How can we be more sensitive to the (social capital?) needs of onsite “little people” who are privileged to be at an event but not privileged to have anyone to talk to over coffee, let alone talk to keynote speakers the way VC allows). Currently, we have 4 kinds of onsite Participant

And it’s also ok for anyone to become a buddy even if they had never participated at all

“Nurturing Affinity Spaces tend to foster a view of expertise as rooted more in the space itself, it the community that exists in the space, and not in individuals’ heads”

Nurturing Affinity Spaces

Anyone

human relationships form within the affinity space, it’s the passion for the “thing” that keeps them together not the relationships

this bears further unpacking.

Is it a passion for edtech or open education?

Many people in the space have a common passion (not identity).

group membership is unclear, fluid and a continuum.

We haven’t necessarily been doing the best job ensuring others at conferences know they’re welcome to join in, though.

That’s the “thing”

Thanks to a comment by Laura Gogia during the vconnecting focus groups (I promise I was listening to other participants in the focus groups!). 

“…Human learning becomes deep, and often life changing, when it is connected to a nurturing affinity space” – Gee & Hayes p. 8

affinity spaces are more competitive than not cooperative in the first place. 

the sense of “us” vs “them”.

count as or try to be “inclusive, supportive, and nurturing”

And what we all know is that even affinity spaces

whereas others are more fully committed

But there is also a meta thing that has more value for those who are part of it:

The article talks about how some of the value-added of Games-Based Learning isn’t just in the game itself but in the social practices surrounding it, such as fan sites for games which involve players interacting and supporting one another.

It goes further, though, to talk about what “nurturing” affinity spaces.

où le niveau de quali­fication de la population est la clé de notre place dans la mondialisation,

Une nouvelle phase de la démocratisation est devant nous et nous devons agir en faveur de la mobilité sociale.

Dans une « société apprenante »

mais il ne parvient pas suf-fisamment à corriger les inégalités sociales.

I find myself annotating the intangible.

I was confronted by my shadow in the street.

. I have clearly run out of map.  It is the beginning of the end of that world. The pirate in me thinks, “Thar be what now? Aye. Set sail for beyond the end of the world

change is anathema or at least to be resisted

If part of your society of mind proposes to do what other parts find unacceptable, your agencies can usually find another way

When one viewpoint fails to solve a problem, we can adopt other perspectives

ventually, very few of our actions and decisions come to depend on any single mechanism. Instead, they emerge from conflicts and negotiations among societies of processes that constantly challenge one another

even though they exist within larger feedback loops.

can hardly claim to be any better than those I critique.  

Someone

first and a political animal at best a very distant second

One human mind connecting to the world, needing help and being helped as best one can with another helping mind.

Ecosystems deal

devise ecosystems

teacher

I did not realize that school had become a surveillance state, a Skinner Box, a Panopticon

lmost all of the presentations were obsessed with how the tech tools on display helped surveil their students

middle-management.

worthy of being considered as complex in Dave Snowden’s sense of the word

They are unnatural. They are political.

mind is the only ecosystem

Anyone working within that political system is a political animal first, foremost and always.

ecosystems

Schools are not ecosystems.  They are political systems.

Maybe every technical tool I am using contributes to the surveillance state.

honest

it

I slammed the door in the face of the world a

to walk away from the intractable hell of other people’s lives

Ah fuck it, let’s go bowling

‘tied the room together

the debris cleared a few very good folk (and you know who you are) cleared

there are no reliable narrators

Then I remembered the wise words of my touchstone, Jeffrey (“The Dude”) Lebowski, “Ah, fuck it.”

and I dropped every ton of ordnance on myself that I could find.

I took a drone’s-eye

privacy, to have more flexibility for making appointments, and to avoid sound problems due to network overload in the computer room.

Access to the telecollaboration environmentsis from pupils’ homes. The main motivation for this decision is to ensure communicative

his is an indicator of increased autonomous authenticity and a move beyond school towards real-life communication.

The point is that ethnography draws its ‘data’ from real-world moments of intersubjective exchange in which the ethnographer and the informant are both sensitive to the contextual conditions of this exchange (see also Bourdieu 2004; Blommaert 2005a)

Historical bodies and historical space

Even just moving something to another context may be transformative all by itself. Duchamp’s urinal, for example.

Eventually, both artists more or less stopped using found photos altogether—only pics they took themselves.

Campbell’s soup was flattered and amused, others not so much, especially when the work started going for serious money

ut the Web – and here I mean the Web as an ideal, to be sure, and less the Web in reality – has a stake in public scholarship and public infrastructure.

But we can do so only if we understand what’s at stake, if we understand that the Web and the Internet are not naturally-occurring entities but are corporate and national forces bending towards certain ideological ends – privatization and profit.

So yes, it’s certainly worth asking: does “Domain of One’s Own” transfer costs and risks – as both the ownership and the post-ownership society would like to sell us on – to the individual? I’m not so sure it does, or at least that it does in the same way as Bush's vision of an “ownership society,”.

It’s all still heavily privatized, but now you own nothing. You just rent. You just borrow. You just subscribe. You just share. You owe, not own. You work, but part-time. You work, but freelance. Everything is contingent; all aspects of life, now precarious. But you’re free… You’re free from owning.

Costs and risks are thus transferred to the individual.

I’d contend that many of the educational technologies that schools have chosen to adopt in lieu of the Web, in lieu of projects like Domain of One’s Own, help further this Uber-ification of education, in which everything we do now is trackable, extractable, and monetizable by other platforms, by private, for-profit companies.

t seems, rather, that the rest of ed-tech – the LMS, adaptive learning software, predictive analytics, surveillance tech through and through – is built on an ideology of data extraction, outsourcing, and neoliberalism

“post-ownership society.

The cornerstone of an “ownership society” is privatization. The cornerstone is a dismantling of public infrastructure. Costs and risks are thus transferred to the individual.

In part, I think we resist through education; we help students and scholars understand how new digital technologies work, how these technologies shape and reshape and are shaped by culture, politics, money, and law.

it’s quite likely your heirs

You don’t own the movies you watch via Netflix; again, it’s a subscription and unlike a print magazine subscription, once you stop paying the bill, you won’t have stacks of old copies lying about.

Your heirs will not inherit your digital reading library

Of course, we might ask how these questions – all questions – about ownership are already shaped by the government and by banks, both of whom can readily seize the materials items in our possession. Then too, how are these questions reshaped by new technologies? Are we already predisposed to expect such seizures?

Shared in public, none of this is public in terms of ownership, let’s be clear; this is almost entirely private infrastructure. Thus, our rights are always already limited; and any notion of “ownership” that we might have based on physical property does not necessarily extend to the digital.

ur content and our data, shared publicly, become theirs to profit from.

we work for free for major Internet technology companies, on their platforms.

we act in resistance to an Internet culture and an Internet technology and an Internet business model in which we control little to nothing. We own little to nothing.

If I own it and I die, it passes to my heirs.

is that something belongs to me.

What does it mean to “own” a digital good – a domain name or otherwise?

a space to express oneself freely.

the need for a place to write and create without fear?

to build better public practices around scholarship.

I’m not sure that “ownership” is the wedge I want to use to argue for this project; but I am certain that “post-ownership,” where we all just “share” and “rent” on the powerful platforms of Silicon Valley billionaires, is far from a satisfactory alternative

When I call for each of us to have a domain of our own,

We valued the notion that within one professor’s course she had the freedom to enact and explore the topic at hand using the pedagogies of her own choosing. And, by extension, presumably the tools and technologies of her own choosing.

In part this question is about why our systems use courses as a unit of measure instead of people.

came the promise of lots of data which would allow us to become more efficient and streamlined.

I think the Web hit us at a critical moment in higher education where we were already struggling with doing our work less like schools and more like businesses, and the tech industry and its vendors had already begun to infiltrate us with promises of how technology could help us achieve this goal.

As a platform for transformational teaching?

What is digital writing? Who is the audience? What happens when our work lands in places we never expected, and what happens when it lands nowhere at all?

our criticism must be defiant, not contained or obedient — it must break the containers of page and screen.

This same tension should be reflected in our critical reading practices, a play of dialogue and manifesto, ebbing from provocation to community. In this, our criticism must be defiant, not contained or obedient — it must break the containers of page and screen.

dismantling hierarchies of critical thought

For Cummings, our bodies and flesh have become materials, food for the industrial and social machines.

move between intellectual, emotional, and physical registers. From awe to disgust. Out of mud and into guts.

The hard choice before us is also to identify new forms of scholarship, to expand our critical reading habits, and not be restricted to old forms of Academia in new clothes.

The hard choice before us is also to identify new forms of scholarship, to expand our critical reading habits, and not be restricted to old forms of Academia in new clothes.

Electronic literature is a ‘hopeful monster’ (as geneticists call adaptive mutations) composed of parts taken from diverse traditions that may not always fit neatly together. Hybrid by nature, it comprises a ‘trading zone’ (as Peter Galison calls it in a different context) in which different vocabularies, expertises, and expectations come together to see what might emerge from their intercourse.

In digital space, everything is next to everything else: people, ideas, high-culture, low-culture, art, trash, literary texts, plagiarized texts, etc.

“Formless Content is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas.”

“The seemingly insignificant fact that we touch the text actually plays a very key role in furthering the intimacy of the experience [of viewing media on the iPad].”

is always unfinished, the start to a conversation not a reservoir.

flesh of the text.

As more of our scholarly and pedagogical work moves into digital space, it’s important to reinvest ourselves in the materiality of the text and the materiality of the reader/viewer.

“images literally assault the spectator, leaving him or her no space for reflection” (50).

Susan Sontag suggests something similar in On Photography when she says that “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed. [They are] a species of alchemy” (81),

Susan Sontag suggests something similar in On Photography when she says that “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed. [They are] a species of alchemy” (81),

Critical analysis is visceral. When I write it, the tips of my fingers tingle. When I speak it in a classroom, the hair on the back of my neck stands on end. When I deliver it to a roomful of strangers, the work feels heavy in my gut.

Teachers should not be gatekeepers for student voices, and once we suppose we are, we miss half the conversation. When teachers serve as gatekeepers, when we tell students explicitly what they should learn for our courses, when we establish requirements or procedures for their learning, we aren’t functioning as teachers; we aren’t allowing students to engage in genuine, self-directed, natural learning. We are instead being scriptwriters. The more elaborate direction, specific instruction, and constraining requirements we provide, the less our students rely on themselves to think and learn. They work to adopt our mindset, to decipher and satisfy our expectations, and to gain our knowledge and experience, rather than using their own curiosity and their own experimentation to risk learning something new… and we stifle learning

it now seems to me even more than before, that academics are often busy talking to themselves inside their own bubbles.

The best teachers upend the hierarchy and strategically use their authority to make teachers unnecessary.

too often these efforts reinforce the division they mean to overcome

And yet, to teach that is to assert the educator’s own authority. Even when we step aside from the podium, the act reminds everyone in the room under whose power the podium really is, and who has the ability to resume that position at will.

As lab managers

If we want our students to become experts, we have an obligation to give them the opportunity to try things, without the real danger that otherwise exists outside a classroom environment. Our students must have the chance — and the compulsion — to experiment in their thinking and with their work.

We are given responsibility for a classroom because we are experts in our fields, which we become after years of work and experience, learning things that are very difficult to put in a textbook or instruction manual.

If we give students the freedom to choose their own path, they might choose poorly or make mistakes on our watch. But we must be willing to allow them the challenge of this authority, the dignity of this risk, and the opportunity to err and learn from their mistakes. They learn and gain expertise through experimentation.

We are, when we are at our best, meant to unsettle assumptions, to reorganize our ideas of agency, and to push the boundaries of what is possible in a connected learning environment.

genuine process of inquiry invites unexpected outcomes — indeed, it does not assume outcomes other than a resolution to the inquiry (which may look a lot like the need for further inquiry). The work we do is framed but also emergent, crowdsourced during and not prior to its unfolding.

We can’t be afraid to critique our own circumstances, our own context. In MOOC MOOC, for example, we saw participants playfully deconstruct not just the MOOC, but the systems we were using to examine the MOOC (our online learning environment, Canvas, and the digital tools we asked participants to compose with).

Engaged: Meaningful work arises from genuine inquiry. When we arrest learners’ interest, their work bears the marks of higher critical thinking precisely because the subject resonates with their own concerns and preoccupations.

An unhealthy attachment to outcomes discourages experimentation

the moment before (and even anathema to) understanding.

We must move past our traditional definition of rigorous academic work, and recognize that a learning experience or a pedagogical methodology can be both playful and also have the qualities of the best academic work, if not the reagents of traditional rigor.

recognize rigor when it mimics mastery of content, when it creates a hierarchy of expertise, when it maps clearly to pre-determined outcomes,

The voices that decry collective, playful learning, often do so from the soapbox of rigor: How can this sort of wild learning — that doesn’t aim at specific objectives, that focuses on dialogue and creativity instead of content mastery — ever pass muster as meaningful academic work?

Intellectually rigorous work lives, thrives, and teems proudly outside conventional notions of academic rigor.

these binaries is currently being challenged by the evolution of educational technology

hybrid pedagogy is strategic.

by risking failure and modeling that vulnerability in our interactions with students.

“by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism, in short, we are cyborgs.”

And, in online pedagogy, it is equally important to engage their physical selves.

The questions of my pedagogical work are inextricably bound to the questions of my literary scholarship.

Each author wonders what constitutes a self, of what sort of matter are we made, what it is to be a body, to be human. Each wonders where our (technological and political) machines end and we begin.

As our flesh is made intangible in the digital age, we find ourselves increasingly interested in bodies, dead and otherwise–in cadavers, crime scenes, bodily mutilation, and torture–in shows like Six Feet Under and The Walking Dead, films like Saw, video games like Gears of War, and novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But it is not afraid to incite, to post its manifestos, to light its torches.

its rallying cry or its soapbox

It is not simply work done in the mind, on paper, or on screen. It is work that must be done on the ground.

Critical Digital Pedagogy must also be a method of resistance and humanization.

“a social justice movement first, and an educational movement second.”

Critical Pedagogy is primarily concerned with an equitable distribution of power.

demands that open and networked educational environments must not be merely repositories of content. They must be platforms for engaging students and teachers as full agents of their own learning.

together a cacophony of voices;

must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;

And when we’re looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools.

Most digital technology, like social media or collaborative writing platforms or MOOCs, does not have its values coded into it in advance

ntellectuals have a responsibility to analyze how language, information, and meaning work to organize, legitimate, and circulate values, structure reality, and offer up particular notions of agency and identity

we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing

oors are rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through

real selves and our virtual selves, and in fact, these distinctions are being altogether unsettled.

a space of community.

Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.” If we are to keep every educative endeavor from becoming mill-work — from becoming only a reflection of oppressive labor practices and uneven power relationships — we must engage deeply with its reality.

The paradox is that the same technology that does this to us also creates a new sensitivity to what is happening.

“Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system […] The paradox is that the same technology that does this to us also creates a new sensitivity to what is happening.”

How can we build platforms that support learning across age, race, culture, gender, ability, geography?

My work has wondered at the extent to which Critical Pedagogy translates into digital space. Can the necessary reflective dialogue flourish within web-based tools, within social media platforms, within learning management systems, within MOOCs? What is digital agency? To what extent can social media function as a space of democratic participation?

Vertical (or hierarchical) relationships give way to more playful ones, in which students and teachers co-author together the parameters for their individual and collective learning.

Critical Pedagogy is concerned less with knowing and more with a voracious not-knowing

I immediately become deeply skeptical when I hear the word “content” in a discussion about education, particularly when it is accompanied by the word “packaged.”

“becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”

Rather, pedagogy, and particularly Critical Pedagogy, is work to which we must bring our full selves

What if we took this Venn and turned it again,

the Fold Here is the text of the poem if you are interested in annotating. I am using hypothes.is inte The shepherd and dog think they are making learning legible,

The Wolf in the Fold

The Wolf in the Fold”

Learning is the wolf in the fold.

Learning is the wolf in the fold.

Education is the mind’s domestication

existing to be herded existing to learn and be heard

a complex of enclosures,

making learning legible, flattened and tidied up,

The Wolf in the Fold

Wide-Awakeness

used to sweep chimneys for a living. I refused to sweep

You never know when someone will share an entire patch of four-leaf clovers or some hideously gorgeous bug.

We suggest that this is more likely to be successful if we remember that Deleuze and Guattari(1980/2013)did not oppose the root and the tree and that they were opposed to chaos, as we explored in an earlier section

the fragility of the will to learn

an ethical approach would be one that ensures that this vulnerability is acknowledged and that the consequences for learners’ identity and becomingof adopting rhizomatic principles for course design are carefully thought through

we can say that using the rhizome as a metaphor for teaching, learning,and course design requires knowledge and understanding of the theoretical principles outlined by Deleuze and Guattari (rhizome as a concept) and of the potential limitations of the metaphor for application to teaching and learning.

At the beginning of this paper we asked whether the rhizome worksas a metaphor for teaching andlearning in a MOOC

Weare aware that a critique of the rhizome as a metaphor for teaching and learning could be viewed as a retreat into arborealthinking, but like Drummond (2005), we do not believe that any research method can be intrinsically rhizomatic

Lack of recognition of the necessary condition of the tree was perhaps the most significant element of the paradox of therhizome evident in the Rhizo14 MOOC

For some Rhizo14participants the course was experienced aschaos, as exemplified by this comment from a respondent:Itconveysanideaofmessiness,chaos,learningbeingeverywhereandgrowingineverydirection.But Deleuze and Guattari were opposed to chaos

We can say that one consequence of freedomin choice about what we learn, is to participate unknowinglyin the oppressiverelations of power in education if we take too limited a focus.

As such, when we refer to metaphor in what follows this will be our definition

Tensions can also arise in relationto the rhizome principle of heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of people and ideas in a community that was also a course, such as Rhizo14,could result in uneven distribution of power with some individuals leveraging this power differentia