I (me, myself) want (with my friends!!!!!!!!) to

“see more stand-alone centers that are devoted primarily to . . .

preparing students to think collaboratively when they try to solve … problems outside the academic world.”

A Threat So Big, Academics

Try Collaboration

This NYTimes article notes that collaborations across disciplines in the academia are most popular on environmental issues, but that seems to me to be one area of many possibilities: including resolving world hunger and ending war.

Ever heard of shopdropping?

These folks are serious, from artists and authors, to protestors of all stripes:

“At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.”

I am attracted to the spirit of  “try[ing]to inject a brief moment of wonder” into the daily rush of commercialized life.

From an article by the New York Times:  Anarchists in the Aisles: Stores provide a Stage

Rachel posted this onto Facebook (!), from the NYTimes:

On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data

Recently (December 12), I received a joke over email:

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the Tehran-Ghom Motorway.

Nothing is moving.

Suddenly a man knocks on the window. The driver rolls down his window

and asks, "What's going on?"

"Terrorists down the road have kidnapped Ahmadi Nejad. They're asking
for 100 million tomman ransom.

Otherwise they're going to douse him with gasoline and set him on fire.

We're going from car to car, taking up a collection."

The driver asks, "How much is everyone giving, on average?"

"Most people are giving about a liter."

I googled the unfamiliar name and came up with Iranian President Ahmadinijad!  A few images came up as well, including an obviously irreverent one from May 3rd, 2007.  The text accompanying the doctored image is challenging, too.   People are paying a price for practicing freedom of expression: twenty students were arrested on December 7th.

A challenge put out to you (us!) via youtube, to ask questions of the leaders at the Davos Economic Summit.

Don’t know what Davos is about? Watch the video.

The rigid segmentation of course material into discrete “subjects” provides gaping canyons for student’s intellectual engagement. As the Fall, 2007 semester wraps up, my thoughts leap ahead to the next class and the next group of students. I want to challenge us to think beyond narrow definitions of “group” focused on “identity” to sophisticated notions of “role” and the ways our own day-to-day activities participate interactively with the larger sweep of social and political affairs.

My idea at the moment is to assign the novel, After Dachau (Daniel Quinn), for the first week of class. I read it in about four hours (see excerpt). I also want to show this media analysis from Al-Jazeera, on the divide in US news reporting over the Iran Nuclear Report. Pedagogically, can the students draw parallels between “fiction” and “reality”? In terms of continuity, might I be able to entice some of the students from this semester to keep talking about the important conversations we began?

Open access electronic versions of new (2007) texts in

• Civic Life Online
• Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility
• Digital Media, Youth, and the Unexpected
• The Ecology of Games
• Learning Race and Ethnicity
• Youth, Identity and Digital Media

And a new journal, due in 2009:

The International Journal of Learning and Media

Evidence of (pedagogical) Ultimate Achievement:

• A shout-out from a junior to a first-year: “Your the shit PBandJelly.”
• “I am starting to be able to create my own ideas absent of influence” (redsoxfan218, Comment 2, keep talking).

Sigh. I would like to continue to participate in my student’s lives. At least to observe their thinking continue to develop, learn from their experiences and ways of being, and/or possibly be a nudge or resource.

“…as a senior I was pretty confident in the way I had been doing things. When as a senior you have a writing teacher who comes along and basically tells you that you need to think in a new way it is frustrating. Where do I go from here? How do I perfect my new way of thought if I am graduating in a few months?” (keithjagger, Comment 21, keep talking).

“…in both the Junior and Freshman classes, we all had to overcome our own personal obstacles in order to succeed in the class” (pinkpanther89, Comment 6, keep talking). For instance, Gphelan explains, “I started off this year pissed off cause I didn’t know what was going on but I soon realized it was all out of my control and I gave up fighting and it worked out I suppose” (Comment 5, keep talking). Unknown29 sums it up this way: “If you get caught in a bad situation and you have no choice instead of complaining about it you might as well learn something from it” (Comment 3, keep talking).

“WIthout great diverging minds, there is no great learning, and in my mind, because i was able to disagree so freely with people early on in the class, i helped to aid the process of learning. We all have something to learn from eachother, but just because we’re learning, doesnt mean the teaching is coming from someone speaking at you. You dont just sit there and listen, you engage. ENGAGE!” (Oddity33, Comment 24, keep talking).

“Steph’s decision in involving her classes with online media is prepping us for what’s to come. Whether we’re for or against modern technology, we are going to have to adapt to it and somehow become engaged.” (hippo86, Comment 25, keep talking).

“I have learned after this semester that it is okay to be a little confused. But the idea of clarity will always remain a question no matter how many differnet teachers I continue to have for the last year and semester I have left at this university” (Carmella7, Comment 22, keep talking).

“We have been taught to write what we want, no rules or restrictions. How it is interpreted depends on the audience” (ciaobelllla, Comment 20, keep talking).

“Writing can have many effects depending on the audience and how it was written. Many people in this class have written how they feel and in return it has gotten responses back about feelings of feelings. While pathos can be used effectivrly in a paper it seems this may not always work. The audience might not understand your topic or the views your trying to get across, or the have no feeling on the topic because they don’t understand the pathos in the topic itself. Also, it seems to be taken out of context in many cases” (Shininginthewind, Comment 19, keep talking).

“When you write an article, a poem, any type of prose, you have an intended focus. You want someone to feel something, and you bring out those emotions with words. If you are writing a piece to persuade someone to feel a certain way, you want the reader to feel what you feel. This is a very intimate type of relationship, one that only words can help make possible” (anon136, Comment 17, keep talking).

“This class has helped me to realize that I am responsible for everything that I write, and that the audience is made up of people who have thoughts and feelings that are both very similar to and very different from my own. Through the use of the blogs and commenting the responsibility of the author has become more and more apparent, as has the idea that writing is just as much a reflection of one’s self as speaking is” (treschouette, Comment 7, keep talking).

“i feel more free to expand on my styles and topic for what i want to write about because steph does not restrict us very much. This is a way of being taught that i have not experienced before and i am starting to get used to it” (wright5, Comment 18, keep talking).

“In a sense,” redbeardthewriter seems to reluctantly concede (!), “this class has succeeded marvelously. We are finally holding a conversation, something that has been demanded of us from day one, about our common aches and pains” (Comment 12, keep talking).

“I hardly ever related any of the assignments that Steph gave us. I didn’t recognize how everything was connecting until we started to write our research papers” (apple23, Comment 15, keep talking). “Isn’t it cool,” writes pylee, “to connect everything together?” (Comment 14, keep talking). Winglsammi explains in detail, “Spending the whold semester with Steph, I find that she tries to make connection between everything… (Comment 13, keep talking).

“From each reflection letters, I know that my writing has been improving a lot, because I know writing the first time is not good enough, we have to go back and forth to see how criticized it to a better way” (white78c, Comment 11, keep talking).

“It is truly that maintaining a conversation via technology can be difficult, specifically when both the junior writing class and our english112 class are equally confused with the process. Fortunately, the topics we have been commenting on are controversial and unsafe (The Wall, Hawaii, Israel vs. Palestine)and summon different arguments” (balderdash1, Comment 8, keep talking).

“Although it may be frustrating at times, this class is a challenge and challenges sure as hell aren’t easy. You just gotta deal” (yepp0628, Comment 9, keep talking).

The text is powerful but the Def Poetry performance is fantastic.

Ok, you’ll just have to go read hippo86’s rant/rave for yourself. The Hippo (“Hip”) opens like this:

Why aren’t people talking???!!! Damnit, sh*t, fu*k!

That’s Comment #17 to hints of connected dialogue. The writing is a little sloppy: there are missing spaces, incomplete references, and a slew of pathos which might interfere with the quality of the logos, or add – pending readers’ stylistic preferences. “Hip”, though, has actually applied the model I have been showing you all semester. Really, you don’t think I have gone to the time, labor, and care of crafting these blogposts full of references to your good thinking and contributions to our conversation only for my own personal amusement, do you? Please!

Let’s start with the serious critique from keithjagger:

“Maybe it’s Steph’s way of expressing frustration with our replies and the connections we may or may not be making, but I’m not sure going so far as implying that our responses are “Random firing or neurons” or questioning the relevance of what we wrote is an appropriate response. We are all educated people; I do not think any of us would be writing something we randomly conjured up or something totally irrelevant.” (Comment 13).

Ouch. I hope my respect for the intelligence of each and every one of you is clear, yet I can sense how that phrasing might have pinched a nerve. :-/ W26s1 articulates the mode of student engagement that I have sought: “We shouldn’t be doing assignments based on what we think Steph wants to see, but based on what she wants us to learn” (Comment 15). I have to tell you, overcoming the trained sensibility described by metalcircus to give the teacher what (you think) she wants has been brutally tough to overcome.

“In past class situations, had I been asked to do something like this, there would have been a blog post, and then maybe 3 or 4 questions to answer after the post. I would have written what I know the teacher wanted to hear and not even looked at how other students responded. This is a lot different” (metalcircus, Comment 9).

This kind of teaching/learning is “different” for me, too. Every class I teach is distinct, the dynamics unfold along unique parameters, even if the subject matter is the same and I keep the same assignments from semester to semester. The challenge of the task is for real: the matters we engage in/through class are a microcosm of the whole shebang out there in the wide wide world. Can we allow ourselves occasional space to vent, knowing the emotion is not personal and we’ll all get back on track? I hope it is ok that I chuckled at two expressions of candour in the blog replies:

“Without relevance to the context or content (which in this class is broader and broader every time we look up)…” aisforastronaut, Comment 12

“Steph asked for us to write a “map of the conversation”…. raise ur hand if you have any idea what this means? no one? okay… thats the first problem.” Oddity33, Comment 10

Here we are; the learning curve (for each of you, and for me) has been what it has been and we (you) have one week to rock out on your final paper. You are well-positioned to do so. Honest. Check out what you collectively know about doing research, applying the semiotic method, and adding to a conversation.

“Nothing ever really completely clicks until I’m writing about it in this blog. It all just finally hits me and makes sense. Writing AS Communication. It works.” ~ metalcircus, Comment 30, sordid process)

“I believe the key is to keep the conversation going. no one has to be right or wrong, only different. Difference is the way we learn about things, throwing ideas around with opposite minds is the way we learn how to take a step back and look at something from a different angle. This is how we should be learning everyday.” ~ oddity33, Comment 29, sordid process

“We have this movie, Babel by which we are surrounded. The movie seems quite confusing at times, but through our own questioning of what we have seen, we begin to understand.” ~ keithjagger, Comment 12, capturing a moment

“Stpeh has been trying all semester to establish connections amongst students using the wiki page and also between students and the rest of the world. Taking advantage of these avenues is something she wants us to consider.” ~ keithjagger, Comment 12, capturing a moment

“…in Serendipity? Steph draws our attention to the different perspectives of one act (both the bomb threat of “My Day in Sentence” and the shooting in “Babel”.) I think by exposure to several perspectives on one act our understanding of that act is deepened and enriched.” ~ likeboldcolors, Comment 13, capturing a moment

“…things are connected and this is important because connections help make us feel comfortable, safe, and like we are not alone in the world. People learn from each other because of this connections as well. Rather than having one professor tell us what he or she thinks of the world – we get our peers telling us different things and helping us come up with our own addition to a conversation whether it be about Babel in relation to the Wiki or this course or the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict or gay marriage, or gun control, or the use of technology in the classroom, etc etc etc. We all have something to add to the conversation- we just have to do it!” Anon136, Comment 1, hints

“…maybe in conversing with each other, establish the context…” likeboldcolors, Comment 2, hints

“In order to establish a “good” connection, one should first look at the context of a situation and analyze whether the thing that’s trying to be connected has any relevance to it.” ~ rocketsredflair, Comment 3, hints

“…we see our own thought processes (that had been disorganized throughout wordpress to begin with) organized through her response. And overall, that was the point she was trying to make in class, if we can just take an idea that we want to get across to a certain group, we gather evidence to help support our point and write to that audience.” ~ shorty763, Comment 4, hints

“To think critically we have to take steps before we can rightly answer a piece of work that we are selves do not understand. The context does not need to be agreed with but needs to be understood to comment…. The point of strangers reading my work is for them to understand the point of clarity I am trying to describe, what will my readers reactions be?” ~ carmella7, Comment 5, hints

“…the boundaries are within the dialog that is connected and that can be continued; the writer and audience make the boundaries.” ~ aligirl22, Comment 6, hints

“I realized that I have to read each blogpost 2 or 3 times to get a better understanding of what’s being said.” ~ ciaobelllla, Comment 8, hints

“Engage further in conversations to create new ones? Quotes and connections are what tie our blog posts together. This could, perhaps, be a boundary that we are experiencing. Our dialogue is connected, both in the classroom and in blog posts. We, as writers, must establish an audience which creates a boundary within itself.” ~ ciaobelllla, Comment 8, hints

“We’re all supposed to be working together here, and obviously it isn’t happening as much as we’d all like. I can confess that I haven’t always been doing my part, but I guess it’s hard sometimes. Opening up the dialog between classmates could add a whole new dynamic to all of our writing. We’ve done peer review in the past, but this really is where the ultimate peer review should be done (even including steph in reviewing). As it’s getting late in the semester, will we ever get to use this to its full potential? Will we all just delete our accounts after the semester is over? This is a good way to bring a class together and a good way to think about every kind of topic.” ~ metalcircus, Comment 9, hints

“…the idea that before we start writing our responses, we should take time to analyze what has been written and ask questions. There has to be a reason the article we are responding to was written and a way we are connected to it.” ~ keithjagger, Comment 13, hints

“…return to something old (like our first thoughts on Bable) and continuously reconstruct our ideas and thoughts on this. That isn’t just learning but it is applying what we have learned.” ~ kmb04, Comment 14