I’m late writing this newsletter, work ran into the evening and by the time we were done with meetings and emails, I limbed off to bed and nodded off almost as soon as I closed my eyes.
It’s Halloween weekend and there will be festivities over the next few days, a parade on Washington Road tomorrow, and Trick or Treating on Sunday evening. We were late arriving at school, but dropped him off in costume and let him find his way to the classroom. I hope he’s able to sit down, he might have to let some air out.
This has been a fun week, better than the last one and although there are always a few hiccups, I’m ending it more positively, and thank you for some of the emails, it’s all good.
This week we’ll take about half-baked ideas, the metaverse, and how I stopped worrying, but am still very worried.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
We’re coming to the end of the second week of our Everyday Learning course and the team now has ideas for learning activity kits, they’ll start putting together a prototype ready to test with actual kids and take a deeper dive into critical pedagogies. I hope that this time around we’re a bit further than before, it was good to get the projects underway earlier, load up the raft and push away from the bank as it were.
The key has been rapid ideation and we ran our first Festival of Half-Baked Ideas asking the team to give short presentations and provide comments and suggestions for projects. A half-baked idea is incomplete, obviously, and again asks students to be comfortable sharing work that they have not had time to refine. A HBI has more holes than Swiss cheese, it doesn’t quite stand up, it might not even quite make sense, but we can prod it, inspect the contents and see if we can’t answer some of the questions we have. I know that it worries my students to submit work that isn’t fully formed, one once said it was cheating, which I thought interesting and others cringe at the thought of talking through work in progress.
In a meeting this week someone said that students should be comfortable with ambiguity and I wonder if this is related. It’s a phrase that keeps delivering hits, this interesting blog from Harvard’s Tech and Innovation in Government course, this essay in Higher Ed, and this video with Stanford’s Sarah Stein Greenberg and Scott Doorley, who also encourage instructors to learn to operate in a state of uncertainty. We have all had to learn to cope with unpredictability and ambiguity during the pandemic. I know that this aspect has been deeply unsettling for many, but perhaps it’s another soft skill (I’m not a fan of that phrase - these are more and more essential skills) that we need to learn alongside teamwork, collaboration, negotiation, and attentiveness.
Presentations were a success and I’m about to send through thoughts and comments, this festival will be a nice thing to hang onto, perhaps it can host other areas of discussion, submissions shouldn’t be limited to design and making courses. Perhaps a conference would work, although I suspect it already exists somewhere in the form of ideas that were never realized or released to the world.
Perhaps half-baked ideas are all you need to get going, I don’t think we need to solve every issue before picking up tools and getting to work.
Life Lessons
David Sedaris on Adam Buxton’s show said that keeping up with the news in recent years was like having a second job. I tend to agree and since the election results last year I have gradually reduced the number of times I check Twitter (almost hardly ever now) or prioritize political news in my feeds. I’ve pretty much stopped listening to shows like Pod Save America or the BBC’s Americast (which I think has ended). But stuff is still happening and there are one or two sources that I feel very comfortable reading including Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American that gives context to today’s news by looking back through US political history. It is essential reading.
I find US politics fascinating and frustrating as I’m sure many do, and in my conversations with friends, my comments are framed by an outsider perspective. I strive to understand where I can but am often bamboozled, just as this week when one man essentially decided that millions of Americans shouldn’t have paid leave.
Facebook changed its parent name this week to Meta and I listened to the keynote at Connect, the yearly conference that I attended in person a few years ago, but has been run virtually since the start of the pandemic. VR is one of the technologies that I work on in my role at the university, exploring its use, in particular, in creating content around language and culture. You might think that I’m excited by the prospect of a metaverse, a virtual environment where people can meet and work, connecting people globally, but it fills me with dread. I wish I could promote open-source solutions for VR and talk students through a growing range of different technologies so that they could make decisions about who they sign up with and the sorts of data they hand over.
Meta (I’m going to have to get used to this) believe the Metaverse to be the next frontier of development for the internet, but they are the wrong people to create it, having done such a bad job of establishing online spaces that are safe, accessible, equitable and good. AOC had something to say about the name change…
Lost and Found
More cheery fare…
We took a trip to Pittsburgh’s Center for Creative Reuse and bought bits and pieces for our class to play with, and hoped that there might be something to inspire a learning kit. I couldn’t resist topping up with art supplies.
Love the modernist post offices of Michigan, come to think of it quite a few post office buildings are built like this in our area too.
5 Things I learned from asking kids 20 questions about ghosts…
Just like @documentally I too received a new Kindle Paperwhite 11th Edition this week, mostly because I’ll be able to use this to read articles using the Send to Kindle app (which works even though it looks like it badly needs updating) and to separate work from more leisurely reading. Btw - good Substack on Amazon.
I only buy the occasional e-book, instead, I use Libby which means I can check out digital versions from the library. I still buy printed books, but too often they pile up unread. I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to read all the unread books in my house before buying or borrowing anything new, could I do it? How long would that take?
This is an article that speaks to the transition from graduate student to teaching faculty entitled The Damaging Myth of the Natural Teacher. It is true that the best teachers are those that are constantly learning and developing evidence-based practice, I agree that there is no “natural teacher’, most of us working in the classroom will testify to learning the hard way, picking ourselves up after failure and reflecting on good and bad experiences.
I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that teaching is a science rather than art because I don’t think of art that way. An artist also works by developing their practice, just as much as anyone else. I worry too that terms like learning engineer or learning scientist diminish the role of creativity, empathy, and playfulness. I have no idea why we need to be so binary about art and science, it seems unscientific to say to least.
Thank you
Okay, time to go now, Halloween is calling.
Donnie Darko is twenty years old, released just a few months after 9/11 it didn’t perform well at the box office, but seeped into the imagination and became the very definition of a cult hit, replete with theories about its meaning and obsessive fans pouring over every detail. Not me, just to say that I’m going to put my DVD copy into the machine this weekend and watch it again for the first time in many years.
Have a good week, keep sending me emails and letting me know how things are in your corner of the world. Have a good week and I’ll catch up with you next time.