Category: archives

From the Draft Archives: Self Organized Learner Support from Jenny Mackness

Jenny’s reflections apply to far more than learning contexts! It connects with the recent post on Stewardship.

birds flying over bushes at dawn

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So a key aspect of support is fostering a sense of self-reliance and this might require some ‘de-schooling’. It gets away from the ‘what can we do to support you’ approach, to ‘what can you do to support yourselves’ approach. The support is still there but it takes a different form.What would this mean in practice? Some of the following thoughts come to mind:

  • Explicit, up front discussion about the meaning of ‘support’ in these terms.
  • Clarity about and discussion of expectations
  • Provision of an environment which is ‘true’ to these principles such as described by the factors we have used in our research on emergent learning
  • Provision of tools that maximize the power of individuals to manage their own learning
  • Modelling and demonstration of self-organisation by the course conveners
  • Standing back and letting the learners get on with it, i.e. letting go of control

And perhaps the last point is where the shift might be difficult to make. So much of a traditional course is based on authority and control. Learners will not learn to self-organise unless we ‘let go’, even if that means letting go of traditional ways of thinking about learner support.

via Learner support in MOOCs. An alternative perspective | Jenny Connected.

From the Archives: 5 Things I Learned Reading/Commenting on the Moxie Project

I’m not sure why I never posted this. I regret not sharing this with the students in my role as their blog commenter. The last post on the Project Moxie site is 2020. I was a commenter in 2013. How often do we get to cross over our silos of age, space and domain and reflect together? 

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First, a rather long preamble. Feel free to skip. For a number of years I’ve participated as a volunteer in the Duke Reader Project. The origins of the project were to find alumni to act as critical readers of a students writing in a particular course. Last year they added blogs as part of some of the summer experiences Duke students can join.  Last year I followed a group in Durban, South Africa. It was a “so-so” experience. The students didn’t blog regularly and none replied to questions or responses from their readers.

This year I got picked to be a commentor for the The Moxie Project. (More here.)  I was encouraged by the topic (working with women’s organizations in New York City,) and by the level engagement of the sponsor, Ada Gregory.

Here was our introduction to the project:

Dear Readers,

Thanks so much for agreeing to support us by reading and responding to the student blog for DukeEngage NYC– the Moxie Project. The blogging is much more meaningful when students have a community that is following along with them, pushing them to think more deeply, and encouraging them when they need it.

Tomorrow 10 students will arrive to begin their summer in New York City. They’ll begin work first thing Monday morning with little time to adjust to the pace of the city, 9-5 work, or the challenges of the Moxie Project. Each of them crafted a pre-arrival blog that you can read now!

Each week throughout the summer, I will send you a brief note about the activities and topics we’ve been discussing and a link to the blog when new posts are up. You can expect to see about five blogs each week from different students. Some posts will be crafted in response to a particular prompt, which I will share with you. However, students are also encouraged to write about whatever might be most significant to them during that particular week.
… Please do not feel pressure to leave comments on every post. Look for posts with few responses and, of course, ones that are most interesting to you.

Let me know if you have any questions at all. Again thanks so much for helping us. It should be a great summer!

Enjoy their blogs: sites.duke.edu/moxie

Ada

This week our writers have posted their final reflective blogs and I decided to go off-script and compose a blog post TO them, reflecting on my “Moxie-at-a-distance” experience. So here goes.

Dear Moxies

I’m stealing Brianna’s method of “five things” to take a moment and share what I’ve learned and what it has meant to be to be a Moxie project reader. This is my way of thanking all of you for letting me have a peek inside of your experiences and your courage in posting your thoughts out to the world.

1. Feminism, it all its glorious (and often misunderstood) diversity is alive and well in your generation. THANK GOODNESS!

2. Life is busy, but it is very much worth taking the time for reflection.

3. Some things tie our generations together. Some things give me a sense of a chasm.

4. Reading about sex still makes me squirm.

5. We can/must/won’t ever stop learning.

From the Blog Archives: Stewardship

Blue door locked with a ladder leaned against the wall to the right of the door.
Blue door and ladder in Tunisia

David Schmaltz wrote an amazing blog post back in 2013. It took me a while to track it down. (I suspect that many of us with WordPress have a problem that somewhere along the line permalink URLS changed, so finding things can be a bit challenging.)

Below is a quote from his longer post. Worth a read. I think now, more than ever and particularly in the US we need to shift our mindsets and behaviors to be more accountable, to initiate public good and to get out of our own self-absorbed ruts. Here David writes about Stewardship.

I believe that attributing Stewardship to an organization qualifies as a mistaken attribution, because Stewardship can only belong to individuals. And, I believe it doesn’t matter what an organization’s underlying organizing principle might be. Stewardship might thrive anywhere. It requires no permission, for permission would render Stewardship into just another form of paternalism. Stewardship has to be the sole and personal responsibility of individuals like you and me.

Thinking about how I exhibit Stewardship popped the funky trance. I am nearly incapable of passing an abandoned shopping cart. I consider it my responsibility to return to its proper place every one I find. I feel offended when I see one left to block traffic or rudely shoved up onto a median strip. Clearly, whomever abandoned it there lacked a sense of Stewardship.

The Muse makes the distinction between what she calls Renter and Owner mindset. The Renter mindset knows it’s not getting any appreciation in the value of any real estate, and easily justifies letting the yard go to seed on their watch. The Owner mindset embodies the practice of Stewardship by assuming full responsibility for the ongoing well-being of whatever they engage with, whether they actually own the property or not.

This house we’re presently renting gets cared for as if it were my own. The neighbors can’t quite understand why I would dig out that stump and improve the quality of the soil at my own expense, and why I mow to more exacting standards than the owners on the block. Stewardship explains it. I feel a deep need to care for whatever’s in my charge.Trying to create an organization that values Stewardship seems to discount Stewardship, and withholding Stewardship until it’s sanctioned and safe might sour any possibility of experiencing it. Stewardship isn’t difficult once the Owner mindset kicks in. The challenge might be to shift my own mindset first. I always have opportunities to care about what follows after me, and I can even see them when my head’s screwed on Stewardship straight.

I’m learning that my sense that I should wait for permission prevents me from practicing wise Stewardship. Stewardship thrived even under Nazi occupation, where it was deadly dangerous to care about preserving civil culture. I think we might be hard-wired to prefer it, though frequently short-circuited by the distracting demands of modern life.

Don’t ask when your company will wake up, wake up yourself. Own yer own shit, Man. Stand up even when nobody’s counting because you’re counting on you. And so are we all.

Here’s a link to a YouTube recording of this Webcast.

via Stewardship | Work | Pure Schmaltz.

From the Draft Archives: Google’s Death Manager

Image of a mother and her three adult children
Mom with her three kids

Death has continued to show up in our online interactions. It still seems prudent to consider how you not only manage your social media and online information while you are alive, but what happens to it after you die. Well, maybe all that free storage will disappear and this will only be an issue for those who host their own domain, and I suspect when payments stop, things will disappear. Maybe having our ephemera evaporate is a good thing… What do you think? Since the Forbes article linked below came out in 2013, I have had to manage the social media of my Mom, who passed away four + years ago. I realized I had a very mixed relationship with her social media. I saw all her emails, what kind of junk email she was targeted with, what ads Facebook served to her. I saw she did not know how to unsubscribe or block things that were irrelevant to her. I also saw how important social media was to a woman alone in her 80’s.

Close up of my Dad's face with a glass of wine in his hands.
My Dad

It reminded me of when my Dad died in 2010 and I would read his emails and feel both more loss, and feel closer. I got to read about his old-timey music community, see the last remnants of his and my mom’s RV and Miata adventure days. It took me about 2 years to stop reading and to unsubscribe and eventually let his account go. While cleaning the basement after a flood in January, I found his hard drives which I had held on to. They finally went to e-cycling a couple of weeks ago. I never looked at the content.

Mom’s Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook accounts are still active and I have all the passwords and permissions. I’ve turned off all alerts and don’t look very often. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was ready to delete the accounts, but I just couldn’t do it. What if one of her old friends didn’t know she had died and tried to get in touch?

Managing the social media of loved ones after death is not just a technical, mechanical set of practices. It is part of how we mourn and grieve these days, how we hold on or let go.

A question that used to come up when I facilitated many online communities was how to handle the death of a member. There are many layers to this which we struggled to navigate back in the good old early days of online communities. Since then, people have come up with many useful and thoughtful approaches. Now Google stands ready to help you with all your Google accounts — not to manage the human side, but how to deal with our digital detritus. Very interesting!
Will You Use Google’s Death Manager To Let Loved Ones Read Your Email When You Die? – Forbes.