just of Amanda, and of teens' willingness to 'pile on' to someone singled out for shaming, but also of our culture of spectacle and bystander silence; of our willingness to blame people for stepping outside the boundaries of our social contracts.
We have been told for generations in small-town cultures that people must bear the consequences of stepping outside the approved social contract of behaviour and decorum. This is one of the few places in society where 'people' has traditionally mostly meant young women and the marginalized. Exploitation followed by slut-shaming preserves power.
But when you translate this old patriarchal model of the social contract to a network society, it gets really messy.
The second story works the same. It's the story of ViolentAcrez, the Reddit moderator and notorious troll who was outed by Gawker as a middle-aged white man. Violentacrez spent vast swaths of his life creating and managing subreddits full of upskirt shots of young girls, sexually exploitative stuff about women more generally, and inflammatory and defamatory crap about other marginalized people. That kind of baiting was his brand. He functioned as a bastion of that old-school patriarchal model of power and social contract exposed at its most base by its anonymity in the network: his small-town was the whole world and he didn't even have to wear the public face of upstanding citizen.
His exploitation and slut-shaming – "you shouldn't wear a bikini in public if you don't want your picture taken," went the logic – went hand in hand with his embedded role in the structure of Reddit: he was acknowledged openly as a troll and a baiter, but also embraced as an insider. He was a keeper of the keys, and his insider status overtly legitimized misogyny and exploitation and general dehumanizing behaviour as a part – not the whole, but a real and accepted part – of the culture of Reddit.
The fallout in the two cases is illustrative. In Amanda Todd's case, memorial sites to the teen were deluged with nastiness blaming her for the topless pictures she took as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old that enabled her cyber-stalker to continue to blackmail and shame her. In ViolentAcrez'case, Reddit – the self-styled 'front page of the Internet' – exploded with outrage about the outing, and (initially) banned all Gawker links from the site in protest.
That's the old-school social contract in operation.
Then the networks – or the vigilantes, or the community, all depending on how you look at it – got involved. And the effects – which were of course already very real for Amanda Todd and her family – began to filter offline and point out the ways in which both these stories depend on the false idea that somehow the online world is separate from the offline, and governed by a different social contract.
ViolentAcrez lost his real life job, and with it his health insurance. One of the more vicious commenters shaming Amanda Todd after her death was tracked down by a Calgary mom and lost his job after the mom sent his boss an email detailing his commentary. Amanda Todd's reported cyberstalker was tracked down and outed by Anonymous, and death threats and sites have ensued.
I don't find any of those people particularly sympathetic, and yet I do wonder about them today…how they feel, suddenly exposed as real and vulnerable themselves.
In truth, we are all bodies somewhere. When we utilize the internet anonymously as if it will never touch our so-called real life, we're making a terrible mistake. And we're threatening the social contract of both the old school and our networked society.
Because in a real small town, people don't get to forget that there are always limits to what they can get away with. Depending on whether they're powerful or vulnerable, those limits may be very different, but they exist.
They exist online, too. We are traceable, as Anonymous reminds us. But we are also accountable – or we can be, if the majority of us networked into each others' worlds hold each other to that social contract. In the fifteen or twenty years since we began discovering ways to be together online, we've allowed internet anonymity to operate as if it were simply free speech incarnate, beyond the boundaries of any kind of social contract. And in doing so we've given power to the worst angels of our natures.
Will this be a tipping point for us as a culture? Will Amanda Todd's death help us realize that, online, there really are no innocent bystanders when something goes wrong?
Thomas Hobbes said, a long time ago, that without the social contract our lives would be "nasty, brutish, and short." In a world where our contracts are in part to each other, we need to step up and speak against cruelty and bullying and exploitation where we see it: no deus ex machina is going to step in and stop it for us.
This giant small town is where we all live. Let's make it liveable.
the death of purity
posted in	capital effects, change11, digital identity, education, MOOCs, social media, subjectivities, the postmodern	on October 6, 2011 19 Comments	by	bon
This is not a post about Steve Jobs. At least not mostly.
When I started writing yesterday, I'd considered calling it "Jobs Are Dead." Small "j" jobs, that is, not Jobs himself. But in the spate of elegies and eulogies spinning round the web today, the title just looks like a misuse of the plural verb.
Yet the two are, perhaps, related. Jobs, Apple CEO and innovator and cultural poster boy for outside-the-box-thinking, was a pretty singular dude. He deserved a lot of the reverence he inspired.
I also suspect that the claims that we will not see his like again are actually accurate.
But that is not entirely due to his own personal singularity.
Rather, I think of it as a marker that the age of singularity is over. While Jobs himself was certainly brilliant, a man with a lifelong and apparently self-sustained vocation, that very figure of manhood – the iconic hero, the exceptional genius – has actually been dying for years.
Our old model of the discrete and stable Enlightenment human, imbued with utter individuality and backed by institutions, is crumbling.
And Jobs' work – his continual pushing of the envelope, his delivery of connectivity to non-programmers, his pretty white gadgets that revolutionized social media – arguably did as much as anyone to kick while it was down.
We are, for better or worse, connected and collective and fractured, now, all at once.
You wouldn't know it today. Today, we are inundated not just with the identity cult of Steve Jobs himself, but with an apologia for identity cults in general, with adulation of singularity and exceptionality. Jobs was given up for adoption at birth, read one heavily retweeted gem, quit school, and STILL changed the world. What's your excuse?
Now, I want people to want to change the world. And I thought it was nice to have at least one CEO in the world who claimed the creative, wired outsiders of the world as his own, and vice versa. We all need role models.
But I think Jobs the icon and Jobs the inventor and world-changer were actually at odds, antithetical in their message and their potential impact. Mac and the iPhone have made the world of connectivity accessible and personal and mobile. They've made possible the breakdown of institutions and institutional thinking. They've also broken down the structures that support that notion of individual exceptionality: there is no room for Great Men in the cloud. Greatness of scale, perhaps. But all are nodes in the network, all connected.
The institutional breakdown frees a lot of us who owe a debt to Jobs.
But it also opens whole other, very real cans of worms. Worms of debt, and the decay of small "j" jobs, and the kind of society we believe we live in.
Because just as Jobs is gone, so are the jobs. Particularly for the types of people his brand spoke to the most.
I see the stories everyday. Richard Florida's creative class – those of us reputedly liberated by Steve Jobs – is being hollowed out. Our most educated specialists, after years and years of study, face the reality that the academic job market they've trained for is, essentially, gone. Universities are caught between their old institutional structure and newly institutionalized corporate realities which make tenure look untenable.
Besides, we have new ways of gathering to share and build and learn together, like the #change11 MOOC I'm involved in, or the Stanford version with its 130,000 enrollees.
The NYT article on the Stanford Open Online Course talks about its potential to disrupt education. I'm all for disrupting education.
But. If the model succeeds – perhaps not this round but over years – what happens to Stanford in the long run? And to universities in general? And beyond the idea of the university as a bricks-and-mortar institution, to the concept of public education and the jobs affiliated? Sure, many will find creative ways to innovate and monetize and perhaps even deliver and share free knowledge and content. I celebrate that. I'm hoping for that.
But they won't do it by being isolated specialists in particular canons, unable to speak or understand the discourse of others. They won't do it by having clear, pure vocations in which the lines are all tidy and what they do and don't do remains delineated over time.
Yet we still raise and educate kids to think of success on those terms, and to have expectations that their lives can or should work that way. We lionize singular figures from our cultural mythology as purists, nobly certain of their vocation or their goal or their results-driven management style. We praise Steve Jobs for being the model of the very kind of self-made genius that his own inventions worked to undermine.
Fierce independence and inspiration – the capacity to see things differently – are the answer to change only so long as the centre holds.
Similarly, Jobs' outsider identity and his advice to "stay hungry, stay foolish" only makes sense if you assume a stable, institutional PC or IBM-style culture; a machine against which to rage.
If everybody is actually hungry and there is no stable centre, you don't get innovation when everybody scrambles to be extraordinary. You get collapse. Or bloodshed. Suggesting we all be exceptional all by ourselves just like Steve Jobs? Ignores the fact that even creative rogue CEOs are backed by the ultimate contemporary institution: corporate power.
I fully agree that Steve Jobs left us a legacy. But it is not to BE him.
Those of us who identify with the Jobs/Apple perspective on the world need to accept, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, that "the jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back." We need to stop calling it a "job market," especially for creatives and academics. It's a dead model. Our industries do not work that way anymore.
This leaves us with two problems.
The first is this: culture change and social media alter our systems of money, status, and knowledge, wide open. But most of us are still in need of some means of garnering money, status & knowledge, even when there is no institutional centre to define those things or the paths to them.
The second problem is tough for Jobs' tribe: as the institutional centre's Swiss cheese holes threaten the entire structure, how do we stand outside?
The notion of purity – always messier than it sounded in the mythologies – is dead. The lines between inside and outside collapse along with the edifice. To make money as an artist, one must become a designer. To make a living writing, one must write to a market, or blog product reviews. Student science conferences on polar climate change are sponsored by BP. The breakdown of boundaries and purity makes it hard not to be complicit in the very things that outsiders have tended to critique about the centre.
Even Apple – yes, beloved Apple – has led the Internet away from the open sharing of the web and towards semi-closed, more profit-modelled apps. Like so many social media shifts, the effects of this have a lot to do with tying capitalism closer and closer to average people's daily practices. Jobs didn't talk about that overtly: it didn't fit the anti-corporate-corporation stance Apple managed so successfully as a brand. If there were ever true purists, they were gone long before he came on the scene.
So if we want to honour Jobs, we do so not by buying the myth of the pure, individualist outsider genius. We do it by using the connectivity Apple was part of enabling.
We are in it together, in this changing economic and environmental and educational climate. Social media enables the possibility of collective knowledge, of distributed action, of working together on a scale never before possible. Maybe we can figure out how to innovate together, and create functional systems that allow for money and meaningful work and some kind of liveable, post-institutional world. Who knows? Maybe.
But we won't do it by standing alone, trying to be geniuses.
Triumph of the Nerds, he called Apple's success, once. It's been clear to the industrial sector for years that the old era's gone. We nerds have been slower to notice, busy thinking we were on the outside and waiting for our ascendancy in the Brave New World where the creative classes would shine, and our ships would all come in.
I think the ships have sailed, but here we are. The centre does not hold. Yet in this mass of connected people is more knowledge and talent and drive – all mixed in, impure-like, with ambition and complicity and mutual reliance – than even Steve Jobs could have wrapped his visionary head around. If we can only give up on the idea that we need singular geniuses to figure out how to use it.
Now THAT would be a real Triumph of the Nerds.
education, learning, and technology – #change11
posted in	change11, digital identity, MOOCs, subjectivities, the postmodern	on September 28, 2011 14 Comments	by	bon
One of the most interesting things I'm doing this year – learning-wise, research-wise, and community-wise – is the Change MOOC.
(For those of you not already signed on for this adventure, dimestore recap: a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. It's free. Anyone can register and participate. There are set topics, assignments, and timelines, but you do what you want, via blog or FB or the central discussion threads: in terms of both your contributions and the platforms you use to share them, its entirely your choice. There are no gold stars – as yet – or credentials for completion, and no invalid forms of participation so long as you're respectful of others. It's a chance, basically, to be part of some coordinated conversations about learning, or whatever the topic, and to make some connections amidst the morass of people IN that conversation. A MOOC usually has participants from around the globe, at least within the English-speaking world. There are close to 2000 people registered for this one, I think.)
MOOCs are catching on these days: Stanford is even offering one. What makes the Change MOOC particularly intriguing is that while Stephen Downes, George Siemens, & Dave Cormier (yep, that Dave) – the godfathers of MOOC – will manage this course, they're not doing the lion's share of the facilitation this time.
The course is 36 weeks long. Each week has its own focus, under the overarching umbrella theme of "Change: Education, Learning, and Technology," or how being connected changes learning. Which, as I see it, is a key site of contemporary cultural shift whether you come at it from the perspective of an educator, a geek, or simply a connected person interested in understanding social media practices more explicitly. Each week is facilitated – readings suggested, an online discussion session hosted – by a researcher or innovator or leader in the particular area being explored: this week, it so happens, is the theme of Digital Scholarship, led by Open University academic and author Martin Weller. Participants are encouraged to "write themselves into the course" by responding to topics, themes and assignments in whatever way they wish. In MOOCs, participants' input often drives as much or more of the trajectory of discussion and interaction than does the facilitator. It's networked, distributed learning.
I'll be facilitating a week on social media identity come spring. I get to take my fledgling research into a classroom-ish setting and explore it with and through the participation of others, many of whom likely will have social media identities to bring to the table. (I'm the second-last week, mind you, so the 2000+ may either have dwindled to 12 by then or blown up to even more gargantuan proportions. We'll see.)
But even better than getting to teach, I get to participate in the whole shebang. Student, faculty, and researcher all in one. Most of the 36 facilitators are also participants and researchers. Identity-wise, this levelling of hierarchical role separations obviously interests me. But so does the rest of the content.
This week's Digital Scholarship discussion is particularly interesting. What does the capacity to share ideas outside traditional academic channels mean for scholarship in the 21st century? What will the impact of it be? It's the impact piece – and the implications for traditional practices – that intrigues me. How do connectivity and the capacity for digital sociality suggest transformations in academia?
One of the readings Martin suggested for the week was the JISC (UK) report (2009) on the Lives and Technologies of Early Career Researchers: as an early career researcher, just starting on my second year of Ph.D studies, I've been conducting my own informal experiment over the past year into the subject.
Am I getting more input and feedback into my research and learning via traditional academic channels, or online?
It's an unfair question, in a sense, because of scale. I'm in a tiny program, the first Ph.D in Education in this province. We are a cohort of three, with three additional students starting up this month. While there are a few broad overlaps in subject area, my peers and I share very little in the way of common focus, experience, practice, or expectation. So the level of face-to-face peer input into my research thus far – lovely and supportive though my colleagues are – has been seriously minimal. Tiny. Whereas from the time I started this blog back in January, the combination of my large-ish online community and my research interest in online identities and practices has made a wealth of sharing and input and feedback available to me, in spite of the fact that the majority of that online community are not in any way academics. They are, however, engaged in the culture of blogging and social media, which encourages reciprocality. Academia is generally still disposed and structured to be wary of reciprocality: it comes too close to plagiarism and treads on cherished Enlightenment notions of individual intellectual enterprise.
However, if I only had an online community of three, I might not have had the same experience. But it is very very hard to have an online community of three. The scale of connectivity in digital spaces and the potential for productive sharing, collaboration, and congruence therein is one of the biggest arguments, in my mind, for digital scholarship. Or at least, the digital engagement of scholars. Which usually ends up being digital scholarship, because people engage on topics that interest them.
As Martin Weller points out, though, there's a conflict here. Research, in most traditional academic conceptions, relies on concepts of control, even where replicability is not required. New technologies are, from an institutional practice point of view, about letting go of control: giving it up to the crowd. And if academia lets go of its controls, of course, how does it validate knowledge? How does it verify and justify its own structures and practices? Yes, connectivity distributes research ideas far more quickly and broadly than traditional journals. At the same time, yes, crowdsourcing is (perhaps) a more vulnerable system of verification than peer review, Nature magazine's 2006 experiment notwithstanding.
(Sidenote: have been reading Deleuze on Foucault lately. Foucault spoke about the institutional structures of the 19th century as the structures of a disciplinary society, juxtaposed against what he, Burroughs, & Deleuze called societies of control, in which continuous modulation of behaviours shaped by business principles along digital (or spectrum-based, non-analogical) models occurs. Control devolves from confinement by institution to a self-colonizing practice taken up by the crowd, by the individuals within. I think this has – ahem – some resonance for those of us interested in higher education and MOOCs, I'll explore it soon, in another post).
The biggest best thing about the MOOC is that it's a semi-structured opportunity to teach yourself to BE a digital scholar, whether in or out of the academy. To select what's relevant from the stream. To curate. To share. To work iteratively, publishing ideas that – like this post – aren't all you could say on the subject, but are at least a start. And letting some stuff go so as not to be entirely colonized, perhaps.
All are welcome, and there are still 34 mind-boggling-packed weeks ahead. Not too late. Think on it. Change MOOC.
I'll let Dave explain how simple it is, courtesy of our SSHRC research project last year.
posted in	brand, cyborgs, digital identity, performativity, subjectivities, the postmodern	on February 11, 2011 30 Comments	by	bon
We passed upon the stair, we spoke in was and when
Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend
– David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World, 1970
(Of course Bowie makes me think about identity.)
I need a word.
A year or so ago, long before I started this theoryblog lean-to on the side of ye olde cribchronicles, I started groping my way towards exploring something, trying to capture something I'd never heard named. I assumed it had been named, somewhere, probably a few times over, but was both amorphous enough and fast-moving enough to have refused reification, mass currency under a single title.
I called it brand, half tongue-in-cheek. I've always found brand a vulgar word, flagrant and blatant in its commercial intent. The online universe – especially in the education and narrative blog circles I run in – is not always so open about its own embeddedness in the capital exchange process. I chose the word to provoke, to try to force that conversation.
But mostly I chose it to keep me honest.
It forced me to look at my commercially lilywhite self and own that I am as embroiled and invested in online circulations of capital and power as the trashiest review pimp out there. Because you cannot use social media and not be embroiled. As you connect and share and have your work recognized by others, your social capital is amplified. As your social capital is amplified, your capacity to leverage it increases, often exponentially. You don't have to: the monetization of the sphere is not obligatory. But ignoring it doesn't mean it's gone away.
I wrote three posts in quick succession on the subject. In the last one, I said it like this:
be it beauty or ideas or humour, it matters not. if you put it out
there and it works, it builds reputation. reputation can be leveraged,
sometimes into capital, sometimes into opportunity, sometimes
simply into connection. we all have our eyes on a prize; we are
none of us pure, without want.
branding is what is read on to you, how you are perceived, what
you signify in the eyes of everybody else. it is not you, but a version
of you. it is an act, and a group act, one that does not exist without
a network of some sort to reflect and amplify it. it is ephemeral, a
wisp on the wind. it is not about content or truth.
it is about image and perceived capacity.
(own it, cribchronicles.com, June 8th, 2010)
I think of all of us out here using social media in our myriad of ways as branded selves, branded cyborgs whose online and offline lives blur. Within the walls of the academy, where the branded cyborg is my dissertation topic, I tend to use the words digital identity or digital subjectivity to describe the idea, depending on which discipline I'm addressing. I see them all tied together in Butler's idea of the performative: that subjectivities are created by the constant and ongoing citation of the (gendered) societal norms that circulate in discourse. What makes me different from you is how I perform myself – online or off – in relation to those norms.
And what makes me a branded cyborg is that the circulations in which I reference and identify myself include the spheres of social media and concommittant capital. And some version of me – my brand, or my digital identity – continues on performing me in circulation even when I'm not there. Ahem. That's all. But that's not an easy thing to explain.
It's hard to name a social aggregate, an "it" in circulation. As Bruno LaTour puts it in Reassembling the Social, "…Social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition – like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger – but only of a performative definition. They are made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist" (p. 34). The performative definition of a group draws attention to the means necessary to keep it up, and also to the contributions made by the fact of it being studied or analyzed.
Goody. I need a word to cover the performative definition of performativity in the world of social media.
Amber Case (here at TEDWomen) is a cyborg anthroplogist, which basically means she studies human life as a product of humans and technologies, or objects. She calls the ephemeral us-ness that others interact with online our "second self."
I'm wary of this term. The idea of a second self ignores the fact that the identity distinctions between online and offline life are increasingly minimal and blurred and often meaningless: tomorrow, for instance, I'll travel to another province to hang out with a bunch of bloggers, word made flesh. The transition from screen narratives and flurries of Twitter conversation to clinking glasses will not be particularly jarring: in fact, because the group of us interact far more regularly than most of us do with friends we know only in the flesh, the awkward stage of polite catching up will be largely bypassed. We are intimate, because we are regularly online together. Are you listening, Sherry Turkle?
Nathan Jurgenson of cyborgology – who adeptly critiques the binary implicated in the second self idea here – calls it a Profile, an aggregate sum of all the data out there about you. I think we're on the same page conceptually. There's something fluid about the word: its connotations are less laden than that of brand, or identity. Yet to me it suggests something flat, surface-like, easily tied up. Does it allow for complex performances of digital identity? Does it represent who we are when we're not there?
I need to talk this out. Last time I asked – when I asked who you think you are online – I got an extraordinary collection of responses and discussion. This is part two, the simpler question, really: what would you call this you I know out here, your online doppelganger, your disembodied you? Profile, brand, second self, digital identity…what works?


text:
Battery Ventures Moves to New Boston HQ from Waltham
Battery Ventures will open its new headquarters in the South Boston Seaport on Monday after moving from its office in Waltham on Friday, a Battery spokesperson said.
The venture capital firm's new office is located at One Marina Park Drive. Battery will occupy the entire 11th floor of the building, with 27,000 square feet of space in total.
One Marina Park is owned by The Fallon Co. and is known for housing the MassChallenge startup accelerator (MassChallenge will move to 21 Drydock Ave. in South Boston prior to its 2014 program). Battery becomes the latest of many VC firms in Massachusetts to move from the suburbs to Boston or Cambridge in recent years. Others have included Atlas Venture, Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners.
In February, Battery announced it closed two new funds totaling $900 million — a tenth venture capital fund at $650 million and a side fund at $250 million.
The focuses for the new funds are software (including software-as-a-service) for business users, IT infrastructure, e-commerce, tech-enabled business services and buyouts in software and industrial technologies, according to Battery.
Past investments in the Boston area by Battery Ventures have included Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM) and ITA Software, while the firm's current portfolio includes local firms Wayfair, Yesware, Pursway and FirstFuel Software.
Battery's plan for moving to Boston from Waltham was first disclosed a year ago. The firm's Waltham office had been located at 930 Winter St.
© 2021 The Fallon Company. All rights reserved.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Switching careers is no easy task and many would feel the urge to shift careers. This is possible only when effective skills are attained in order to switch to the next career. There could be career ideas for many out there but executing their plan can be difficult. The first step is to analyze the fact whether the new career is going to be fruitful. This will enable better prospects for a brighter future. Not everyone would be successful in their career change but if there is a bond then it would work. Working people today realize that they do not belong to where they currently are. This just worsens the situation and everyone wants to have the best career ideas.
With a change in career life would seem better than ever before and satisfaction is guaranteed. With the career ideasevery individual would be able to analyze the fact that there could be a better future. This is ideally very true for there have been many who shifted careers much later in their life. This is definitely the best offer anyone could get and no more forcing others to do that which is not welcomed. Every job is different and requires different kinds of work load. Only those that love the job would be able to perform well. There have been many centers where professionals come together to assist youngsters.
If there are open minds to attempt something new then opportunities are galore. Opportunity knocks once is how the saying goes but there have been many who were lucky many a times. This is the time to stick to what is essential in life and to know one's priorities. Career ideas are open to one and all and choosing definitely may seem difficult. With the many career ideas available anyone would be able to choose the best. Career ideas can start after ten or twenty years and being able to spot the difference is a big deal. Many do a job for more than ten years and then realized they have missed out on something. A good career will boost any kind of person to work much harder.
No more missing out on anything for there are career ideas which will fill in that blank space in the mind. Many magazine and booklets have the career choice and the many companies who can assist individuals. Having a good stable income would be the right choice for anyone but go beyond that. Venturing into something new would enable everyone to work in a very comfortable set up. This could be the stepping stone to success and this could be better an offer. Having to change minds can be beneficial for that could land anyone in a good career. The ultimate aim at getting someone to change career is for their betterment.
No matter the kind of career everyone gets the career ideas that are very helpful. Youngsters are brought up with a certain idea of being in some kind of profession. This gibes all kind of inspiration to choose something that is interesting and yet suitable. There are sufficient career opportunities for everyone. These career ideas can be very useful to those who are looking forward to a new career. When there is a connection the many would certainly love to get to be one. On the other hand there are many who love switching their job and are never satisfied. This should not happen with the youngsters. The demand for a change in career ideas will importantly take any individual very far in life. Getting a suitable career is a dream for one and all and the ultimate choice lies in the hands of the individual.
It takes dedication and decision making is also important with the career ideas. Once the two elements are present then there is no stopping anyone. Many companies are sure about the experience quotient and would love to hire those. The one thing that everyone should know is the fact that any job done should be done out of satisfaction. When that is missing then for sure the right place is not here. Once analyzing is done regarding the switching of careers then it is much easier to decide on the rest. There would be particular skills that anyone would need to possess and with that there is victory. Every career should be treated with ease and knowing the fact that opportunities are various then adequate offers would pour in career ideas.


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text:
Staff Photographer
Ex-Richardson trustee sues, alleging that at-large elections yield all-white board that fuels segregated schools
Filed under Education at Jan 2018
Kevin Krause
Marc Ramirez
A former Richardson school board member sued the district on Friday in federal court, claiming the all-white board has contributed to racially segregated schools and an "egregious achievement gap" by devoting more resources to students from more affluent neighborhoods.
David Tyson Jr. alleges that the at-large election system, in which board members are elected to serve districtwide, violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He says that the school board members mostly live in affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods and that the voting system discourages minority "or minority-preferred" candidates from seeking office.
White students make up less than 30 percent of the Richardson Independent School District's student body, but the district is still largely segregated, with more diverse schools getting less attention and money from the board, the lawsuit says.
"The board plainly and consistently prioritizes this cluster of high-performing, primarily white schools at the expense of the rest of the community," the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to issue an order stating that the at-large election system violates federal law. It also seeks an order halting the May 5 school board election until the voting system is fixed.
Voters currently may vote for candidates for every board seat, and members serve in positions called "places" that have no geographic significance.
Tyson, an African-American businessman who served two terms on the board, says he's the only member of a minority group ever to win a trustee election.
David Tyson Jr.
(Linkedin)
School board spokesman Tim Clark said Friday afternoon that the district had not been served with the lawsuit.
"In addition, RISD's practice is not to comment publicly on pending litigation," he said.
The Dallas Morning News attempted to reach several board members for comment. Justin Bono, reached by phone, said he could not comment because he hadn't seen the suit.
Similar lawsuits have been successful in other North Texas cities and school districts.
Most recently, the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board in 2015 approved a settlement in a voting rights lawsuit that similarly called for electing trustees by geographic districts to increase racial diversity and fairness.
"A single-member district system vests trustees with responsibility for the interests of actual communities," Tyson's lawsuit says.
Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD scraps at-large voting in settlement, gets first Latino trustee
In California, many school districts voluntarily switched from at-large to single-member district election systems after the state passed the California Voting Rights Act in 2001, Education Week reported. The act forbids political subdivisions from conducting at-large elections if those elections prevent minority groups from electing candidates of their choice.
Nationally, some similar lawsuits have been filed successfully.
In 2005, the U.S. filed a complaint against the at-large system for electing county commissioners in Florida's Osceola County, where Hispanic candidates had never won any countywide office even though Hispanics accounted for more than a third of the population.
The county was eventually ordered to institute a single-member district map.
The U.S. also sued South Dakota in 2000, challenging a specific district's at-large voting system for state representatives and charging that it diluted Native American voting strength. The state was eventually ordered to divide the area into two districts, including one with a Native American majority, which then elected a Native American candidate to office.
William A. Brewer III, who is Tyson's attorney, said people who have an interest in their community should have an opportunity to serve on the board.
"That's just not what's going on," he said. "If you're not Anglo, you're not going to be elected. Everyone knows that."
Brewer, whose Dallas law firm is handling the case pro bono, said board members are "completely disconnected" from areas in which most of their students live. He said he was "mystified" over how the board could tolerate such a disparity. He said he was hoping for a trial or ruling as soon as possible, even if it delays the coming election.
"There is such an urgent need for change," he said.
Brewer said the disparities are particularly stark at the elementary school level — a key time in a child's development. "It's just stunning to us."
Brewer said the community service affiliate of his law firm had successfully brought similar Voting Rights Act cases against the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district in 2015 and the Grand Prairie school district in 2014.
Other successful cases involved the Irving school district in 2014, the city of Farmers Branch in 2012 and the city of Irving in 2009. Those lawsuits resulted in new voting systems and the election of minority candidates, Brewer said.
Segregated past
In Richardson, school board members serve three-year terms. The district has more than 39,000 students spread among 54 campuses.
Today, the majority of students are nonwhite, and more than half of the student body is considered economically disadvantaged, according to the lawsuit. The district is 21 percent African-American, 38 percent Latino and 7 percent Asian, the lawsuit says.
Tyson, who left the school board in 2010, said the "discriminatory voting system" is a "relic of the district's segregated past" and must be replaced with single-member districts in which people vote only for candidates within their district.
Grand Prairie to decide on Voting Rights Act lawsuit settlement
The Richardson school district was placed under a federal desegregation order in 1970 because of a civil rights lawsuit when it was more than 95 percent white.
The lawsuit required the district to reassign staff members, close one all-black junior high, eliminate segregation of any school activities and create a biracial advisory committee.
In 2009, the district started the legal process of demonstrating that the vestiges of legal discrimination had been dealt with. At the district's request, a federal judge in 2013 ended federal oversight of the district.
"As RISD grapples with its history of segregation, it also faces pressing issues of poverty, inequality, discrimination, and overt racism in its schools," Tyson's lawsuit says.
The school board, Tyson says, is required to make financial decisions that benefit all students in the district, regardless of where they live. Yet the district's underperforming schools are predominantly made up of nonwhite students.
"The story of RISD is a tale of two school districts where a greater than 60 percentage point achievement gap exists between campuses at opposite ends of the academic spectrum," the lawsuit says. "Clearly, the present board is failing the children of RISD. Now more than ever, the district needs a board which reflects the composition of the community it serves."
The school board never considered a minority candidate when it replaced the superintendent in 2016, according to the lawsuit.
Tyson's lawsuit called that unacceptable.
"Maintaining the status quo at the highest levels of power keeps RISD frozen in time, lacks true democratic legitimacy, and inhibits the development of tools necessary to address the challenges of inequality and poverty that many of its students face daily," the lawsuit says.
Irving ISD trustees to decide whether to change to single-member district election system
The lawsuit says the district's eight lowest-performing elementary schools have mostly Latino, African-American and Asian students. And more than 80 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the lawsuit.
"An achievement gap persists through every level of the RISD student experience," the lawsuit says. "RISD's disparate structure allows white students to outpace their nonwhite peers by a larger margin than exists statewide."
Racism alive?
Tyson also says that "overt racism" still exists in Richardson's schools.
The lawsuit mentions a September article in the The News about racist memes that circulated on social media days before a football game between Richardson and J.J. Pearce high schools.
One meme depicted a burning cross with Richardson High's emblem in the flames and members of the Ku Klux Klan bearing the J.J. Pearce logo in the background. Another picture depicted a slave being whipped by a slave driver, their faces covered by each school's name.
Richardson school board elections are "racially-polarized" because the predominantly white voting bloc typically defeats black, Latino and Asian candidates, the lawsuit says.
Tyson says that creates a "chilling and discouraging impact on minority voter participation."
Lawsuit claims Irving voting district violates equal protection


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THIS BBC STORY highlighted an issue that affects more young people that we realise.
People don't speak out about it if they can't afford it. People are embarrassed; they don't like talking about it anyway.
Girls might get desperate and steal from shops. And what about homeless people?


Maintaining a close working relationship with the schools and teachers of our community is a veryimportant aspect of children's services in our library. We host class visits, provide walking tours of Morristown to school groups and work directly with teachers to ensure curriculum coordination. Class visits are usually for early elementary grades and they introduce children to the library andmake sure that each student has a library card.
The walking tours are for middle elementary grades and they are conducted when Morristown is studied in the classroom. The buildings around the library are featured and their historical significance is discussed.
We are also very happy to consult with teachers when they are planning assignments that will require the use of library materials. This will enable us to provide students with the material they need to complete homework and research assignments.
Supplementary materials for teachers from this learning web site.
A collection of subject based lesson plans.


text:
John Mccain A Cause Greater Than Self
The last words he used in his farewell speech to the American people are as resonant today as they were in 1941. The American public is in awe of the man who decided to put his career ahead of his ideals. Regardless of the adulation he may receive, John McCain made the right decision by deciding to dedicate himself to a cause greater than himself.
In the Vietnam War, John McCain served his country by becoming a POW. Later, he became a Senator from Arizona and was elected President in 2008. His accomplishments are numerous, but one thing stands out above them all: his stance on immigration and the issue of war. As a veteran, McCain understood the dangers of US political polarization and self-centered myopia, and he understood the risks of the post-World-War II global system. He also recognized the perils of global terrorism and extremism and took action.
Despite his impressive resume, the most enduring achievement is his commitment to preserving democracy. In a time of extreme political polarization and self-interest, John McCain saw the threats that surrounded Western democracies and stood up for those who suffered from authoritarianism. He also understood the perils of the US post-World War II system. This is why he was so effective at governing the country and defending the rights of American citizens.
After retiring from the navy, McCain became the navy's liaison to the U.S. Senate, a position he later deemed his "real entry into politics". In 1979, he married Cindy Lou Hensley, a high-school teacher and the daughter of Jim and Marguerite Smith, who founded the third largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship. In a world where people choose to be selfish over their country's security, McCain had a chance to make his political aspirations come true.
In his political life, McCain has fought for a cause greater than himself. The Vietnam War veteran's service in the United States and support for President George W. Bush's surge troops in Iraq, but ultimately, he failed to stand up to conservative pressures for immigration reform. During his 2008 presidential campaign, McCain opted to choose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin over Lieberman, an independent who was not familiar with the issue.
Although a Vietnam POW, McCain's political career was far more than impressive. He was a senator from Arizona and ran for president in 2008. With so many achievements, it is no wonder that he was so eager to run for the White House. Yet, this quote, however, has many flaws. This is not the only reason that he should not run for President. He must stand for the American people and not be driven by political expediency.
A cause greater than self is a key part of McCain's character. The American people need a president who is a man of his values. As a former naval officer, McCain fought in the Vietnam War and was imprisoned for five years. He was tortured in captivity, and he refused to be released until all the other Americans were freed. Eventually, he was freed, but he still remained loyal to his ideals and did not stop fighting. He was a hero.
A cause greater than self is essential in the world. The death of John McCain is a tragic loss for the nation. The US has lost a cherished member of its culture in the form of the President Barack Obama-Palin candidate. While the former Republican presidential candidate did not share the same views on immigration reform, his legacy lives on. The country is divided on issues like these, and he would have embraced these views as a man of his values.
The maverick in the presidential race, John McCain was a Vietnam POW. He was captured by the North Vietnamese and later admitted that he was in love with a woman from his first marriage. His wife, Cindy Lou Hensley, was a teacher and the daughter of Jim and Marguerite Smith. His parents were successful businessmen and founded the third largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship. The political career of John McCain was a success.
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