Spoke & Hub

I blurted out a comment this week that sounded way more negative than I meant it to, and the reaction of the people in the room got me thinking. This was an informal meeting, we were talking about renaming a teaching and learning center, and somebody pitched the idea of a “Center for Faculty Excellence.” I said, “Excellence? Ick. I’d be happy if we just got to mediocrity first then we could talk about excellence. Who the hell ever feels like they are excellent? I thought only Bill and Ted said that. Ick.”

Silence.

Shoot. I know that silence. That happens when I say something that I meant to be funny and it was taken as bitter sarcasm. Or that people don’t get my pop culture reference. Or it sounds like negativity. Bitterness. Kinda mean. Unnecessarily hostile. Elitest. Choose the insult, and I’m sure it’s been said about me or my ideas. For the record: If I was surrounded by people from the Northeast, they would have fired back three retaliations to belittle me and/or my ideas. We’d laugh. Drop a couple of F bombs. Insult eachothers’ mothers. It wouldn’t have been a thing. Just sayin.

Then the word “Innovation” came up. Double Ick. And I have to tell you, I’m awfully sick of this word. I’ve ranted about it. I’ve thrown my fist up to the heavens about it. And then I saw this beauty of a post from Tim Klapdor, Innovation and the Novelty Factory.

What scares me about this trend is that now innovation is being talked about in government policy, institutional strategies and every goddamn mission statement known to man – and yet, I don’t think there is any understanding about what innovation is: what it really means, what it entails or the implications of adopting it actually are.

Horace Dediu posits a taxonomy which I think is extremely useful to help discern innovation and reduces some confusion:

Novelty: Something new

Creation: Something new and valuable

Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility

Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful

People don’t want to invest in innovation because change is really hard. It’s complex, expensive and risky and more often than not takes time – years if not decades. It requires behaviours and mindsets to adapt to entirely different concepts, inputs and environments. It requires people to leave behind what they did, what they built reputations on, what they trust and tacitly know, and replace it with something strange.

Innovation is about trust and relationships more than anything else.

It’s about building, shaping and learning not just coming up with ideas.

High-five, Tim! Thank you, Internet! This is exactly what I needed to read today. Yes, maybe it’s invention that we should care about, and like Tim, I’m worried about this constant focus on innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s like this bad smell in the refrigerator that we can’t get rid of when we start talking policy and strategic planning. I worry that what we say we are doing isn’t what’s happening at all, yet that’s what we’re selling, so to speak. I’ve got issues with that. I’ve broken off the last two sentences and bolded the font to emphasize what I loved most in Tim’s post. Those two sentences are forked into my heart. I can make those sentences mine. (Shout out to The Fedwiki Neighborhood, you know what I mean).

And the ideas in this post are on my mind because I left a card game last night to read a blog post in the guest bedroom. My friends–for the record–were super pissed that I left their amazing wit for a blog post. I said, “But it’s Amy Collier, y’all, I have to read this.”

“I don’t care if it’s the Queen of Frickin’ England. You’re reading blog posts instead of hanging out with us! What a gigantic loser!” they said.

They were talking about the wainscoting and paint colors, mind you, so yes, I left to read Amy’s post. I didn’t think they’d miss me, honestly. I’m kind of more in love with NotYetness than I am with shades of kitchen paint. When somebody like her puts something into the world, I have to check it out. Read this:

…our focus as educators should be on emergent situations, where complexity gives rise to ‘new properties and behaviours… that are not contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions’ (Mason 2008, p.2).”

So what does all of this mean for educators? Here are some ideas. Embracing not-yetness means making space for learning opportunities that:

promote creativity, play, exploration, awe

allow for more, not fewer, connections, morepersonalization (true personalization, not necessarily what has been offered to us by adaptive learning companies)

transcend bounds of time, space, location, course, and curriculum

encourage students to exceed our expectations, beyond our wildest outcomes, pushes back on “data science of learning” focus

do not hand over essential university functions and important complexities over to private industry

The ill-defined, the un-prescribed, the messy can lead to the unexpected, the joyful.

Noel Gough (2012) writes, “complexity invites us to understand that many of the processes and activities that shape the worlds we inhabit are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. It also invites us to be skeptical of mechanistic and reductionist explanations, which assume that these processes and activities are linear, deterministic and/or predictable and, therefore, that they can be controlled (at least in principle).”

So much to say here that I don’t even know where to begin. All I can say is yes. Yes. I am so far gone into NotYetness that it could file for a restraining order because of my stalking. I especially love Amy’s attention to the messy and playful. The unexpected. The unknown. The joyful.

So maybe we need a Faculty Funhouse. No scary mirrors or clowns. Just a place to spice it up and feel appreciated doing it. Just a spot on campus to have a bit of fun with what you do for a living. Maybe a place where you can dream a bit and feel okay if you fail trying something new.

Whatever we end up naming it, it shall heretofore be known as the Faculty Funhouse to me. And these posts come at a time when I’m a bit worried about a new project that we’re brewing up in eLearning. If what I’d like to try is the right thing to do. The right thing to try now. The right thing. Right. Now.

So speaking of Notyetness, Fun, and Invention, my Instructional Designer and I have a joke about the whiteboard in his office. We call it The Dream/Reality Whiteboard. He sketches The Dream, I add to it, and then we revise it down to what we can actually make happen now. Reality. We sent a call to faculty to learn about Backward Design, and I expected maybe seven or eight to respond and we got 20! I’ve heard from 25 faculty the last time I checked my email. Who knew?

And here’s the thing: We don’t know what we’re doing because The Dream can’t be done (yet), so our scaled down version is really sketchy. Reality is unknown. This so NotYetness because we’ve never tried anything like this here. We’ve never tried. Here. Elsewhere. Yes. Perhaps there is a center of excellence that has pulled it off.

So here’s what we wrote to faculty about what we’re inventing. Our little Funhouse we’re creating. Here’s the description that I sent the faculty and I got back so many Woohoos! and Love This! and I’m so excited to do___! Basically, we’re going to try a bit of (funded) connected-learning with a cohort of 20 faculty. We’re setting “a class” and we’ve made it flexible on how they connect with us. We’re hoping they will help us and eachother, and they are so game. Who knew?

Here’s what I sent them:

We are building this airplane as we fly it, so we hope you’re up for an adventure. We going to try an online asynchronous flexible professional learning opportunity with lecture capture and backward design. What does that mean? We are going to build OL modules that will teach you a bit about Backward Design while supporting you through the process of creating videos for your course. Ideally, we’ll create short engaging videos where you will incorporate meaningful content and assessment using our lecture capture tool.

The purpose of this pilot is to invest in your learning of a valuable productive tool in educational technology. We want to learn from you on how we can improve our support of your teaching. In short, the success of Backward Design courses is contingent on creating good questions–what is often called The Big Questions in a thematically organized course. This is something you already do as a teacher, so let’s see what happens when we focus on the Big Questions using videos.

We’d like to debunk the myth that you have to be these two take make something worth watching.

We have to debunk a lot of myths in education. There are a lot of things we’ve yet to try.

That’s why we need the Faculty Funhouse, NotYetness, and Invention.

Image credit: http://bit.ly/1I0vF8M

On Mondays, I change the CDs in my car for the week’s commute. Yesterday there was a huge pile-up on the highway and I got stuck in my car for almost two and half hours. I got to listen to a lot of music.

Week 1 Set List

1. In Raindows Radiohead
2. Manos The Spinanes
3. American Recordings Johnny Cash
4. 89/93 Uncle Tupelo: An Anthology
5. Drunken Angel—Lucinda Williams
6. Kingston Advice: Live in Jamaica–The Clash (I haven’t taken this one out in 4 months.)

Usually I listen to part of a song or I fast forward. Sometimes I listen to the whole CD. Sometimes I don’t even realize that I’ve listened to an entire CD and a new one has started. And more often than not, I listen to the same song several times. Here are my three favorites from this week’s set list. Lines that give me chills are italicized. They are so good.

“Entire”—The Spinanes You call it in colors/And she bows to you/An archer, come sparrow/It’s a place I can’t get to 

“No Depression”—Uncle Tupelo In this dark hour, midnight nearing/The tribulation time will come/Storms will hurl in midnight fear/Sweep lost millions to their doom

“Drive On”—Johnny Cash But my letter read from Whiskey Sam/You’re a walkin’ talkin’ miracle from Vietnam

All of these songs tell a story. Reminds me of people and places. Gives me something to think about. Takes me out of my head. Away from my own story. I know all of the words. I hum the songs later when I’m cleaning the kitchen. Getting dressed. Petting the dog. Whenever I notice I’m humming. Most of all I think of the lyrics. The words. The lyrics. The words. Always the words.

This past week was the start of the quarter, and now that it’s in the rearview window I can think about a few other things. The start of the quarter, if you support teachers and students, is incredibly exhausting. I have to find the energy to keep the spirit alive for the the other things I love–even though I want to go to sleep at 7pm because the day was so hard.

Instead I lost sleep during the week nights. I watched a movie, read a book, had a happy hour that turned into a cab ride home at 1AM, wrote lists, planned projects, talked to interesting people, and dreamt of other paths than the one I’m on right now. The jobby job I’d like to do, but I shouldn’t write about that. Let me tell you a story instead.

It’s spring in the NW, and my yard is beginning to sprout and bloom. But here’s the thing, it’s not my yard. I’m a renter, and we get a deal because of my gardening skills. Landscaper is on my resume, and I know a thing or two about plants. Our landlords’ previous tenant ripped out a whole row of hostas because she thought they were weeds (yikes!). When we looked at the house, I was quizzed by the landlord about what plants were and I passed the test. And you see, they have landscaped this house in a way I would not. Ever. It’s lovely, don’t get me wrong. It pulses with different shades of green when it’s in full glory, and I love it.

But I’m tired of tending other people’s gardens. I’m ready to plant my own garden and get so nutty with experimenting with landscaping design. I want to build a little forest with a bunch of different beds. I want to mix vegetables and flowers and let ferns get huge. The clematis would grow all over the railings. The daisies would grow over my head. Sunflowers would grow up to the roof and then slowly fall to the ground heavy with seeds. Then the birds would have a party eating the seeds. Then I’d clean it up. I’d have a whole front yard of tulips right now. I’d have one little patch of the grass for the dog, and the rest would be xeriscaped with plants and rocks. I’d grab a shovel and help the husband build his BMX pump track and then I’d landscape hardy plants around it. I’d sell the damn mower. I’d ditch the awful planters and buy handcrafted pots from art students.

In short, I’d let it get kind of wild and just see where it goes. Every spring and summer it would get better. I’d make sure everything was healthy, but I’d landscape it in a way where plants would benefit from being close to their friends—just like in a forest. I wouldn’t have to weed as much because I’d have every bit of land covered by plants or rocks. Right now there is a lot of weeding because the landscaping is that of a golf-course resort. It’s manicured. It’s tame. It’s predictable. It’s decidedly not me. Or the me I hope to be.

But I tend somebody’s else garden because that’s my job. That’s what I promised. That’s why I pay less rent. I thought this plan was only going to be a year and now it’s turned into six. And here I am back again at the point where the weeds of winter must be tended. Torn up. Manicured. Tamed. Again. Shaped into a design that I can’t change or control.

During the time that I’ve rented this place, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. When people say something like “Just do whatever you like. Treat this place like your own. Just call me when you’re making plans. I trust you.” That really means, I want complete control of this place. I want the final say. Don’t do anything without my consent. That’s called passive aggressive. Leadership and the philosophy of the micro-manager. I trust you, but never forget I control you. I trust you up to a point. Make sure you run it by me first.

And I learned this by mistake when I treated this garden like my own. I love the way daisies and tomato plants and mint look next to one another. You’ve got the shiny low leaves of mint. The furry tomato branches and the endless white above it all with the daisies. Yellow flowers that turn into red things you can eat! I think it’s gorgeous. I was pretty proud of the one bed. The landlord, however, was not as thrilled. She hated it.

She said, “Your taste is a bit more hippy than mine.” She had a look like she smelled something bad, and said, “I just think vegetables and flowers should be separated. Not like this. Definitely not like this.” and she waved her arm over my bed in disgust.

My sarcastic brain said, “Tomatoes are fruit, technically. If you’re going to critique my shit at least get your facts straight.” But I didn’t say that. I bit my sarcastic forked-tongue.

I panicked that she wanted me to tear it up. My little design was going to be manicured into the predictable. The boring. The same as everyone else in my neighborhood. The boringly beautiful. But that’s okay. I’ll own it–My tastes are a bit hippy when I think of my masterpiece.

Sounds so serious, right? I’m sketching out plans for future gardens. I’m not going grow old here. I’m looking for other gardens, so to speak. I’m going to build landscaping plans that I’d like to see and then I’m going to share them with like-minded hippies. I’m going to give them away. I’m not letting go of the dream of my little backyard forest. For now, I’ll weed. I’ll manicure, but I’m thinking of better gardens yet to be built. I’m writing it all down.

Lately I’ve been calling the book I want to write my “work of drafted of articles.” Uh-o. That’s a sign I’m giving up again. Alert! When I start call it a series of articles, that’s a sign I’m starting to lose sight of it. Dammit. Here I go again.

This time, however, I’m okay with that because I’ve another idea brewing that connects the hobby job and the jobby job. I’ve got plans to sketch out my little vision for OER. I’m going to give it away and let somebody else build the garden that I can’t make happen in my backyward. That’s right. I’ll give it away. I’m not going to try to publish it, and I think it could very well suck, but maybe somebody will dig it. Revise. Remix. Take it, I’ll say. You don’t have to call me. Just build it and send me a picture. Invite me over for a beer. I’ll get drunk next to your daisies and tomatoes. I’ll put some mint in my pocket. Well done, you.

I’ve been talking about how OER helps teachers improve their teaching practices, and I’m seeing it work. I’m seeing the goods of the work bloom. I need to write about it, so I’m going to do it. I just need it to be simple. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

This week I finished reading Mistakes I Made At Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of  Getting It Wrong. Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild is one of the people featured in this book. In the introduction to her chapter, the editor excerpts a book review by Dwight Garner. “This book,” he wrote, “is a as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound.”

Oh. My. If only somebody said that about my work. My garden. That’s a review you can see, smell, and hear. You can feel it. Wow. I love it. And here’s the thing: I’ve been a vocal critic of Strayed’s work yet her chapter and the one by Kim Gordon were two of my favorites in this book. Listen to these Strayed quotes:

Doubt is a part of the writer’s life.

We’re all rough drafts. If you’re living right you’re constantly striving to make the next next version of yourself one notch better. Real success is rooted in learning how to turn mistakes into successes; loses into gains; failures in the things of value that propel you forward rather than hold you back.

Thanks, Cheryl. You deserve your success. Now that I know you were a waitress who hated the world because you wanted to be a writer, I like you even more. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go listen to Lucinda and do some weeding.

What does that title mean, you ask?

During the Teaching Machines Happening, I learned many things that surprised me, and on this post, I’d like to write about two of them–teaching and time. Let me get all hippie dippie on you first and then I’ll try to get academic. Time in the fedwiki, if you have been following this blog at all is something I’ve already written about metaphorically. This time around, I got interested in the actual or literal measurement of time. And what I learned during this Season.

Seasons, in the federated wiki, are the days, weeks, and hours tallied up as time spent reading and writing. Fedwiki Seasons do not align with the calendar we live our lives by day in day out. They don’t correspond with Course Outlines in classes. I’ve now marked a Season of four months. A Season of writing, reading, and thinking in the the fedwiki during my free time. Writing and reading have been the hobby job for me as long as I can remember during all seasons of my life. These activities are nothing new.

What’s new, to me at least, is the federated wiki and how it marks the Seasons of my thoughts. For all that it is or could become–it has taken me out of the doldrums of my own reading, writing, and thinking process. Sounds pretty hippie poetic, right? The doldrums of my thinking. Process of reading and writing. In a Season. Time.

Hippie. You know, kind of like this:

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

‘Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, no breath no motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Truly surrealist and drama queen to cite this, right? What the hell is worth learning that happens in a Season? How to measure? How to state and craft objectives for such a Season? I see points of conversion that are really interesting and they are spicing up the usual winds under this painted ship’s sail on this painted ocean. In this Season.

I have no idea how many pages I have written in the fedwiki. I couldn’t really summarize if I’ve accomplished anything. I haven’t “published” anything during this Season (still waiting for rejection letter on one piece, so maybe. And I wrote a draft of it in the fedwiki, so there’s that). I’m not even sure what I’m doing in the fedwiki Happenings is even progressing towards what the creators working on it would want to see.

The doldrums, for me, have lifted. Scattered. Dispersed.

doldrums plural

a :  a spell of listlessness or despondency :  blues

b :  a state of bafflement :  quandary

But here’s the thing: In my corner of the sea during this Season, I’m thinking about research, research writing, collaboration, and portfolio cataloging. I’m not thinking about it as the next big thing in educational technology. If you want to, be my guest. That might be your gig. Rock on. In this next Season, I’ve got two little ideas that I want to pursue.

I think I have found two ways I can use the federated wiki as a result of  both of the Happenings. One is that I can teach other teachers how to use it. I would like to start with my lovely history teacher-friend’s class. I’ve got to get it together to have something coherent to say soon, so let me get bloggy with some ideas.

How to write sample assignments. Create timelines for assignments. How to avoid formative assessment rubrics. Challenge the need for perfect summative artifacts. How to strategize a long-term portfolio project that could be a success as the federated wiki evolves a bit. How do we take an academic year and think of it in terms of project based Seasons. The notion of the Season isn’t a quarter or the semester. It’s a bit of time that you’re using to work on a project. The doldrums of the clock and the calendar could lift a bit with a tool like the federated wiki.

Another Idea with Potential: A Memoir

I have an idea to write my online teacher certification class using the fedwiki and Canvas. The one truly lovely all positive part of my jobby job is teaching/facilitating the online teacher training course for my institution.

To call it a course is a bit generous. I’ve inherited the content from two other projects written by other people and it doesn’t come together the way I’d like it to. For the range of teacher experience I have to address, it feels like it fails. It could be better. I offer it once a quarter. I’m fully in charge of the content under the umbrella of professional development.

So here’s what I’m going to try to make happen. I’m going to put the content–what I now have on Canvas Pages into the federated wiki. It will be just like I integrated a textbook or handbook into my Canvas course. I’m wondering if I can get away with teaching teachers to use it without the factory at first. Just shift-click magic and read. For now. Why hadn’t I thought about that course? I could then share it on with other people who are interested in educating online teachers. Such as it is.

I got this idea playing around with the integration of Lumen Learning’s platform Candela, into Canvas. I then tried to think of using the fedwiki as an assignment connected to one of the readings. Perhaps a more useful start for me is to use my own little course with six-seven teachers at a time. Maybe I’ll just try to build something really small. I’m not sure if I can make this happen. There are some huge projects on the horizon for me until June. This Season is busy. Kinda of booked. Just an idea. [Pause to stare out the window].

Here’s another thing I learned in the fedwiki this Season. I was surprised by my Neighborhood of writers. So interesting! I was in full-on holiday mode for the first Happening, and this one has been busy. Not as much time to read and think big thoughts. No big questions. Two retreats, a webinar, and a conference really killed that time. I’ve been in full fedwiki-creation-mode. For better or for worse. And I write really stupid stuff sometimes.

So I haven’t done a whole lot of forking. Not a lot editing. I’ve done a lot reading outside the fedwiki that started from the fedwiki–so how would you assess that? I didn’t spend a lot of time reading what was posted by others. Also, our use of a Google Group and the Hangouts toned down the use of Twitter a bit from the first Happening, and I’m sure I posted way more than anyone about useless information in that thread. Apologies to folks in my Neighborhood. Maybe I should have shut up and read.

This weekend during this Season, I finally noticed some of the complaints about the fedwiki by some of the participants. Wow. What to say about that? I had no ideas such doldrums existed until two days ago. Honest. I had no idea what others were writing about during most of this Happening. Just a few folks with good titles. If I remember nothing of this Season, I know I’ll remember everything I learned about Wonder Woman for the rest of my days. (That’s a post for another day!)

I saw the doldrums in some comments from the Conversation Club. Lots of complaints about time.

They were corrective: “You should have.”

They were selective: “It would be nice to see X but not Y.”

They were a bit grouchy: “I can’t seem to engage with.”

They were lists of wishes: “Wouldn’t be good if we could add.”

There were bits of frustrated sounding language. Frankly, I missed your Season.

My Season, as the snowboarder brahs say, was motha fuckin’ righteous. Kinda bitchin. Beyond stoked. I realized that if you do not have really fantastic title, I don’t click on your work and read it. I don’t see your Season.

This Season I’ve generated thoughts that I can trace back by titles written by others. By me. There are no tags. No bookmarks. I can go back and trace my thoughts by days, weeks, a month, or a Season. Everyone doesn’t have to love or like everything I do. But really, I’ve got to be honest with you. If you complain about the federated wiki, here’s what plays in my head as I listen to or read your words:

Thanks, Iggy. You’d hang out in my Season. I just know it.

The federated wiki has been described as a curio cabinet, but it’s also my junk drawer. It’s my DIY zine of copied thoughts of others. It’s an easy tool that is somehow sounding way more complicated than it is. Perhaps it’s because we’re comparing it to products or software that we already use. If I want to diss on Google Docs to help me think about the federated wiki, then I will. Now that I’ve done it, maybe I should stop. I need to describe it as more of a tool that promotes a certain mindset. That’s what it is.

During a recent Google Hangout, somebody said that if we do anything with the fedwiki then we’d like to create more voracious readers. Yes. I’d also like to see more insatiable writers thinking about the things that they’ve read. Yes. That too. You can do both or either in a Season. That’s the life-long learning thing that sounds so hippie. So idealistic. So romantic. So truly hard to quantify with data-driven decisions. So hard to measure with standard measurements of time. So hard to please everyone. No fun, my babe. 

What’s so appealing to me is that it’s easy to share information in the federated wiki. Easy to get interested in what’s posted. Or easy to change directions with your thoughts. Find out more about something else. Or another thing. Easy. There’s space to be creative with other people about information that is freely available on the Internet. Just by claiming your site, you are embracing open education’s notion of connected learning. You’re spending a Season with your thoughts in the mix with other people’s thoughts in a Season.

It’s a bit of a compass for research while being  a roulette of other people’s thoughts (not the Russian type, Thanks Kate and your careful reading). Whether I’ve spent an hour, a day, a week, or a Season, I’ve learned something with the federated wiki. Why couldn’t somebody else love this style of learning?

Say that last paragraph out loud. Now you sound like a dreamer, right? Hippie dippie nonsense. Hippie Idealists. Fooled into thinking there is a solution in education in the Season of Snark. Well. Yes.

If you’re not looking for solutions in education, then here’s the other song title in my head when I think of your ideas:

Queue the Everly Brothers. I’ve already lost that vacation-mode feeling. I’m on day three back in the office, so woe unto me fair maidens. Vacation, did you ever happen? So it goes. So it goes. And speaking of so it goes, Nick Lowe! Thank you Kevin Cole at KEXP, you are my favorite DJ at that station. I love John and his mornings, and Cheryl is beyond cool, but Kevin, I want to kidnap your record collection. You can come over too and play them for me one by one. Even if it takes us years to listen to them all. I’ll sit like a yogi and listen. We’d have a grand old time, I know it.

On my commute home I get KEXP for about 35 minutes of my time in the car, and I love to catch the last hour of Kevin’s show (when I get out of the office in time). He’s been my favorite music historian teacher for almost a decade now. I’ve been known to pull over so I can write down notes of trivia and songs while he’s talking about bands. Yesterday he played some Nick Lowe, and I found this beauty on the YouTubes. Eat your heart out, Beyonce and Madonna with your silly costume changes. Watch Nick do it and learn.

I’m going to do some lunch break bloggery about a story I’m re-purposing on my BookFedwiki. I’m also brewing up some ideas to blog about concerning the federated wiki, but that’s got to wait. I’ll need it to cheer me up later in the week. It’s only Wednesday. Today I want to write about rainy mountains! Yay!

Rain Is Not An Emergency

Post-script special note to Tami: photo credits, all you. And I know some of this story is out of order but one of my paragraphs got rearranged by the federated wiki thanks to a bug we call The YHOD, but I decided to keep it.  Thanks, fedwiki buggery, I thought, for the editor suggestion. Fuck it, I said, who will know? But then I remembered, it’s your story too.

And hikers, consult trail maps, books, and your friendly ranger. Don’t trust bloggers for hiking details. Suggestions, yes. Directions, no. 

In the mountains, there you feel free. ~T.S. Eliot

When I can’t seem to write anything new, I like to go through old files. Thanks to the generosity of my federated wiki friends, I have my own federated wiki bookmarked and waiting for me to fork my own insane ideas. What I’m doing will not progress the potential of the federated wiki, I know that. But I have my own little digital writing studio that I’ve titled “BookFedwiki,” and that’s pretty fun for me. I’m going to reap just what I sow (thanks, Lou Reed).

Yesterday I got an outline done, and I went through piles of old work. Most of it is useless. All of it on paper printed from a dead hard-drive. Some of it interesting. None of it feeling like a book. The giant paperclip I’ve used to bind the folder together is starting to rust. Years ago, I titled this folder “Le Livre Maintenant”–literal ugly translation–the book now. I’m close to renaming it “Le Livre Jamais”–literal ugly translation–the book never.

But then I discovered this small installation that my friend Tami and I created for a Found Art Show at UW-Bothell. I never got to see the show in person, but Tami sent a shot of what it looked like on the wall. She also sent me shots of her favorite installations. What a gal, that pal of mine. It made me smile to think that this was already three years ago yet we’re still rhyming and scheming for our next backpacking trip. We might get to do two short trips and one long trip this summer now that my jobby job has chilled out a bit. And this year there are caches on our long hike so we won’t run out of whiskey and chocolate! I won’t have to ration coffee. Hot damn! I just put our application in the mail to hike The Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier this summer, so hiking is on my mind. If we don’t get our permits, we’ll head back into the Olympics. The hiking. This book. This book on hiking I want to write is on my mind.

The now that became never is once again perhaps.

Here’s our bit of found art. Tami Takes Photos, I Write The Words: A Memoir.

Backcountry Altar—Alyson Indrunas and Tami Garrard

One of the Ten Essentials of Backcountry Hiking is to “Leave No Trace.” This past summer on an 85 mile backpacking trip in the Olympic National Park, we discovered a most welcomed violation of the rules. After a long morning with 50 pound packs, we arrived at a rest spot near Cameron Creek excited to devour our lunch when we discovered a small shrine of berries, rocks, leaves, and a feather. Charmed by the artful display of nature’s artifacts, we left it as we found it for the next hikers—taking only this photo.

Later that day, we met two young hikers who were sketching plants while eating their own lunch along trail. After a short discussion about maps, the trail, and the weather, we noticed they had drawn designs on their faces with berry juice. “Did you by chance leave an altar at the last camp?” Yes, their nods indicated, that was us. When we said goodbye, we shared blue-teethed smiles stained by the abundance of summer berries.

There’s more to this story. I love meeting strangers on the trail. Dirty smelly arty weirdos of the backcountry, you are my people. Inspiration to keep writing, my friends, comes from the oddest places. Now if only I had kept those airplane sick bags I used to write poetry on back when I got to travel by plane a lot.

My collaborative found art makes me think once again about le livre peut-etre. Peut-etre.–the ugly translation–the book perhaps/maybe. Perhaps it will be.

Found art. Words. Collaboration. Old files. Books. The fire. Bad weather. Snoring dog. Wind too wild for bike riding. Stay inside. Stay. Then later, a movie too. And then home. Oh, it’s such a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you.

Are you familiar with the Ignite format? It’s 20 slides in five minutes. And, let me tell you, they are hard to do well. I had a lot of friends in the preso audience, so they were very supportive. When you prepare for Ignites, you think about what you’re going to say, practice, and then you stress about the five minutes for days. It’s about timing, organization, brevity, quality transitions, and the substantiation of your ideas. The things I’m really quite awful with in my personal life, truthfully.

For the #wshetc15 conference; I had applied for an hour. It ended up that I got 20 minutes paired up with Christopher Soran, the Interim (still) eLearning Director at Tacoma Community College. He should have had the entire time, really. If you are interested in OER at the community college level and you live near Washington State, stop reading my blog and look up Tacoma Community College, Quill West, Christie Ferroro, David Lippman, and Lumen Learning. Right now. Click away and do some research.

If you live far away from our great state, then put “Open Education” or “Open Learning” in your favorite search engine or check out the writers on the e-Literate blog–that’s where I started.

I am a teacup Chihuahua among the New Foundlands in this movement, but I think I can help the newbies with little inspiration. You know, the rest of us. The folks trying to parse it all. And all of the people I have referenced above, they care quite a bit about people like you. Like us. Like your teachers. Like your students. Especially your students. Don’t be shy.

In May, I am going to be presenting at the NISOD conference in Austin, TX and if you see the names Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning, or anyone from Tidewater Community College, go see them! Geez, I hope they don’t schedule me at the same time because I want to check them out. See you there. I’ll be front row all fangirl style. Hopefully in some new bitchin’ cowgirl boots.

My 20 minutes preso needs to become an hour, so I want to think about it here while it’s still on my mind. While I have so many emails from folks interested in what I did. What I said. How I said it. Thanks kittens, you’re the best.

Here’s my link to the #wshetc15 preso http://bit.ly/EvCCOER

I’m recycling this book nerd, tech geek title a bit this season mainly because it sums up my recent experience explaining to people what I’m up to. What I care about. What I’m passionate about. Obsessed with. FanGirl about. In love with. All that. Bleeding heart? Sure. I’ll own that. Here’s my NISOD blurb:

In my work as the Director of E-Learning (tech geek), people are often surprised to learn that my background is in English Studies (book nerd). Learn during this session how open educational resources (OER) provide pathways for student-centered success while fostering collaborative professional development among faculty members. The presenter [will share] strategies learned from starting a small grassroots OER movement on her campus that will help you avoid common pitfalls and failures.

So first of all, I’m going to keep the post-it note brainstorming. I’m a big fan of using post-it notes to collect ideas from people. Ideally people would Tweet, but they don’t, so I give them old fashion post-its. On one side, I ask them to write what their barriers are for implementing OER on their campuses. They usually jot down ideas quickly. I sometimes have to stop them because it depresses me how much they are writing. This usually only takes about 90 seconds. Then I ask them what they would do on their campus if nobody could say no to their ideas. If they could do whatever they want OER-related is best but you can dream big. Imagine! Time and money aren’t barriers. Everything you say will get a “Yes, and…” response. All green lights. Go. What would you do?

Think about that for a second. You have to dream big. The glass isn’t half-full, it’s overflowing! (Hopefully, says my stomach, with anything but birthday sambuca).

Here are some of thoughts people wrote down:

More time to share ideas ideas and methods with peers/faculty get support time/students create OERs/nobody pays for a textbook/high-speed internet for all of students and faculty/get more librarians/laptop checkout for all students/fund faculty professional development/show OER courses in class schedules/work with my departments to create OERs that we would then share with the world/every major learning activity would have the commonly expected outcomes documented/combine departments under the same people in ed tech who get things done/fire non-tech anchors/free on-demand printing/free online homework modules/require non-commercial textbooks/all students have good tech access/all courses would use 100% online resources accessible globally at no cost to students/implement a streaming solution/students would help build content/pay faculty to write texts/academic tech teams expanded/add instructional designers/more eLearning people, IT folks don’t get it/more time to share/more time like this/more time to dream/more time to think

I’m going to pull a few of these out to disagree with not because I think they are fully wrong; I just need to make a couple of points. This will help me with my future preso. I’m not looking for a fight. These sentiments above are from somebody’s dream, so I don’t want to kill anyone’s creative idea. George Siemens’ keynote made me think about things that I should worry about in Ed. Tech. After all, I did ask people to write on paper at technology conference, who knows. Maybe they are worried about something like me in Ed. Tech leadership. Whatevs.

The ideas below—I don’t want these ideas mixed up with my OER crush–I’m worried about that. If the OER movement was a dude that I had an endless crush on, these ideas would not help him put a ring on it. They’d chase him away. They’d chase him into another woman’s arms. He’d start having doubts. It would be over before it even got started.

1. faculty & staff get their COLAs from the last 7 years 

• Yes, I get it. Believe me, I get it. The recession has sucked the lifeblood of The People. My household routinely struggles to pay The Man. I bought into the idea that going to college was going to help me get into another tax bracket. Well, it did but didn’t. In fact, I’m worse off than anyone ever in the history of my family only my bookie is the federal financial aid system, not some mafia slime ball who made money off of me gambling. It’s cool, Big Fed Vinnie is only going to take a percentage of my income for the rest of my life. He won’t come hunting for me to blow out my kneecaps. Let me be very clear, I know how money changes everything. I learned that from Cyndi Lauper. But here’s the thing, the minute you start talking about labor and COLAs, you get away from talking about student success. Yes, I know they are intertwined. We know that. We just have to think about the folks that don’t get it. Talking about COLAs makes the dream about you, and OER is about students. Not about institutions saving money. Not about your paycheck. That’s a different discussion worth having.
• Here’s my dream response: Be very careful with talking about labor and OER as a cost-saving measures for the institution. The taxpayers continue to defund us. OER, my crush that I hope to marry, is about students. Repeat after me: It’s about students. It’s about students. It’s about students. Yes, I do. Until death do us part.

2. laptop checkout for all students

• This is a very noble idea, and Project I-DEA in Washington State is trying to address this very issue. When I was a student, I’m sure my grades suffered because I had to write my papers in a computer lab. I didn’t have my own computer until graduate school (thanks, Mom & Dad & your credit card). Here’s the thing: my community college is losing money out of the nose from our netbook library check-out. Our students who disappear take them with when they drop out, and sadly, many of them do just that. We spend a ridiculous amount of resources  trying to recover those cheap netbooks. I’m not sure it’s worth it. Like poor students need another avenue to ruin their credit.
• Here’s my dream: We collect data from students when they register so we can figure out what technology they do have. How many with smartphones? How many with tablets? How many with nothing? I’ve had students living out their cars yet they’d email me with iPhones. So we need to be smarter about how we reach students with technology. We don’t know what they have and don’t have. At least that’s the case on our campus. I don’t want to mine the data to sell them stuff; I just want to know what they use to connect to the Internet. If you have ideas, I’m all eyes and ears.

3. free on-demand printing

• No. This is not it. Yes, some students still want print. I get it. I like books. I like love letters written by hand. I love art made on paper. I print out knitting instructions. I get it. I keep notebooks. Allowing people free access to printing, however, allows them to make copies of things they don’t really need. Have you seen a forest clear cut lately? I ride my bike in an “active timber forest” weekly and I see slash and burn timber harvest practices. Free printing has a cost; you just may not see it everyday.
• Here’s my dream: Teach students how to read in the digital space. Help them understand how to be careful readers on the screen. Show them how to be scholars on the screen. You do it, right? Why can’t you teach somebody else how to do it? I’ve worked on a Paper-Free Project to help teachers learn how to teach their students this skill. Contact me. I’ll give you everything I’ve created by electronic file. You print it out and we’re no longer friends. I’ll send Big Fed Vinnie after your kneecaps. 

4. pay faculty to write texts

• No, this is not the right verb. Use “curate.” Here let me rewrite your sentence. Pay faculty well to curate texts in their discipline that they will share with their colleagues. Telling faculty to “write” a textbook will chase them into the arms of Big Publisher. Pay them to collaborate together, and you will get results. Encourage them to write/think/collect/research/talk together and things will get started. Show them what is already out there. Tell them, yes, you can do this. Tell them yes, you’re the one. I want to put a ring on it.
• Here’s my dream: We stop pressuring faculty to do this implementation quickly. Right now. Super fast. Hurry. It’s got to be fast. The top-down administration call-to-action is a failure. Right now I have a two-quarter plan that I wish was a year, but I can’t afford to pay teachers that long. If you have no money, then ask your teachers to focus on their courses three weeks at a time. Revise and remix a bit at a time. In a quarter system, you’ll have one OER course in a year. It can work. That’s how I did it.

5. more eLearning people, IT folks don’t get it

• On my worst days, I rant about the same thing. But it’s not altogether true. The best of IT folks get it. We’re wrong together on this one. This is where we need to own our failure, eLearning and IT. This is where we’re like a bad marriage. We’re the Capulets and Montagues preventing Romeo and Juliet from saying things like this about Ed Tech.—Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. Juliet: You kiss by the book.” 

It’s got to stop. I dislike the overused “silos in education” argument because I think we should really call it what it is in IT and eLearning. It’s a turf war. We suffer from a turf war mentality involving money, equipment, and labor. It’s a turf war that’s not about students, teaching, and learning. It’s a turf war about us. We’re blocking Romeo and Juliet, let’s face it.

• Here’s my dream: Somebody helps us learn to talk to one another again. Keep us away from the poison. We need a marriage counselor. Things went south years ago. So bad we don’t even know where to begin again. Some schools are better than others, I know. This conference I attended showed me that having a tech savvy teacher talk about her pedagogy with IT and eLearning people in the room could make all the difference. 

6. show OER courses in class schedules

• Yessy Yes Yes! This is a movement that has to come from the students. The old guard faculty–the red lights to all things innovative and fun–kill this momentum. The students have great power in what the endlessly cool Amy Collier called “NotYetness.” We need to teach students to advocate for themselves that the NotYetness is blocking their potential. Hurting their future. Harming their options for learning. Killing their love of learning.
• Here’s my dream: I want to the students to hack the system–don’t worry IT folks, I’m not advocating that they break into the bloody network. Relax. I want them to create their own class schedules. Do some research. Maybe there is an eLearning Director or a faculty member who knows every single course that’s OER on campus. I bet she’d give you the list. I bet she’d teach you how to figure it out. I bet she’d teach you how to use social media to market your ideas to other students. Here’s another thing: People who design class schedules would be all over this labeling if we would just let them do their jobs. Their jobs get stifled by the same red light faculty. Maybe those faculty need to visit red light districts…wait, hold on. This is a family blog post.
• Here’s another dream: Faculty start marketing their own OER courses. Students Google you. I did it when I was in grad school just a few years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice if the students found out if you have chili pepper on rateyourprofessor and that you use OER in your courses? Now that is hot! Market yourself, faculty–It’s super easy to set up on Canvas, Twitter, or on WordPress. I’ll help you do it. Contact me. Wouldn’t it be nice? Maybe if we hope and dream it might come true. We could be happy. We could be married. Wait. You get it. I somehow arrived at a song. It’s time to go. And who doesn’t love Pet Sounds?

But that’s a little too upbeat for such a rainy day in the Northwest. I’m going to settle in with some moody beardy Bon Iver, my dog, some books, the fedwiki, and coffee.

All the best with your dreams, readers, thanks for sharing yours with me.

Notice how I didn’t want to talk about the barriers? I have them too. Me, too. Me, too. Me, too. Yes, me too. Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.

Moody beardy, save us:

I’m going to bust out a lunch time short little ditty about Jack and Diane. No wait. I’m going bust out a short story about Tommy and Gina living on a prayer. No wait. I’m going to write about overcast days never turn me on but something about the clouds and her mixed. No wait. I’m your eyes when you must steal/I’m your pain when you can’t feel/sad but true (Yar!). No wait. Tell your man, I’m stuck on this lovely girl/Of course to me she mean all t’ world. But then she like another guy. I fall down dead she never see the tears I cry.

No. Wait.

Sorry, readers. I’ve been trading banter with teachers who are advising their students this week, and I’m feeling a bit mad with stress myself. So what’s a girl to do? Write non-sense. Create useless information. Try for humor. And that’s what we’ve been doing via email. Send the snarkcasm and wait for the laugh down the hall. Say you’re advising a student and you have no idea what to say. Channel 80s lyrics. Yes! I need someone, a person to talk to/Someone who’d care to love/Could it be you?

But then this email bomb banter got me thinking. Would I, could I possibly remember all of the lyrics to the Violent Femmes self-titled album? What else do I have to do in the car?

And oh. My. Gawd. I did. Every. Word. Haven’t listened that beauty in at least 10 years. Whenever the first iPod came into the household and I shelved the CDs. And I knew all of the words like it was yesterday.

The brain, my friends, is a strange beautifully troubling machine.

So here I am, right? I can remember the useless, the ridiculous, the mundane, the banal, the trivia. Yet I mixed up William Carlos Williams with e.e. cummings. I botched a translation of French that I know I once knew (Sorry, Lacan). I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember the title of a book I read last month. I mixed up two adult learning theorists that I wrote long (winded) papers about in graduate school.

Yet, I remember the lyrics to a beautifully juvenile band that to me meant all the world at one point. Please, please, please, you hurt me so.

I have a ton, and I mean a ton of work I need to do. Yet I type this. I go for long mountain bike rides this past weekend. I get rip roaring drunk and clean out a filing cabinet that I haven’t filed anything in the last two years. I darn a sock. I start a new knitting project.

Focus. Pocus. Hocus. Locus. Focus.

It’s just not happening. I keep pro-jing out on the dumbest stuff. Are you familiar with this term? (Thank you, Urban Dictionary).

Proj-ing Verb.

the act of creating something either alone or communally for a considerable about of time. Working on a hobby or task.

Used in a sentence: Somebody you know should be focusing on her actual work and a presentation she’s about to do yet she’s proj-ing on meaningless blog posts. Please don’t ask her about the federated wiki.

This term, sadly, is commonly used among crystal-meth addicts. (You know me, always keeping the lesson plan so high-culture). I learned “proj-ing” from a memoir written by Chrisian Hosoi, the skateboarder. He talked about proj-ing out for long stretches of time trying to recreate his fame and stardom as a professional skateboarder;turns out meth isn’t so great for your balance. And humanity in general, really.

Despite the not-so-my-forte-the saved-by-the-jesus-miracle-arc of his memoir, I totally adopted proj-ing as a verb. To describe my very anti-methey-using-entirely-home-brewed-brand-of-crazy-I-like-to-call–Me. I *should* be proj-ing on my To-Do Lists. Lists. Lists.

And quite frankly To-Do lists, you can kiss off into the air. Behind my back I can see them stare. They hurt bad but I don’t mind. They hurt me bad. They do it all the time. yeah yeah.

I hope you know, this will do down on your permanent record. Oh yeah.

I’ve been reading Morrissey’s Autobiography, and I had to slow myself down to process how unbelievably fabulous this book is. If my experience with Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki has taught me anything, it’s that I was not walking my talk as educator. I taught people to slow down and think, yet I was becoming swallowed up whole with moving too quickly. So I’m stopping at every 50 pages to think and listen to music. How could I possibly love Morrissey more, you ask? Well, read this description of the first time he sees David Bowie:

I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At mid-day he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touch the hand of this explicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform (p. 66).

Sigh. To be able to write like that. Think like that. To say so much about culture and fashion and sexuality and adoration and politics with so few words. I might have to wear heels next week. Poor little Morrissey, surely you knew that your “spectacle of suffering” would become something almost spiritual to little ol’ me someday?

My recent fascination with Morrissey (did it really ever end?) was sparked when he rescued me from despair when Margaret Thatcher died. Ugh. Everyone was so celebratory about her, and it was this grotesque endless reel of her good works. Her leadership. Her legacy. Her feminism. I actually overheard a group of young girls talking about Thatcher as a model feminist. As I eavesdropped, I thought to myself: Okay, these are pit bulls with lipstick and the mama grizz of the future. These are girls who aren’t paying attention in history class. These are the students that make say to my history teacher friends, “Let me buy you another drink. Go on. I’m listening.” Thatcher as a feminist role model?  And here’s how Morrissey saved me that week in 2013: 

Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others.

Every move she made was charged by negativity; she destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them, she hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists, she was the only European political leader who opposed a ban on the ivory trade, she had no wit and no warmth and even her own cabinet booted her out. She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone—and was sailing AWAY from the islands! When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.  

Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes. She hated feminists even though it was largely due to the progression of the women’s movement that the British people allowed themselves to accept that a prime minister could actually be female. But because of Thatcher, there will never again be another woman in power in British politics, and rather than opening that particular door for other women, she closed it.

Thatcher will only be fondly remembered by sentimentalists who did not suffer under her leadership, but the majority of British working people have forgotten her already, and the people of Argentina will be celebrating her death. As a matter of recorded fact, Thatcher was a terror without an atom of humanity.

How fabulously beautifully correct and spot on. “Without an atom of humanity.” Hot damn, that’s brilliant. So, I’m slowing myself down to enjoy the memoir of a philosopher-musician whom I adore. It’s too wonderful to read quickly. And surely by now readers, you know I have a thing for the memoir.

I use one of my favorite Smith’s songs for my title of this post because that’s how I feel about some of the changes I’d like to see in education. The generous Jennifer Whetham at the SBCTC asked me and my brilliant colleague Peg to facilitate a retreat for faculty developers. Okay. I’m so there. You betcha. I have to pause right here and tell you that I did an Ignite presentation in front of a woman who can pull something like this off. Watch this and marvel, folks.

Brilliant, right? This is the woman is helping to lead the charge at the state level for professional development. Fist-bump with fireworks, Universe–this is makes my heart sing-a-ding-ding!

I’m not going to lie–the retreat was a lot of work to prepare for, to think about it, to stress about–but I love love love what we discussed. I will share more on my other blog what we produced, and I think I could have done a better job with the facilitation of the discussion, I didn’t say half of what I wanted with my Ignite, Jen is so fantastic… Remove the hair shirt, Indrunas; it’s over. Now I need to focus on what I said I would do. How soon. Is. Now.

How soon is now, indeed.

I feel very lucky to have listened to these caring educators talk about their needs, their wants, their desires for change. And even though I said I wouldn’t take on another thing until after June, here I am strategizing how I can create a pathway for us to share ideas. How to remove the duplication of our work. How to synthesize our concerns. How to send the message up the chain that This Is The Thing We All Want In The System.

But I Have To Start This: A Memoir of Losing Sleep

Oh, and we talked about adjuncts. You know, the 70% of our teachers that teach our students. You know, the person I used to be. You know, the person who still loves people who are adjuncts. You know, the topic that turns me into Negative Ed. Tech Nelly.

You know.

One of the people at the retreat is an adjunct. She came up to me during a break and thanked me for what I said. For caring about people like her (How can I not?). This has happened to me quite a bit in the past two years, and my heart turns into this giant mosaic of broken pieces every time somebody thanks me. This level of sincere gratitude is painfully familiar. I used to share it with people who made me feel cared about. Seen. Recognized. People who helped me. People who were my champions. She and I had a lovely chat, and we were all smiles. She was so happy, and I’m sure she is a good caring teacher. She didn’t stay for the whole retreat because she had a lab to run the next day–her students needed her. But she took the time to thank me. To look me in the eye. To care. To share. To say me too. I made my tear ducts turn to steel. Don’t cry, I told myself. Look her in the eye and smile.

I have so much on my plate right now that I have to set some priorities, and I will do the work–the extra work that is outside of my jobby job–because it’s needed. I can’t let somebody like her down. Jen can only do some much in her position. We have to help one another–we need subconsortiums within consortiums. Systemicity. Synthesis. Solutions.

I have to say how soon is now because this can’t wait until later–I’m trying to use “the wisdom of our ancestors.” The fact that we have passed the buck this long makes me the daughter and the heir of something that is “criminally vulgar.”