I’m stalling. I need to clean the garage today, but instead I’m writing. It have been an eventful couple of weeks. I was screened out of a series of jobs where I live, because, from what I can tell, it is too risky to hire someone who is not doing the exact same job, right […]
Pushing vulnerable students to pursue for-profit options
I was almost ready to call it a night when I saw a tweet in which Tressie McMillan Cottom linked to the article: Plagued by scandal, for-profit colleges target single mothers Yup. As a single mom, having access to online, distance, high quality *public* higher education was the difference between me working a (or more […]
Curating Digital Voices in the Margins
The following is a paper written for my doctoral program. I thought about trying to clean it up and publish it somewhere, but not sure where to submit it for consideration (suggestions welcome). In the meantime, I thought I’d share it here. _______________________________________ In open online spaces, we are not equally fragile. It is everyone’s […]
Creativity at a Distance
We are in the midst of planning an event at TRU for October 23 & 24, 2017 called Creativity in the Open. I’ve described it as: Two days of sharing ideas about openness and creativity and their place in education in a fun and informal atmosphere. We are very lucky to have Laura Ritchie, Rajiv […]
What do ‘open’ and ‘closed’ mean in an ugly world?
I accidentally found myself exploring the ideas of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ this evening. Perhaps I should apologize for the ramble… (Note: This post includes the topics of child abuse and images of that abuse.) As a quiet weekend after what feels like months of running, I had some time to do some catching up in […]
thinking small does matter
“So the help I need here is how to communicate meaning behind what we do without that broad-scale scientific evidence. Because what we do HAS meaning. Thinking small DOES matter. The communication of what matters is what’s hard, for me.” ~ Chuck Pearson I had planned to write a different paper. I had wanted […]
How easily I forget… My blog story
I spent a good chunk of the day in a development environment cutting and pasting one line of .php at a time wondering, “Why, oh why!” I could not get post content to move into the pretty containers I’d created in a new WordPress page template. “It’s time to learn to read and write .php,” […]
Noticing, feeling bees
This is likely to be a rambling post that is intended to make sense some of the questions that I’m asking myself in order to challenge my own assumptions and because sometimes writing, and often input from others, helps me better make sense of my swirling thoughts. It’s been a week of unease since returning […]
What’s in a boot?
A few things have been on my mind lately. Technology, Mastodon, Twitter, MOOCs, upcoming conference presentations, data, privacy, analytics, SPLOTs, open, research and backups. Gardening, drawing, kids, sleep, freedom, control, choice, culture and sewing. Swirling, swirling. Today, as I thought about our expectations of technology, for it to work seamlessly and ubiquitously, for it to […]
Building a digital literacy playground – an emerging idea
For the second year in a row, I attended LAK and OER conferences one shortly after the other. This year, the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference came first in Vancouver in mid-March followed by the OER17 Conference in London in early April. Going into LAK, I made wrote Deciding Better, Learning Better: Different Kinds of […]
