teaching: January 2008 Archives

Sign the petition.

Downloadable logos and images for t-shirts and signs (scroll down to get to the English versions), or make your own: white flags, Colombian flags, and/or flowers...

Mike reached up and patted this sign to remind me to slow down. :-) I'd asked the class why I'd gone off on a particular tangent....it related, but I had to pause for a moment, back up, where did I begin? How did I arrive where I was? What was the point?!

I came across the sign near the hallway trashcans on my way to class and I thought it was too perfect to pass up: not for them, for me! I've a good feeling about this group, based on how assertive they were during the first and subsequent activities. We laughed a fair amount. And - they took the material seriously. Minds at work. I like.

At some point, they'll be designing some webpages. In the meantime, I'm using the space to post lesson plans and track our progress.

Any day now, students will start to post their first self-analyses of a decision-making process. They've been asked to make a real decision - to attend or not attend a protest in Boston against the FARC who occupy part of Colombia. (FARC is the organization responsible for the kidnapping of friends of a friend - close enough to touch me. I decided to be affected; I decided to care, to act, to do the little that I can do.)

Google debuts knowledge project: potentially a threat to Wikipedia (check out their Commons), and also to the Earth Edition (h2g2) of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dropping Knowledge. Who knows who else out there is giving knowledge compilation a go. There is a whole genre of knowledge ecology that is quite fascinating.

As I myself become more convinced in the construction of knowledge as the only way any kind of knowledge is achieved, the importance of staying on top of how these mega-projects unfold increases. The first two promote the kind of so-called "objectivism" that has driven western science while hiding the nature of social construction. The second two may not draw attention to the fact of social construction but simply move ahead on the premise that knowledge can be built with outcome in mind.

I am relieved that some of my students this past semester are able to articulate this fact. I hope most of them "got it" at some level, even if they lack (as of yet) the language to explain what they now intuit. Who knows, maybe they all did, and some are just more reluctant than others to give me a clue! :-o

Posted today in my teaching/student-oriented blog:

Class won't begin for nearly three weeks, yet, but the mind already whirs...