Any such program for youth requires careful facilitation and the support of a more experienced peer or teacher to help students reflect on what they are learning and take it forward beyond the limited period of exchange.
This was in many ways the inspiration for Equity Unbound (#unboundeq)
can digital spaces such as social media help promote empathy and social justice instead of sensationalism, hatred and extremism
In part, this is a design question I think...
empathy does not come from responding to a situation en masse
Empathy is born of truly listening, even when the message is counter to what you know or believe. This is very difficult, but it is crucial skill - whether applied in a f2f personal relationship, or an online engagement. But are the platforms we use designed for listening? Or just reacting?
Digital citizenship augments our embodied citizenship
This idea of augmentation is very compelling. In what ways do we engage in our civic duties IRL, and how can we do that differently with the augmentation of our digital lives.
It’s a metaphor meant to make you think about what happens behind your screens, on or off.
A metaphor for the ubiquitous MEDIA-tion in our lives. Can online life even be considered as "seperate" from our lives off line? Or is online life also real life? What do we see when we reflect on the screen mediations in our lives? What is reflected back to us?
alchemy
I am especially excited about the notion of breathing life into something inanimate. Making something "come alive". Vitality is certainly a mystery. The homoculus stuff kind of freaks me out tbh. But imagine if we could give the breathe of human life into something that is not alive?
philosopher’s stone
ahhhh...It is also called the elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and for achieving immortality;
I love Latin fables, proverbs, riddles, mottoes, emblems, and symbols,
Laura - I love how you bring to our attention the fundamental role that language and riddles & stories and symbols play in the pursuit of alchemical tranformations!!
My speciality
That is such an amazing specialization John. I think there is something fundamentally "romanitic" or "dreamy" about alchemy, ...just because at its core, it seems to be about our human limits and it brings us into the realm of spirituality via the pathways of science.
Who are we?
What a question....so many things. But together we are both a network and a community. As a network we share resources and connect others and grow our references and associations. As a community we think through ideas and share our undertsanding of things, and offer glimpses of our creativity in hopes of collaborative inspiration. There is power in networks. But there is magic in community.
The only way to make borders meaningless is to keep insisting on crossing them: like a refugee, without papers, without waiting to be given permission, without regard for what might be waiting on the other side. For when you cross a border, you are not only affirming its permeability, but also changing the landscape on both sides.
This. (!!!!)
the declaration of a singular understanding of what it means to be alive in the world.
Our shared humanity
It is a communal heritage, but is also something entirely individual, entirely your own. And that is what gives it its transformative possibility: this inevitable commingling of self and other, of self and culture, of personal history and collective history. Language gives the individual the power and strength of the collective.
Writing by giving voice has the power to move from individual truth to collective understanding.
How stories might be transformed and disguised to pass through the world more easily, but still smuggle with them the same truth. And how the perfect metaphor for the acts of reading and writing, and the witness you must bear to perform each, is translation, specifically its Latin root: to cross, to carry over.
the act of translation here is a smuggling act across borders of violation
Carrying something whose significance cannot be described in language, but must nevertheless be contained within it.
What can we do, as we bear witness?
You understand at least that merely lifting my voice to tell you these things is an act of trust, of faith in your ability to understand.
To write, and claim voice, is also to trust.
not knowing what distortions that portal might work upon my body.
The intractable relationship of the body to the story that it must tell is so profound in this piece.
insist on being part of the text
Using the tools of the oppressor (mastering the language of hegemonic violence) in order to reveal the machinations of certain violence in the representative act? In a way, that is precisely what this essay is in giving certain voice.
I want to make the writing as unobtrusive as I can, to have it slip easily into the mind, mild-mannered and unassuming, before revealing that it has been wearing a vest of explosives all along. But these are theoretical questions, questions of technique, and ultimately ways of distancing myself somehow from a raw wound at the core that simply and only begs to be told, no matter how.
The question "distance" in writing seems to be related here to technique and theory. So does that mean "voice" in writing then is the assertion of something more immediate, more intimate?
For the story to come to an end, you must serve the purpose of the story, not the other way around
-The danger of the single story, the violence waged by a single story
what I am allowed to smuggle through
I was thinking about the smuggling of both bodies and stories - each just a critical to survival.
To witness, however, feels too passive a word
To witness is to be bound to a certain truth. And inherent in witnessing is responsibility. It is a weighty word, no?
agreed to have at 42 for my husband’s sake, to bring life back to his tongue after we laid our two grown, handsome sons to rest, one after the other, and grief took all his words away
"Grief took all his words away." It seems vitality itself lives in the ability to have voice. And here we see how a women who loves will bear new life literally in order to save other lives. So very much to bear.
We
I am interested in the implicit assumptions of the "we" here. I know it is supposed to mean the signers of this letter. But I am wondering about the stakeholder sensibility of this pronoun.
our democratic institutions
at this stage, many democratic institutions are failing us. So how do we recuperate them and believe in their ability to adjudicate these concerns?
Tech is not above us
Tech is also not necessarily "neutral" - a claim that is deeply problematic.
it seems that much of the writing assigned to students across the curriculum does intend to promote deep learning, although very little prepares students for writing beyond the academy.
Perhaps because so much of the academy is so detached from real world challenges...<br> Yet deep learning is skill we all need to build a thoughtful and meaningful life. To connect academic undertakings to real life challenges would go along way in making education more relevant and building a better societal fabric for all.
We hypothesize that the setting of clear expectations
Clear expectations are really amiss. Both in the classroom, and also in research.
The most highly satisfied faculty are those at the private high school, and the least satisfied those at the urban high school.
Let's chat about what this might be about....
quality of writing must be improved if students are to succeed in college and in life. (
Since I firmly believe that writing is a form of thinking, I wonder how effective the SAT really is for college preparedness if this measure is so lacking.
writing beyond school.
a key lens IMHO
to police
I am pretty uneasy with these allusions - "Forcefully, policing, ...gets one thinking....what is at stake here?
Students’] initial progress will be marked by their abili-ties to take on the role of privilege, by their abilities to establish authority
privilege and authority...are these the ultimate goals for becoming an educated person? (insert eye roll meme)
work in the academy
Work in the academy is always the assumption that underlies the notion of research but I am insistent that it is a important life skill (academy or no academy).
A key question. I always maintain that the creative writer must foster their research identity as much as the academic writer, but somehow the impression remains that research is an academic domain rather than an imaginative one.
Where can we discover it
Check out the three Volumes of the Electronic Literature Collection online. If you scroll down further on this post, you will see the links. These links are each precious portals into amazing worlds. :)
literature in the digital age
One of my favorite topics these days :).
One other cool source for checking out twitter bots is the bot collection in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol 3: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/collection-bots.html
Also, there have been inquiries already about how to make twitter bots. Here is a great twitter bot workshop handout by excellent #DH (Digital Humanities) colleague Zach Whalen: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s637/sh/5ce01e7f-b88d-4f11-a744-0edcdaed33a0/85a8e4137554b25f
For anyone who is interested, here is the link to my Electronic Literature class from last semester. It is check full of materials, resources, etc.:(http://writingelectronicliterature.miazamoraphd.com)
We can annotate together guys! Read and comment on this blog as a test run.... http://giphy.com/gifs/EcHfgLJ0dAq0E/html5