I love this. Memorable. Part of my theory of close reading is that the slowing down and summing up and otherwise internalizing makes the reading easier to remember and easier to access in our memory schema.

This is up to me and will be the subject of a ten minute "why is this worth learning and using" minilesson.

My classmates' commons--wow, what a phrase!

Students often feel cramped by lots of highlightings on top of highlightings.

not sure if this is damning with faint praise or just withholding judgment.

not sure what this means, probably not a criticism.

tes

Really interesting discussion of some of the assumptions the author makes in the post.

The key word here is "encouraging". And the simplicity of it--standing--is such an easy ask. OK, everybody stand or sit whichever suits you at the moment. But what if you need folks to sit so all can see? We now can appreciate that your whole philosophy of learning is reflected everywhere, even down to the furnishings!

https://youtu.be/g9ZZFCIncA0

Constellations are forever. They tell stories and they are practical tools for navigation. And you don't need Google Maps or Google Earth to make them mean something.

Great question. One of my goals when I retire is to build my own telescope. I love the stars.

I use a model for analysis that goes like this:

1. What is the "text"?
2. What is the context?
3. What is the subtext?

I initially used this model to teach 8th graders about how to analyze political cartoons. Later I used it as a tool for analyzing all manner of media. I have added a fourth text to this.

1. What are the pretexts (assumptions)?

Big fan of the Young Turks and have been since their AirAmerica days and before. Combine them with Chuck Mertz' WNUR show "This Is Hell" and podcast with the same name, I feel halfway informed about the world

Correction: a recent spate?

Is it really as bad as Ebola?

How do you mean? Give a specific time stamp and say why that is an example of vivid.

I did not know that!

It feels like magic sometimes including the possibility for failure. Plus, it takes lots of practice just like magic does.

What is the purpose of repetition here specifically and in poetry in general?

Is this true?

You would think that this was obvious, but in some schools and universities we are as far away from that as we can be. Learning is not a treatment to be undergone, yet...

This is the entry point for everyone's oscillating learning wave.

definition

I see her argument as an extension of Tim O'Reilly's essay "The Architecture of Participation" . And I see it as a Marxist way of viewing political and economic agency as a function of some idea substructure. Although I find it intriguing that Watters uses a mesh metaphor at the end of the post. We are enmeshed in rather than standing upon political and philosphical assumptions and axioms.

Who will direct Watters to this shared work or is that even wanted?

I cannot begin to say what "future-facing" means. I am reminded of an old George Carlin routine where he notes that a plastic Jesus in one's car is probably facing the wrong way. If Jesus is helping you, then he ought to be looking at the damned road, right, not you. I don't think we need to project onto the future a roadmap (template) especially one that is as waste-ridden and futile as 'school'. Talk about a manifestion of Eliot's wasteland. Rather I think we need to feedforward from the future. We need to imagine what we mean by content and context delivery and connected learning and the programmable web. Then we need to allow ourselves to be drawn toward that future as we live in the present. And we need to allow ourselves to modify that future present like a feedback loop.

reliant as they are on...

I much prefer this nomenclature especially since it allows me to add Christopher Alexander to the mix. He argued that there are machine systems and growing systems. Or perhaps we can think of the distinction as between engineered and rhizomatic? Or using James Scott's terms: legible v illegible.

and hilarity ensued...MySpace is/was/never has been less templated than Wordpress. Just not as well templated as Wordpress or as peopled by good developers who add more choice via plug-ins and the WP API. But make no mistake: plug-ins are templates.

This is partly true, but....every space is a templated space. Coding creates the space. Text boxes and the metaphor of page and post are templated. Just minimally so. Templates are not the boogey man. A haiku is a template, a sonnet is a template, but is anyone reasonably arguing that Basho and Shakespeare would have been better off not using them. We use templates to create buildings. We call them "forms" and use rebar and concrete to send them to the sky.

And it's a nod to the practical idea that you don't allow inexperienced folk the chance to muck up the works accidentally or maliciously.

learning as a process that develops the __.

You fill in the blank with your own expertise NOT HERS or any others. If this all about power and control then the ends and means must be about that as well, even to the point of arguing individually for the idea that content is king.

You MUST control what you share and know and are. What makes this dictum any different than programmed learning where you must mast this set of content. Just Watters telling us what we must do as opposed to Skinner.

A root initial condition for being a connected productive person on the web.

This is nothing if it is not connectivist MOOCs like CLMOOC.

vs. connection and creation as the center of learning. Of course, you deal with content as a teacher but it through the learner connections that we educe learning.

The fucking hubris of this is worthy of the profanity. This is classic Taylorism and worse because engineering/managing complexity is impossible unless you force everything into a 'legible' state, a reduced state.

Education fails for most of us when it becomes this farming adage: just put the food down where the goats can get to it. If all education is, is this, then almost everybody will be left out. I think that is what technocrats like Khan and Gates want in their most secret hearts even if they would never admit it--rule by the autodidact, rule by those who look just like them.

Question

Is this only what we will do or is it something else?

questions

question

I get it. My alt rallying cry is

BE FANTASTICAL

thesis

question

question

Something will change.

Yes, you have got to feel like walking through.

Many moons ago I believed that if you put the food down where the sheep can get to it, they will eat it. Not so much.

Somebody somewhere has to test these tools IRL and that means they have to take the risk of failure. We just need to make the risk small and safe. We need to protect the early adopters.

Cringe worthy phrases of the day "just having fun" and "rigorously learning". If you got rigor, you not learning. You dead.

all students? one sized equitable tool fits all?

I am ok with quantifying this and even making a rough matrix/rubric of techquity, but I am unwilling to say unequivocally as best practice (shudder...) that a pencil is 'better' than an app. Each has its charms and the user's mileage may vary.

All grand questions. But as Candide said, let us cultivate these gardens. And observe what happens.

One of these real talk affinity spaces.

Yes. Maybe even simpler we could: we need real talk with peers and elders.

Abso-freaking-lutely!

yes and no. If it is nothing more than opening your door and making your classroom permeable, then what could be simpler. I did not say easy. Just simple. If you change the initial conditions even slightly then perhaps the butterfly does cause a hurricane in Cuba.

Reminds me of St. John of the Cross' "via negativa", describing something but describing what it isn't. Learning is divided between school and 'the real world'.

Mark Twain said, "Don't let your schooling get in the way your education." Might substitute 'learning' for 'education' because of the fishy smell that emanates from the latter.

Follow the money.

This is to aspire and to die for.

I am wary here. I have read too many Harvard Business Review articles and bestseller leadership/entrepreneurship books to want to replicate the "100 points of light generalized to the universe" theories.

Moving to influence others with known happy practice.

This is exactly what Christopher Alexander wrote. So you have to change the physical space. This what the permaculturists say, you have to change the ecosystem. I wonder what Buddhist farmers like Masanobu Fukuoka would say?

Current educational error can be reduced to one faulty assumption: students learn because teachers teach.

Unknown outside AND unknown inside and forgotten outside.

If the function of learning is duplicate conditions inside of the learner, I suppose this is true. But even in static times, when change was more glacial, there was still a need to address change. And now that change is a constant we need learning ecosystems that address this stressor so that we can adapt and survive. The old way is like the story of the guy who lost his car keys and a cop finds him looking for them under the street lamp. The cop wants to know where he lost them to which the guy says, "Over by my car." The cop asks, "Then why are you looking over here?" To which the guy says, "There isn't any light over there." We need to provide folks with good flashlights not hope that there are convenient street lamps. I think that is what CLAVIER is trying to do.

A largely inconvivial space in France (frankly, the US too mostly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_space

Simon and his colleagues assume that the connected learning network for becoming an English language user already exists. We just have to jack into it via affinity spaces.

Access as metaphor. Security metaphor? If you don't have the key, the password, the magic symbols/handshake/medium of exchange, then you don't get in.

Simon tutors/teachers/facilitates English language learning for his students.

1. think out loud about your status quo
2. know that wherever you are, the map's margins and lines are never as solid as one might imagine

This permeability is one of the defining characteristics of learning in the virtual age.

This is always a retrospective view. Always worry about the post hoc view that this represents. Perhaps the change was inevitable given the set of initial conditions the classroom represented at this point in time. Perhaps we need the hard rock problem that the status quo ante bellum represents. Perhaps it is just one narrative of many that are equal to more compelling.

No, it's not. Technology carries with it a certain amount of rigidity. Text boxes as discussion mechanisms. Limited to text? Not always but usually. Coding creates finitude not eternity.

Why wouldn't we? Aren't we just privileging the salacious over the boring? This is where the word "privilege" explodes with the non-meaning it is so capable of carrying. I don't even know what it means anymore and I think that this is a classic strategy of those without power, disabuse the word by opening up its boundaries just like some words have been re-abused by closing down their boundaries.

You cannot manage a meme.

Hilarity ensued. I never felt information starved as a student or as a hobbyist or as a business owner or as a parent. It was the tempo of the information gathering that was different.

I think this ignores the genetic fact that some of us are way better at this conversion process. The same might be argued about the handling of information abundance. Yes, we can learn to get more skilled, but there are still differences baked in by adaptive evolution. Unexpectedly it would seem.

You cannot optimize or manage the efficiency of complex systems. It is a fool's errand to try.

Some proportion of the population must be driven by a biological need for certitude. We all have cognitive bias, but for some this need for certitude is so strong that it cannot be balanced. What can we do for those in this situation.

1. We can rule informaton by separating the good (credible, fair, good-faithed) from the bad (inaccurate, unfair, hate-filled)

Problem-solution template/metaphor:

1. We can rule information with tools (the technocratic solution)
2. We can rule the information but only so long as we acknowledge the truth that we are not multitaskers but serial taskers who have to learn how to codeswitch.
3. We can rule the information by allowing ourselves to not be ruled by fear of missing out.

burden metaphor

Make up your mind. Which is it? Here tossed salad of a paragraph is indicative of the confusion we all have in face of this thing called the Internet or the web or mediarich ecosystem. See. We can't even agree with a noun to call the thing out.

eating metaphor

security metaphor

Very much a move toward what we in litcrit call 'reader response' theory or what in physics they call observer effect.

power relationships.

I don't want to say 'understate much' but I do want to indicate the level of complexity that is being undertaken is at a scale similar to exploring the genome.

What are we looking at here: race, gender, economic class or what? Which category is more 'telling'?

geeking out

messing around

hanging out

huh? agency as a everything from total freedom to totalitarian submission, a continuum? Agency within structure.

Perhaps the next paradigm shift has more to do with blurring or erasing the line between informal and formal learning than making that line brighter. Every situation is a learning situation, every learner defines for themselves how best to learn, every person in that person's life can be a participant in that learning culture. The idea would be to make learning a permeable thing.

Interestingly it seems to be working for Laura Hilliger here: http://laurahilliger.github.io/learning-materials/

@dogtrax wrote about this recently discussing the difficulty of allowing his 6th graders to 'have their heads". The structure has more to do with just learning. Schools are about sociality, they are about babysitting for working parents, they are about shared culture, they are about isolating young cohorts from the workplace. I see teachers working within the limits of this structure, but only at the tacit consent of the system, a consent that can be removed at will at any time.

I would not want beginning nurses to shape the curriculum on how to insert a central line. Content can shape participatory approach.

Is this authoritativeness inherently wrong for the classroom? Could there be ways to move from external control toward internal control? Can authority be made to serve autonomy? Isn't this quite common in tutor-mentor or apprenticeship structures, even informal learning situations?

The word "authority" here is one I am unclear on. Does Jenkins mean acknowledged and certified expert knowledge, does he mean hierarchic power, or does he mean something else entirely?

😁👍

You can use emojis in osX by holding down command+control+spacebar to open up the emoji keyboard.

Quote:

"But this was more than a useful innovation. That first book — and the classic paper “A City is Not A Tree,” and really every work by Alexander since — amounted to a kind of technological critique, revolving around the observation that we’re doing something wrong in the way we make things. We’re substituting an oversimplified model of structure-making — one more closely related to our peculiar hierarchically limited way of conceiving abstract relationships — in place of the kinds of transformations that actually occur regularly in the universe, and in biological systems especially. Ours is a much more limited, fragmentary form of this larger kind of transformation. The result of this problem is nothing less than a slow unfolding technological disaster. We know it as the sustainability crisis."

Salingaros, N. A. (2012) The radical technology of Christopher Alexander - the Permaculture research institute. Available at: http://permaculturenews.org/2012/12/06/the-radical-technology-of-christopher-alexander/ (Accessed: 11 January 2016).

Learning is never a side effect. It is a parallel event, occuring all the time. If we consider learning as a consequent event and an object of some other doing, then we are in danger of committing the same sin as the 'banking' model--x causes y. Dangerous and predictably problematic.

Isn't it both? For example, when I do annotations like this I am looking for a way to understand and, if worthwhile, internalize the best ideas I find. It is a part of my own internalization process.

Theory drives practice. Learning theory drives learning practice. Problem is this: what if you are wrong in part or in whole? What has been the consequence of learning as 'banking' theory?

Probably a good idea. Not enough folks focused on informal learning.

Yes, racism is just another tool in the box for the haves to keep the have-nots from sharing in the incredible wealth generated by us all.

Well...applies to blogs as well even when in a fishbowl. Readers are not codeswitching carefully and intentionally.

walkmyworld defined

fishbowl defined

Purpose of post

OMG

What shall pass?

I propose some prototypes for this kind of scholarly/active research work.

1. Pick a short text/poem/digital object.
2. Create a solo Hangout on Air.
3. screencast the text chosen at highest possible resolution.
4. annotate with hypothes.is while the the Hangout is running.
5. When finished, upload to YouTube.
6. Create a YouTube playlist with all participants represented.
7. Use Vialogues or NowComment to comment on other's videos or to analyze or otherwise annotate and observer and name and notice.

Of course one could also do this with a screencasting tool like Screencast-o-matic or Camtasia. I am sure there is better workflow than this, but maybe this "small pieces loosely joined" philosophy works best. It doesn't matter how you get it to the cloud, just get it there and share. I know I will be doing this in my online intro to lit course this semester. Gotta.

1. save

Yes! This is the next step that these technologies enable. And who knows what will happen once we step through that door and see four more doors in front of us. Just hope it's not a tyger behind one or all of them.

Take it a little further from the other night--Google Hangout on Air + Screenshare +Hypothes.is = a new way of collaborative learning. And a new way to learn about our learning, metacognition on the hypothes.is half shell.

Great. My thoughts, too. How do we make these affordances dance, how do we make them mean more and give us a stronger signal on how people and ideas work.

ah, the subtext here could fill volumes...well,

Does it seem like annotation tools are just pouring old wine into new bottles? They afford so much more. What they represent are useful palimpsests, bridges between people carried by 'text' like a StarTrek transporter.

Yet another way to look at writing and reading as indistinguishable conversations. This would be a profound author talk tool.

Just love the rhetorical strategy here--give a fav. I love the phrase "for example". As a reader I am being mapped down a wide blue highway when I hear it or its many cognates.

Love the moniker. Now where's my gat. Gotta have a gat to be a mobster. Or at least a pen.

Consider all the adjacent possible doors that had to open for us to even consider taking this small step toward collaborative annotation. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

But now...annotation can be social. The Webs are alive with marginalia.

In pairs, in web-powered groups, and yes oh yes in crowds

Historically, even very recent history, annotation is a solitary act. Or at best it's an imagined conversation with the author, usually one-sided.

Talk back to the text--annotate

MLK quote from Nobel Speech 1964. Lots of powerful turns at end well worth studying.

This is straight from ym the Bernie Sanders playbook.

sort of like drone strikes?

Ask the wedding party in Yemen...oh wait you can't b ecause you aithorized drones to kill them.

Is this nuance lost on most Americans?

another issue--doing so without killing our economy.

Backhand to global climate change deniers.

No, duh.

Laughable lauds for a failed program.

Another Trump ref

Is this just another "expert" prediction like Christensen's bogus disruption theories.

Is this a veiled attempt at American exceptionalism?

Reference to Trump et al.

change as the only constant

I use Vialogues to do the same kind of video annotation.

Celebrity annotation--is that added value?

slow reading, slow eating, slow .... a new zeitgeist?

Please use this tag below for your annotations--nextprez

If you tweet out, please use #nextprez.

purpose of article--a call to action.

Jeremy Dean, bio at Hypothes.is. Katherine Schulten, bio at NYTimes

Irony of Ted Cruz facing the same challenges from Trump--birtherism gone wild

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

spooky ture.

perhaps this addresses the very real danger of 'doing your job' that you raise in your Dear Henry soundcloud file?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpOMs7qcW8U

A common refrain: the more I know, the more I know that unknown unknowns lurk aplenty. This is the wisdom of experience and not of youth.

The bildungsroman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming-of-age_story

This is a common assumption I teach my students to disabuse whenever they see it. People are rarely a monoculture, almost never monolithic block.

Assumed by whom. I have a hair-trigger bias on this because of some media outlets who have argued that 'some expert', unnamed of course, says this or that. Grrrrrrr!

Each "job" elicits relationships. If it doesn't then you aint larnin'

Question to ask yourself: how does my job pose interesting questions to pursue? what are those questions? are they the right questions to spark my passion?

Here is a comic version that sums up in the final panel: Image Description

Why not build the capabilities of passionate workers and let them build their own damned work environments that "elicit/amplify worker passion 2 improve learning opportunities/drive sustained performance improvement." Whynot have a partnership together? Why does this reek of management hierarchy?

The assumption here is that 'worker passion' however that is defined is the driving force behind higher levels of performance.

This is the driving force behind all of my composition classes. You have to 'wanna' and I mean really wanna write about that special topic or question. Without that you will have at best competent drivel.

One of my favorite annotations is an image that points to dead metaphor, i.e., cliche. In a way it helps to revive both the metaphor and its extension.

Can't remember the exact quote but it reminds me here that only when a tool becomes ordinary does it become useful

Hence the need for a public conversation with the whole book. Hell no to the isolated scholar here

Process as product? Process over product?

Check out this Guardian article on busyness.

The metaphor behind "release" is pretty profound. Released into the wild. Like the book is a injured wild thing that has been nursed to health and now returns to the zeitgeist from whence it came? More like a domesticated thing that we allow in and out through the pet flap in the door?

I am thinking more in terms of 'reader response' theory which argues among other things that the book as a stable thing that the authors have control over no longer exists once it is 'released' into the reader wild. As lit-crit David Bleich once noted, "Knowledge is made by people, not found."

Assumption: not the wisdom of crowds (mobocracy) but the wisdom of wise crowds.

And wouldn't this book have been even more of a conversation had they also published it on a platform like WordPress using PressBook's plug-in. Hey, they could still do it, right?

I am reminded a bit tongue in cheek of Robert Earl Keen's anthem of touring, "The Road Goes on Forever (and the Party Never Ends")

Maybe I don't even know what a soft skill is. Is hammering a nail a soft skill while writing the instructions for how to do it be a "soft skill"?

Sorry but when I see "soft skills" I hear "soft targets" a jargony dodge phrase that avoids the real.

Reminded of Otto Scharmer and The Presencing Institute and how we need to stop leading from the past. You can't change the past. What we need is a new way of conjuring future as it wants to emerge now. Scharmer's book Theory U is an ethereal manual on how to do just that.

Focus--now there's a magic metaphor. Part of me loves legible illusions like the map and chart and the infographic. Insofar as they are of use but only just another filter for meaning I am OK with it, but the institutional demands of schooling always make them something more.<br> I think that part of the problem is in that magic word focus. If you want to extend the metaphor a bit to the biological realm, as I understand it our brains actually put together more information about visual "reality" from the peripheral. Plus, there is a huge paradox in focusing: our high def , sharp vision occupies 1% of the retinal area but preoccupies 50% of the visual cortex. The paradox being that the fovea is a blindspot because of its acuity. We see yet we do not. Our minds are half occupied with seeing the grand 1% of the sensorium (yeah, I can appreciate the analogy to modern economic life here) Small wonder that the Latin word fovea originally translates as "pit or pitfall". Focus is a pitfall, there for a specific adaptive purpose--to survive on some savannah or woodland or veldt somewhere. But we live in a very different environment now. We need the periphery. Metaphor controls, it is the default until we reprogram it. I think we need to reprogram the 'focus' metaphor.

I think so too, but also part of me is so wary of trying to know what is best for someone else.

Mine, too. Partly internalized, partly a space to revisit, partly a piece to fit into the large and borderless 4d puzzle that is living.

the would be two sets of frog eyes at night in a muddy pool.

I don’t think the change is largely in the medium. I think the change is in the stance. Most of what people are calling remediation, most of what I am doing in fact, is just a mapping over from one medium to another. Unless the parallax occurs like Sousanis talks about in Unflattening, I don’t think there is a remediation. It’s not the medium it’s the messenger.

I am trying to hold two or three defs in my head here. Context is all. Language can be terribly tribal. Or in this case a guild language like so much academic jargon, intended to off-put the uninitiated and to make sure that those with the correct handshake and ring can play.