One very important video annotation tool is missing: vialogues.com This tool has been around for nearly a decade and is served by Columbia University. I hope it never deprecates. It is awesome. Why don't more people know about it?

Sooundeth worthy.

Sooner. Yes, sooner.

If it is a contract, it is one of "adhesion" and not enforceable.

How can teachers keep track of the syllabus throughout the semester? Is there an RSS feed for anytime the syllabus is annotated?

Learning grows from the soil of mutual aid. Creativity is only expressed within communities. Creative expression comes through collaboration.

Summed up correctly and fairly? I ask a question of my community. Can anyone help me.

Thinking out loud about one's work, what we are doing, is inferior to thinking out loud about the social context we are working within? That's disturbing. Where is everybody? If this is social bookmarking then where the hell are the social bookmarkers. I wasiInvited to share, but nobody here. Maybe I was mistaken.

These spaces are like desert isles, monads, not social at all. What is the social context when you are alone. A radio station that mistakenly thinks it is broadcasting but no one is listening? A tree falling the forest and no one adjacent?

Wonder how Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework would work here.

Relationships are terrible complex with many variables. I am not sure I want schools too interested in them. Do they understand the social capital that is generated inside of those relationships? Will measuring that increase their understanding?

Some things can't be counted or we just don't know how to count them?

Feels very "quantum effect".

https://youtu.be/6Dp27XYjHuk

The eye watches,

unblinking as a poem

They only know themselves through the other.

They don't know meaning.

They are careless AF

Prime numbers never rust

icecreeps? I see creeps? it creeps? A poem creeping and creaking and cracking open

a seed? permafrost? Siberian meteor gloating and thawed.

Yes! a poem.

giving light permission

What? A poem.

A light shining through

apron rot still

Has anybody tried to do a semester walkthrough using a screencasting tool and a presentation tool of some kind? I think that might be a valuable tool for first year comp students.

Or maybe a short simulation like Clark Aldritch uses:

Be aware of how Zoom and the online scheduling tool Calendly and Google Calendar integrate, hand-in-glove.

I discovered how valuable this was for students last semester. I did a weekly screencast and walkthrough of the course which I also did synchronously on Monday. I also had a checklist for those who use the damned things.

https://youtu.be/bCDmDzIOZ-g

But never forget what Einstein is purported to have said, but was probably said by William Cameron:

Here is a place to add more possible guidelines:

1. Provide a scratchpad each week where students can reflect on the week on progress or regress.

2. Get lots of quick feedback from learners with Google Forms.

3.Introduce the idea of feedforward to students and teachers.

Amen to that.

Daunting

The ultimate practical question for fall of 2020.

How can we connect as learners to build our classroom community? Distance doesn't matter, but the "we" does, more than a wee bit, it does.

So amazing.

Do I have the tools? Do you?

no matter what, right? We better think about better futures drawing us forth than this. What is the future that this represents? Risky for all and shitty for all. We can do way better, but the stakes are too high for those large and in charge.

Yet we so blithely call this a 're-start'.

And don't forget the marketers.

a meal fit for the transfixed.

a souffle of unreason

short-circuited

Saul on the road to Damascus

the clap

Hallelujah!

as it grows from light to sound

it will make a believer of us

I used this in a poem, or it became a poem here.

https://youtu.be/qs35t2xFqdU

No shit. Just think of all the literacy modalities that someone younger has to deal with. Memes. Data visualizations. Tweets. Tiktok vids. Instagram stories. Digital annotation. Video annotation. YouTubes. Akkkk. Emojis. Gifs. Think of all the lateral communication modalities written, read, spoken that our students face daily. And the success with which most of them navigate these...well, it is extraordinary.

I read for me first. I read my way second. We all have reading blind spots. I think reading laterally reduces these blind spot, but it adds others. When I read people like Green it puts my back up and I say, "Who the fuck made you king of the lateral reading hill?" Another expert/sociopath rises up to keep me down. I teach to make people more powerful. Reading tools help, but the idiosyncratic ways we use those tools are grandly variably. I want it that way not one way.

Thinking of these margins as a raised bed in a community garden. Share the wealth, the commonwealth.

It seems that many of my students have done exactly this:

emojis memes vids for instagram, etc. FB Twitter

All of these have a grammar and a lexicography and many constraints. Aren't they already doing this? Isn't this already much more difficult now than it ever was? Hence, another argument for reading differently bu perhaps one that applies equally fo teacher and learner.

Gutenberg Parenthesis.

Also, this: https://youtu.be/pQHX-SjgQvQ

Am I supposed to read all of these hyperlinks or are they supposed to show a mountain of posts as proof of "changes be happnin"?

Code switching literacy.

Whose flexibility and adaptability?

Finally, we get to what should be the first thing we read and see. Not a big red corpuscle/virus marketing icon. So very tone-dead.

Blatant--the tripwire is more deaths. If we have more deaths then we will contingencies for making people safe.<br> Roadmaps? Seriously? You need to go back to your literature classes and do a re-start on metaphor and its significance as a frame for shaping meaning. A roadmap is not the frame we have or want. Isn't that obvious?

Start with this assumption and you end in tragedy. You start with humanity and its safety, then you ripple out to your mission statement, but not before you have secured everyone's safety.

Did anyone do any UX work on this site before it went up? It tries to come across as expert, but all it seems to me to do is weigh in as heavy-handed and...useless. If you really wanted this to be interactive, a true back and forth, then the site might look more like a Discord or Slack site. I don't think WKU really wants feedback. If they did this site would be better and it would have been better all along. There is mos def NOT a crowdsourced document. This is a missive from on high written by a committee begging for us all to buy in or at least to not rock the boat. It is almost as if it was intended so that the virus of free thought and critique would not infect the university body politic.

The metaphor here is strikingly bad. We are not playing a game where COVID 19 is the opponent. We are talking about human lives not touchdowns. The brain is a metaphor machine. As such the metaphoric frames can control our entire response to a crisis. If we characterize it as a game with finite rules and goals, well, that's what we get. BE CAREFUL.

Not sure this is what the result was. It is important to realize that this shift was more a stagger. Anybody can stagger if their job depends upon it. And the authors (whoever they are) say that we learned something from our students. Was a study done? Surveys? Analysis? I have seen none of this. Without an indication of how they decided what is "clear", it is abundantly clear that this is an unproven assumption. No one I know actually looked at the blind spots revealed by the virus as it struck our campus.

The institution didn't do a thing any more than BigRed did a thing. People did things. And why this attempt to frame this as a heroic effort? Isn't this a waste of effort? Doesn't this reveal the sense of inadequacy that the authors are trying to hide? BTW, who the hell are the authors? What are their professions, fields, disciplines? What is their "cred"? What is their bias? Who gets paid? Cui bono?

Is this assumption true?

Is anyone else disturbed by the use of branding in this? What does BigRed, a fictional entity used solely for selling the image of WKU, have to do with something so deadly serious as COVID 19?

It is all intertwined like bamboo corms, all the stories from the past.

Maybe he would say, "Don'b be a hero."

My father ghosts in and out of my life like this. My wife was fixing our bird feeder the other day when she told me she lost the lock washer for the nut that held the whole thing together. I said, "I know just the thing." I went to my shop, tugged open a multi-tiered drawer with thousands of bits and bobs my father had scavenged for me. I found the washer and saw my Dad's satisfied smile as we both considered his real legacy to all of his children. I gave the washer to my wife and she said, "Thank you." I responded, "No, thank Dad." She smiled, knowing and grateful for his legacy.

Questions (please add them as they occur to you).

1. What are the long and short-term consequences of C19 on the ground level for folks on the inside? Folks on the outside? The country? The social fabric?
2. What would you give up to fix it short term and long term.

An aside: witness the superiority of digital annotation (@Hypothes_is style) to Twitter threads.

Attendez! Certainmente. But the cliches need to be run through the chipper and used for mulching and fertilizing some better ideas.

I predict lots of "set-aside" versus "drop out". Work then back to school then work then back to school. What we need to do is to be the place that recognizes this and makes sure that every re-entry is frictionless and...easy.

Emergence. Unpredictable in its effects but predictably disruptive.

It doesn't appear that these values have won the day. Probably why Silicon Valley values have won the day. There is never a values vacuum--a post-truth consciousness.

Five percent. What does that number even mean?

What are the numbers at WKU? Should we ask the obvious market-centric questions like: how can we sell this degree better? Or should we just accept this as the zeitgeist, the river that we can really push against? I don't know, but I think that general education courses will need to become integrated into the other disciplines. I envision an English instructor like me being a team teacher with a business teacher and showing students how to do effect research or how to write a business plan that does what you want it to do. So, English teachers would be part of a real writing and reading across the curriculum program.

Zoom Enervation Syndrome (ZES). It is ZEST without the T. Low T zest? Maybe zoombombing is a necessary element to ZES, adding the T to it.

MIT's microcredential AI needs to be something we are thinking about as we add value to our courses. Why couldn't our Intro to Lit students get "added value" by taking a piece of a great online program like UPenn's ModPo MOOC. We might re-design Intro to Lit as a "buffet course" where we have main course work and then side dishes. Students would have to complete the main course stuff but they would have agency over the side dishes. I know, I know, how would I make it work. Probably by walking it through one semester and seeing what blindspots are revealed and what anti-fragilities exist.

I think this is true, but I spent three years facilitating a MOOC for the NWP and all of my work was on building community with others. This is where we fail building community in Blackboard. We need folks whose job is to not only do pedagogy and content but others who are group facilitators who can encourage students to be facilitators. And I don't want to hear how that would cost time and money. I know it works and it is so hard to be teacher, facilitator, trainer all at once. That is one of the big changes I am contemplating for my embedded tutors in Fall 2020--training them in online facilitation.

I know this, but I have almost 120 online students this semester. I have encouraged them to use virtual office hours, but I am unwilling to have my whole life be available as a virtual office. That is a prescription for total burnout.

This is why helping students create their own networks (of which I am part) is so important. And I wish these academics would stop using words like "robust" because WTF does that mean? Or my personal bugaboo, "rigor"

We need to teach everyone how to succeed online, especially ones who are ill-prepared for online college work. I am thinking low-income students coming from schools who do not have the resources to prepare students.

One area I find disheartening for me is that students, especially under-resourced and thus underprepared students, don't know how to create their own online personal learning networks and don't know how to plug in to existing networks of peers and mentors and others who are doing what they like to do. This is a disastrous failure. I think my freshman comp class needs to emphasize how writing and reading can be tools to create these network and to extend them year-by-year as you go.

WKU needs to be part of consortia, state-wide or regional or national or all three, We would have the same kind of online footprint as OPEN SUNY.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/17/new-recession-sets-stage-abuses-profits-critics-fear

Vulnerable student populations. Aren't these the ones we have targeted for recruitment and retention the last several years? These are what Tressie Cottom identifies as "single mothers, downsized workers, veterans, people of color and people transitioning from welfare to work' I might add veterans, re-toolers, retired but not tired.<br> Will they be picked off like antelope from the herd by the for-profits? Yeah, I think so.

Now Hylands Credentials.

IN a nutshell, blockchain

I have no doubt that this is her generous attitude, but the biggest problem we face in the "grass community" is that the culture has been forcibly ripped out of agriculture. There are not plenty of good farmers out there by anyone's definition. I am not virtue signalling here. I don't count myself as a good farmer. Aubrey is a good farmer by almost any measure but especially by her mighty fine milk.

The motion is of one piece with the quiet.

That word speaks volumes. It made me laugh out loud when I read it.

This is an abstraction for most folks or if not they only understand it in terms of their own work. Dairy relentless is different than sheep relentless is different than teacher relentless is different than..... The word is an abstraction masquerading as being one thing, having one meaning. Such is the foolishness of dictionaries and lexicography. I have known dairy relentless. It has a special feel that I know you have tried to capture in your photos, GG. I can guarantee you that while the physical aspect of this is important, it plays second fiddle to the concertmaster, the mind. If the mind can't handle it, no amount of metabolism and stamina is going to help. Your emphasis on focus (another one of the futile abstract words) is better, but there is also an un-focus that is absolutely crucial. None of this work happens without a balance and by-play between the two. In other words if I don't have a certain amount of what appears to be looking to the distance while I am also focused on checking on the health of each lamb, then I am not a good sheepfarmer.

I love the word "usufruct" in regard to farming. It is a term from Roman law that asserts that we don't own the land, we only own the fruits. Anything that diminishes the usufruct is against the law. For me, that law in a natural one. I do think that modern agriculture is just as sick as everything else in our 'post-truth' world. Aubrey does it right. I try to do it right. Wendell Berry tells the story about how a good farmer walking out of field always scrapes their boots onto that field before they leave it. I live by that.

One fine cold winter evening

this city boy

working on a dairy,

walked down to the milk tank

in the January dark.

The electric lines

sang and snapped

in the cold

as I greedily skimmed

the cream from the tank

for next morning's breakfast.

Until that moment

walking home

I did not know one thing.

I thought I knew many things,

but they all had condensed l ike cream

into one moment.

Now I knew one thing

and then I knew nothing.

Love the name. Our farm doesn't even have a name. Here's a sheep-level view of one or our pastures. I see what you did here. Trying to inspire us to look at our own "farming" lives. Tricksy.

Thanks to Daniel for dropping by.

https://youtu.be/ls5C0be_EpQ

Thanks to Sarah for following up:

https://youtu.be/34Q0Hm4LaQ4

Thanks to Wendy for initiating the marginal support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TO48Cnl66w

I'm not so sure. COVID19 has revealed so many cracks in the system. Can we really build on top of that creacked foundation? We need to document the results of this stress test so that we can answer the question. I put my trust in nimble teachers first. NImble admins? Not so much.

Call the empathy police. We are going to need them.

And imagination intensive, too. The idea of feedforward comes to mind

This is quite a trope.

I am. I am 65 with an impaired immune system. I am afraid.

I took words from your previous paragraph to create a found poem. Just trying to honor your text with close reading.

Impact.

Ground Zero,

a whirl,

learning to cope and console,

suspended,

like dust

in a new reality

of not knowing.

No airplanes.

Nearly deserted highway

Marking another forever day

that changed

the way

we live.

https://diigo.com/0h1y3v

I am slated to take a similar one from our unis Center for This and That Online.

A slightly different cover of R.E.M.

https://youtu.be/Az_ULnL2Cw8

I like this sentence. Helpful.

https://youtu.be/KrAqO9F-12A Clear and succinct examples. Thanks.

An interesting follow up link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(semiotics)

Gonzo journalism

evaluating

What kind? Federated?

Learn from failures:

What are these failures?

What are we calling "the net"?

https://youtu.be/7Exi0cCFAfU

https://youtu.be/o8HqzYKT2lM

https://youtu.be/dlFEJ-Ctpjc

Rearview crosses Railroad ties Oh, Hail Marys Friday nights Heartbeat baby Low-beam lights God, I miss when you were mine Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us Shotgun sunset A cool mint kiss Backseat promise Breaking it Floorboard feeling County lines God, I miss when you were mine Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us In a sleepy town, just jumping in Far too young to know that summers end We were us, we can't go back It's what it is, but God I miss Back when that song was a song I could sing along without thinkin bout you every time it came on Every beat, every line, every word, every time When a road was a road I could roll on through without wishin that empty seat was you Money was gas, dreams were dust Love was fast and we were us Every beat, every line, every word, every single time I just close my eyes and you're ridin shotgun You and me, baby, on the run I can feel your heartbeat, baby

https://youtu.be/AWLVLFPswGA

or not ever

https://youtu.be/zgMnlptZt7I

When someone says should

I withdraw into my shell.

I have so little power against

the hierarchy

that it is way safer to hide than fight.

I have done way more

for my students by hiding in plain sight

than ever i have fighting

the People of the Should.

Pre-sets. Teacher as pre-set. Pre-set to "teacherly". i sign. This future is not now nor is this now the future. No. Not liminal. No. Not thresholds. The Shakers built thresholds in their sleeping quarters so that each room could be swept clear every day. and the dustbin could be hung up on a wall peg next to the broom. Done. Dusted. Now Not in some God-forsaken future. God lives in the daily dirt. Forgiving and forlorn.

This is the source of my feeling and sensing and thinking and knowing.

It all starts now. Feel. Sense.

I find myself being a "horse of instruction" way too often. I think it is fear and a lack of faith that make me not be the "tyger of wrath" more often. What are you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tTJGKOUPJ8

Again, faith. We think of catastrophe as monolithic, but it has flaws, capacities for failure.

Such faith. Defines faith. This is the faith we need in the face of existential threat. This is the faith that will redeem us in Gaia's eyes.

Taken from Blake's "Proverbs of Hell", a mind-blowing read.. Here are a few more of my favs: What is now proved was once only imagin’d.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

The cut worm forgives the plough.

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

I finally remembered to do it this morning. I remembered by practicing just before I went to bed, rehearsing what I would do in the morning. I will keep rehearsing and then gradually I will do the "Reverse Maui" where I say, "What a great day it has been!" "What a great night of sleep it is going to be!'

I am planning on doing this using app Explain Everything.

There is a certain amount of goofing around--Fogg's words. That reminds me of Mimi Ito's acronym (HOMAGO) to which I add (SO): hanging out, messing about, geeking out, sharing out) A certain amount of experimentation and loose play in devising and implementing tiny habits.

It would be super helpful to share the feedback you get from the Google Form with the class. I do this in my own classes and students seem to appreciate it.

I was hoping that more people would read this, look through Wakelet, and be prompted to consider the role of ritual in their workplaces. Gonna keep looking at this myself, especially in my own life.

https://youtu.be/yiKFYTFJ_kw

Amen. Amen. Amen.

If you have ever watched any of my zeegas you know how important and sustaining the lighthouse metaphor is to my personal and creative life. You never know what ship you kept from being cast onto the rocks. All you know is that you were steadfast at best or as others even my own children regard me--obdurate, flint-headed. Folks like us have "keep on" hard-wired into our DNA. I can see damned well your lighthouse and I can only hope that our respective beams cross and amplify for all those sailing the dangerous seas.

I can gin up the empathy to imagine what you are saying. I feel it most when someone cares enough to drop back by, poke their head in my door and say thank you or just a kind hello. I can feel that and I know you can, too. Most people on the outside don't know who we are. They don't even know they are on the 'outside'. I say this more in sorrow than in anger. And I realize that the anger I feel is easier to feel than this sorrow. I wish I could keep the connections but the entire structure of school WORKS AGAINST LONG-TERM CONNECTION. And those caps are the anger in me, open and raw. The sorrow I feel is altogether something...different, harder to feel, internalized into depression if not dealt with. So...thanks for the mental health moment. I certainly need it.

When you do this long enough, yes, this is exactly the deal. I have always wanted to keep up connections, find ways to create useful tools, say newsletters, for my grads, but the zero sum day thwarts all. Only enough hours in a day to do what I do? I teach five university general education courses this semester. Three of them are comp courses. That means roughly 700-800 papers, a smattering of unusual projects, and 3500-5000 pages of material to read and respond to. I work harder in one semester than I can be bothered to explain to most people (except you). Why not be bothered? Because they would not believe me or they simply could not urge forth the imagination to generate the empathy needed to understand what I do. Yet...I feel it is important work and hard to stay connected to the fine folk who raft down the river of my course. I am grateful for the question, Dan. Very grateful.

One of the important discoveries I have made about using tech in the classroom is that I can model its use, show how I use it, keep using it in a public way, and generally hope it gets adopted. What I know from the population of students I teach (underprepared, first generation, working class) is that they've got quite enough tech in their lives. They are terrific people but they have busy lives. No time for new stuff that doesn't solve an immediate problem. I get a few privileged students in my classes who do adopt tech readily. Classic case of the rich getting richer, seeing past the minimal amount of time and attention needed to adopt a tool like Wakelet. I have three or four students out of 65 who are adopting this tool in the way you so astutely suggest. I find the same issues with Vialogues and Hypothes.is in the classroom. Mostly I get respectful students who clearly are not buying what I am selling, hence my soft sell, a wing and a prayer.

Maybe instead I should always be closing?

https://youtu.be/AO_t7GtXO6w

So a liberal education is one that doesn't stamp out curiosity? I would love to see the data supporting that students are incurious "these days". Ok, boomer?

Who do these people work for? Who funds them?

John Warner's blog: https://www.johnwarnerwriter.com/

Here is his email address: johnw@mcsweeneys.net

Here is some info about the author:

"John Warner, writer/editor/speaker/consultant with more than twenty years of experience teaching college-level writing. His newest books are Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing. He is editor emeritus of McSweeney's Internet Tendency and you can read his weekly column at the Chicago Tribune. "

I love writing process posts. I am reminded of my work with high school students where I had them create "Instructables" to post on their blogs.

I will shout the 50 ways to lose your balance---

I wanted to change this to "Y'all call learning".

Or a little more explicitly with 2Pac

https://youtu.be/rKQNcOI8KWE

https://youtu.be/F1uG1pDd8QE

Remember how our children learned to walk? Yeah, they didn't learn how to walk, they learned how to fall down.

Taking heart

A Chance Haiku

Chance.

A verb.

A noun.

The way in which things fall out.

A cadence.

A step.

This is the operative phrase. It is what I mean by providing the simplest set of initial conditions from which their heads and my head can merge and emerge. I am not doing my job if there isn't some initial confusion on both our parts.

Mr. Margins...hmmm, great rapper/poet name.

You can come here to comment or add to.

Might I suggest you listen to this discussion of 'trim tab' by Jeff Bridges? Start at 7:39 or listen to the whole thing.

Are words the ultimate abstraction? Little porns made of pixels that when looked at closely enough cease to mean? One of my hopes for this poem was to honor Kevin's discoveries. Another was to sketch out further what one letter added can add. Another was to play further with his words--to play-gerize. I hate the word plagiarize. I just want to subvert the living eff out of it. To decolonize it from the inner margins of that moebius strip.

Again, Mr. Margins raps true:

Dystopia, it’s a word that's overused

But that doesn’t mean its meaning doesn’t hold the truth

The loneliest muse I’ve been beholden to you since the fallopian tubes

My colloquial roots challenge colonial views reported as news

These are Kevin's words/worlds. I kinda fucked up the formatting. Forgiveness? Not permission.

Here are phrases that come unbidden from these words into my world:

the skin of history

mindscrawl

divisions come together

ash and assignation

echo lingers

word crawl chiron

mad voices

crawling voices

slicing voices

skinned voices

ashy voices

bond of madness

bonds of ash and possibility

lingering bonds,

echoes bound,

assassination possibilities

mad assassination

mad assignation

The reader can join in from the margins using Hypothes.is (or any other tool they wish. The headline and the word numbers in the post are open for business. Marginal and opened, 24-7-365. Or as Mr. Margins says,

"When I get agitated, words are ma Ritalin If life’s a jotter then I’m living in the margins that I scribble in But sometimes when you’re on the outside looking in You get a better view of how the world spins."

But make sure to

Mind the gap when alighting from this place…

I am 'splainin' from the margins.

Best I can.

"Splainin' from the margins.

That's a plan.

https://youtu.be/NahcSOrLCdQ

Here's the lyrics.

I call it a neo-rhetoric in that I am an accursed academic at heart and sometimes jargon is worth having. I think that my job as a composition teacher has become super-constricted. I am a text guy left at the dock by the ship of digital rhetoric that is setting sail. I panic and race for the gangplank and leap. This is my leap--neo-rhetoric, image + text = whatevs.

I have been playing with image and text with my friend Kevin Hodgson. It is a game I wish I played more with all my friends. The point of using an equation here is as a metaphor. Like a gestalt...the sum of the parts is greater than the parts alone. I suppose that is the definition of meaning. The parts (in this case the words) take a flying leap off the cliff and on their way down they click together into meaning. Word becomes world. The word becomes flesh just by adding one letter.

Legislators of the Word

Legislators of the World

Poets are the unmoved movers. God? At least demigods.

Poets not only don't understand the words that they use, but they don't feel what their trumpets are trying to inspire.

And poets have to live with the words they use, knowing full well that they really don't reveal understanding of the shadow that the future has cast on us.

The future casts its shadows upon the present. This is the opposite of what we normally think, Santayana's idea that those who do not study the shadows of the past are doomed to repeat those shadows. Nope. It is the future, what we want and what we want to happen, that casts those shadows on the past. Future shadows. Living in the backcast shadows ow the future.

I think he means that the Muse (inspiration) cannot be captured but invited to appear.

high priests of the word

Here are ways to reach author Alex Corbitt:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alex_corbitt?lang=en

Website: https://www.alexcorbitt.com/

Super glad to have the author share here. It is risky business to make yourself vulnerable in a space like this. I am grateful.

Robert Twigger has a great book about learning called "Micromastery"

I am trying to figure out what the entry trick is for this discipline called "teen activism". This is some of what I am seeing, but these are not really entry tricks so much as abstractions.

1.peer audience? 2.finding student capacity? 3.enlarging the field of possibility? 4.teaching for social justice? 5.navigate and negotiate with students? 6.research tools? 7.create media?

Not being critical here, but I am looking for the entry level trick to get my students into activism much like Twigger explains here with cooking eggs as an entry trick into the discipline of cooking.

Is this too big an ask?

Good that you have both of these tools in your kit.

THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS A secret history of the war

AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH

blazed a comet

https://youtu.be/sJi41RWaTCs

until the truth

https://youtu.be/yCiZJbUJSk8

So say we all.

https://youtu.be/B3EzRAgjo_s

Juke the stats

https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM

Each link below is part of a chain of protest for all the wars I have known in my life. These are all inspired or taken from the Washington Post article, AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH.

And ever it was

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

the truth blazing a comet

https://youtu.be/sJi41RWaTCs

until the truth

https://youtu.be/yCiZJbUJSk8

Juke the stats.

https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM

And ever it was

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

So say we all.

https://youtu.be/B3EzRAgjo_s

Big bad quote:

What the past quarter century has taught us is that there are five basic failure modes of commons-based strategies to construct more attractive forms of social relations.

1. Companies and countries can usually sustain focused strategic efforts for longer and more actively than distributed networks of users. They can and do use these advantages strategically to re-centralize control over consumers and voters using mechanisms that are layered over or circumvent the still-open parts of the ecosystem. This is not true in all cases; Wikipedia has enough activated users that they are able to overcome concerted efforts to distort information; major FOSS development projects of core pieces of infrastructure beat out proprietary solutions. But, as Wikipedia approaches its 20th anniversary, we have to recognize that these major examples of successful distributed commons-based social production continue to be our prime examples. Time and again over the past twenty years we have seen companies spending money to harness relatively passive consumers— whether it is in carrier-operated WiFi networks that completely overshadowed the emergence of community wireless networks, or whether it is in the App economy that Apple introduced, based on the App Store model, that increasingly has displaced for most people the openstandards based personal computer running an openstandards based html browser. And in the past five years we have seen countries find ways of using the open nature of communications to engage in propaganda and manipulation, as well as to track dissidents and opponents by tapping into the surveillance capabilities that companies developed to continuously gather information about their users for commercial sale.

2. Distributed social relations can themselves develop internal hierarchies and inequities (the Iron Law of Oligarchy), as current debates over Wikipedia and FOSS gender participation ratios and governance make clear. 5 See generally Julie E. Cohen, The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy, 31 PHILOSOPHY & TECH. 213 (2018). 83 A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UTOPIA? [Vol. 18

3. Distributed open communications have provided enormous play for genuinely hateful and harmful behavior, such that we find ourselves seeking some power to control the worst abuses—the power of the platforms we want to hold democratically accountable, or the power of countries to regulate those platforms for us. As early as Gamergate, when networked gamers mobilized to harass and intimidate women: game developers and media critics, in the name of geek masculinity and free speech, and more prominently since the various elections of 2016, we have come to appreciate the extent to which fully distributed networks can underwrite abusive behavior.

4. More fundamentally, as long as we live in a society where people have to make money to eat and keep a roof over their heads, markets produce stuff we really like and want. For all the broad complaints about Amazon, it has produced enormous consumer welfare. More directly, for all the romanticization of fan videos and remix, the emergence of subscription streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime has been a boon to professional video creators and underwritten a golden age of professional video entertainment and narrative, both fiction and nonfiction.
5. States are still necessary to counter market power, provide public goods on a sustained and large-scale basis by using coercive taxing and spending powers, redistribute wealth, and provide basic social and economic security for the majority of the population.

Crooked timber

)

Politics cannot live without disagreement.

Are you familiar with Eli Meyerhoff's new book? Really 'noises up' my understanding of abolition. Maybe yours, too.

Can we transform 'whiteness'? Or must it be cast off? What must we become if we are already 'white'? Is this just another example of impossible bootstrapping? Are we recognizing and acknowledging how difficult a prospect this is? I think the lessons of Daryl Davis are apt and practical.

Are you familiar with Eli Meyerhoff's new book? Really 'noises up' my understanding of abolition. Maybe yours, too. I think this whole discussion tends toward what James Scott called "illegibility". It needs a whole lot more noising up and illegibility.

[Who the hell am I kidding? No one will ever read this. Please prove me wrong.]

Kickoff

Marking up a text is:

an act of empathy,

caring for the future,

sometimes angry,

being open and vulnerable,

keeping on

leaky roof

into pixels?

Yes. The greatest understatement evuh!

You can dance

You can jive

Having the time of your life

https://youtu.be/xFrGuyw1V8s

Here is the archive for my newsletter.

Yes, it does still ring true for me. Truer as I think on it.

caress

worn

holes,

blanket

torn,

time like a shoulder

tucked

close to

the start

of nothing at all

plastered

tattered

torn

rough

unwoven

scratching

frozen

cold

nothing nothing

I fly inward here: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/NoTitleTillDone_said_Penelope_to_Odysseus

Connected with Ms Garcia via LinkedIn. Grateful for work here although I have a colleague who was not so enamoured of the article. He might or might not be ready for the "OK, boomer" meme.

Quite a caveat: a hole has the potential to be a posthole or a sinkhole.

Feedback and feedforward are terms adopted from systems theory and should be adaptable to learning and instructional design.