[null, null, null, null, {"document_url": "http://amusingspace.blogspot.com/2007/04/", "unformatted_src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gUPVNPjIXc0/RhCzdzkwWSI/AAAAAAAAAAM/WSgd__drzSY/s320/Posthuman_Future.jpg", "src": "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gUPVNPjIXc0/RhCzdzkwWSI/AAAAAAAAAAM/WSgd__drzSY/s320/Posthuman_Future.jpg", "formatted_filename": "Posthuman Future"}, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null]

Freedom vs obedience in tertiary sector education

While socialising with a student today she told me she has to go to a disciplinary hearing for missing more than 20% of her timetabled lectures. She has paid something in the order of $2500, for a semesters courses and then the institution I work for thinks they can take her to a disciplinary hearing for not availing herself of the courses???
The lecturer hasnt bothered to get feedback to discover what might put off attendance, things like public discussion of personal issues could well be of concern here. There is such an arrogance in assuming students have to be within the four walls timetabled and in the presence of a great one to learn. Bollocks.
But the institution seems to have a rule saying we take your money, in exchange we provide you this service, and then if you dont use it we take it off you. Hello?
Let me see if I can make an analogy here of similar services, I purchase six months worth of access to the internet, and then I dont use it for two weeks out of 10, the company can drop me, refuse me further access...?
In the meantime her house has had a fire, her mum has dementia, the house is on the market.
All assessment points were being met, but she is now so stressed re a disciplinary hearing she couldnt concentrate on the next assignment and thought she might drop it.
Its a university for Gods sake, not only that, but a health faculty, one that teaches caring, mental health, health promotion....
The student gets taught all about optimising the health of others, saving lives even, but we dont trust an adult to make adult decisions about where their learning may best take place?
This is stupid.
This is not about education or learning or being student centred or being adult learning oriented.
This is about control.
No wonder institutionalised education gets bad rap.

Posted by ailsa at 10:32 PM 1 comments 
Plaitting ropes of sand

The man who writes to the masters of Pig Island
about the love they dread
plaits ropes of sand
Yet i was born among them
and one day
will lie amonst their dead.

James K. Baxter
Pig Island letters

Writing the ethics application, still, is a lot like plaitting ropes of sand.
Its important, but it seems incredibly time wasting if not detached from reality.
I've almost got enough rope to hang myself with!

How to obtain consent from online others...
who may or may not be under 18yrs...
who therefore in a std ethics application would, apparently, need parental consent...
but what they talk about online, they may not want their parents to know...
and it could be unsafe for the young person, that their parent/gaurdian knows...
and where anonymity is promised....
and the content is personal/private...
Seems like every little bell that can send off alarm bells for the ethics committee, short of it involving toxic waste, has now been rung.

Posted by ailsa at 10:36 AM 0 comments 
To be human? To be a child of the sun...to be an earthling...

Being empowered and empowering...
To quote an exceptional NZ woman that my institutionalised learning did no justice to, Katherine Mansfield identified her needs, while she was dying of tuberculosis she strove, she risked, she said "risk, risk anything". I don't move forward if I I don't risk. So My background is health and education, and in my mind, they are both basically about the same thing: how to empower? What should I be aspiring to in assisting others to aspire? What is it that others might aspire to? Well, Katherine just says it so well
"...the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love—the earth and the wonders thereof—the sea—the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good—there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.
Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this. I want to be writing....
But warm, eager, living life—to be rooted in life—to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. "
Got that? Nothing less!
And more than this, it matters when I create the circumstances that makes this less likely to occur. Where I make it less likely it cannot be called education nor "work for health" (ref to David Seedhouse, to do less is dwarfing!)
Now back to compliance, there are deadlines to be met, educational structures that impose limitations...an ethics application for the doctorate that still isn't in by its second due date....
Time to stop being a child of the sun, and just fit the square peg into the round hole...at least for a couple of days...
Thanks to artichoke and Stephen's web for the diversions, now back to my constrained rather than empowered education...
(I can almost hear the ghosts of lecturers passed saying its not empowering if it leads to disadvantage, if it leaves you unable to be credentialized in a world that demands certification... time to thank James Marshall and Colin Lanksheer, for introducing me to the concept of freedom in education; that there might be philosophy to such undertakings, and time to thank David Seedhouse for introducing me to a better reading of Mansfield than my institutionalized schooling managed, thanks also to Chris Bigum for reminding me that plain ordinary folk in educational institutions might also be heroes.)

Posted by ailsa at 8:57 PM 2 comments 
i am feeling decidedly post human today Posthuman Future, an illustration by Michael Gibbs for The Chronicle of Higher Education's look at how biotechnology will change the human experience.
In getting through the oxfam training the attention to my doctoral life lapsed somewhat.I am feeling somewhat split as if cycling not through online programmes or online lives as eluded to by Sherry Turkle, but this is currently the nature of my terrestrial lives, compartmentalised, cut and pasted and patched!
(70 km this last weekend and feet with blisters on blisters that reflect this, and sadly an ethics application similarly suffering, not quite fractured but seems somewhat fractioned.
In walking though I had the blessings of having my feet, if not my soul attended to by a gift of spiritual healing from a friend, I know I felt lightened by the ministerings, but blisters are blisters and walking on them still hurts. My spiritual self has been offered txt ministerings, just text me from when your in Taupo so I can channel the energies where and when...
i just love how care is communicated through whatever medium comes to hand, or foot or soul...
Imagining that i am not a human being on a spiritual path, nor a spiritual being on a human path, but a cyborg whose spirituality can be enhanced...

Posted by ailsa at 6:49 PM 0 comments