It might be good I’m on my way to a beach vacation tomorrow… People who know me, know that my 13 year-old son has been struggling in school. He quit going altogether in the first semester. Then he started the second semester full of promise, excited to go back and be again among his […]
Author: telias
Voices in the margins
In open online spaces, we are not equally fragile. It is everyoneâs responsibility to listen and care and support marginal voices. Whether or not they wish to speak. Whether or not they wish to be present. Whether or not they like what we do. – Maha Bali Bali’s quote challenges us not only to actively […]
What I think, feel and believe: Ice cream & education
I applied for an EdD program over the winter. A couple of weeks ago I got accepted. I now have one more week to accept the offer. Should I do it? This week that question slammed into another question What kind of ice cream do I like? Back story: Almost 20 years ago I accidentally […]
Deciding better, learning better: Different kinds of stories
Lately I’ve been thinking about data and stories, design and luck, prediction and intuition, faith, empathy, beliefs and truth, scale and thinking small, political and personal, power, control, freedom and social justice. And how all of these ideas crashing into one another inside my head. Conflicting and challenging one another. Creating turmoil, unease and discomfort. […]
Stories scare me, but I’m listening
There was a time that I woke up one day and realized that I’d been manipulated. By stories. Lots of good compelling stories. Stories I wanted to believe. No technology was involved in the telling or my choosing to believe these stories. When I decided to leave, it meant that everything that I believed was […]
What do I hope to do?
I’ve been conflicted lately. I’ve felt the need to pause and reflect on what I’ve done, am doing and hope to do. What I’ve done: Working for a call center company is not glamorous. Most folks have an interesting/ tough story of how they got there. Few have others options. I was no exception. Incredibly […]
Learning to code: Six women &a mooc
I have some much to do over the next few days, but here I am writing a blog post confession… Damn Twitter, damn interesting people who make me think đ Scrolling through my Twitter this morning, I came across Laura Gogia’s post about being a “reluctant coder.” I was struck with the similarities with my […]
Noticing remarkableness
I’m tired of being told that online learners are uninterested, uninvolved and unengaged because, from where I sit, I see us as completely connected to our work, communities, families and school–we may just be too involved to step back and notice the remarkableness of it all. My last post got me thinking about my academic […]
From the margins
“marginality … is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance “ â  bell hooks cited on the Marginal Syllabus from her book Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) as cited in Maha Bali’s Reproducing Marginality There have been a few things in my Twitter feed lately that have been on my mind. One of them […]
Open analysis of open content & pedagogy
Just about a year ago I asked a few people what seemed like an easy question at the time : If we think of a university as a business, what’s our “product”? Are we in the business of “selling courses”? Or “converting non-educated students into educated students”? The most compelling answer that came back was […]