Behind “Something is Rotten in the State of…Twitter”

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By Bonnie Stewart, Prince Edward Island, Canada

This post emerged from a conversation between Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) and EdConteXts facilitator, Maha Bali (@Bali_Maha) following Bonnie’s post “Something is Rotten in the State of…Twitter.” It is an explanation of the thinking – and context – behind that post.

My house is currently infested with fruit flies. I have hidden all the fruit in the refrigerator, but still they come. They are last gasp of summer where I live, the swarm that makes it possible to look ahead to six months of winter as almost a reprieve. They make me think about rot, and what it feeds.

I ended up thinking mostly about Twitter.

I’ve been on Twitter seven years now. Initially, it was a space for real-time banter and discussion within my blogging network: when I started out online, my life was far removed from academia. As my identity has shifted back towards education and career, my Twitter circles have expanded to reflect each new facet: fellow Ph.D students, educators, researchers interested in the socio-cultural implications of technologies, people with something to say about identity in the 21st century. But the bloggers and mombloggers remain, and the para-academics who first walked with me through thinking about what it means to be online, together, in networked environments. Continue reading Behind “Something is Rotten in the State of…Twitter” →

EdConteXts finds 5: on social justice, edtech, & open learning

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts

by EdContexts Facilitators

Here are our CLMOOC inspired “#f5f” (“Find 5 Friday”) “picks” for August – thought-provoking posts we’ve come across during the month that have shown sensitivity to context in education.  Themes of social justice, edtech, and learning in open spaces are covered in our finds this month.

Cody Charles (educator) _@CodyKeith_

We first noticed Cody Charles’ post “WTF? 10 Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators”  in late July when it was published on the  “Teaching Social Justice” blog, which we featured last time in our #f5f. This is an insightful post that points out 10 habits or behaviours that can be easy for social justice educators to fall into, but which tend to hinder rather than help our cause. Many of us at EdContexts thought it raised such important points that it’s something we’ll likely be posting above our desks as a reference to inform our daily practice. Continue reading EdConteXts finds 5: on social justice, edtech, & open learning →

Education in Context: A Few More Good Picks

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, MOOCs

by EdContexts Facilitators

In response to the often grandiose and paradoxical claims made by MOOC providers and professors, educators around the world have brought up critical issues about education across borders. An issue that has become more pronounced in the discourse of cross-border higher education is that MOOCs are making education more “democratic” while in fact they are further re-centralizing it and eschewing collaboration among educators across nations and contexts. Indeed, a lot of the educators who decided to enter cross-border higher education from the fancy door of xMOOCs often show striking lack of knowledge, experience, or even interest about the implications of teaching/learning crossing borders. Many professors, usually in the Western world, show up in the new landscape without having thought about complexities of cross-contextual pedagogy, diversity and cultural difference, and the many vagaries of contexts on a global scale.

However, the discourse about MOOCs and cross-border higher education, including in the mainstream media, we’ve come across a lot of conversations that add nuance to the issue of context in education. Continue reading Education in Context: A Few More Good Picks →

An education(al) anecdote from Brazil

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, Teacher Education,

By Clarissa Bezerra, Brasília, Brazil

As an educator and as a woman, I have had the privilege of having a very strong woman to look up to – my mother. Today, in my 39th birthday, after having spent most of my day by her side, I decided that it was time I wrote down a story she once told me about her life as a young and inexperienced teacher back in her hometown, a small and impoverished village by a river, called Cajari, in the heart of the state of Maranhão, northeastern region of Brazil. This was back in the early sixties, and my mom had just finished her studies, the then-called ‘Escola Normal’, which no longer exists, to become a teacher. Back then, it was the only choice a woman had to being someone’s wife and bearing children.

My grandmother Raimunda was my grandfather’s, Jerônimo, third wife. My mom was the first-born daughter of three siblings, but they had a whole bunch of other brothers and sisters from my grandpa’s first two unions. Having become an enthusiastic young teacher, my mom greatly contributed to the setting up of one of the first schools in her village, where she taught Portuguese, basic Math, and basic agricultural practices to students who were in their majority either as old as, or older than herself. She remembers the exhilarating feeling of standing in the front of the group in the very simple classroom. That was, she had always known, her true calling. She was a natural-born educator, taking after my grandma Dodoca, whom I will certainly write about in another post. Continue reading An education(al) anecdote from Brazil →

A Chinese-Australian’s Reflections on Language and Culture: a response to Bland Culture

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By Tanya Lau, Sydney, Australia

I was inspired to reflect on my own experiences of language and culture by Ana Carolina Calil’s EdConteXts post Bland Culture. As an Australian-born Chinese, I found that much of her story of learning English as a Brazilian kid mirrored mine, of learning Chinese: “I remember being dragged to class because we HAD TO learn Cantonese”. I don’t recall being told it was “important for our future”; the reason we were given was more along the lines of “because YOU’RE Chinese” – whatever that meant.

Like Ana Carolina, we were taught a language without context; and adding to the alienation was a pedagogy based on learning by rote and repetition. A regular homework assignment from Chinese school was to copy sets of Chinese characters into rows of specially designed grid books using a traditional calligraphy quill and ink pot. It was fun…at first. But for a 7 year old, writing the same Chinese character into a 2x2cm square every week gets boring by about character no. 5, week 1 –turning what could have been an inspiring learning experience into a dreaded chore. The historical significance of calligraphy in Chinese culture was never explained – we were simply instructed to do. That Chinese school was on a Saturday didn’t help either: while our friends from school were playing, we were reciting or copying Chinese texts.

Chinese school photo

Chinese school, where my sister and I spent Saturdays learning Cantonese. Continue reading A Chinese-Australian’s Reflections on Language and Culture: a response to Bland Culture →

Unprecedented Interconnectedness: opportunity or threat?

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, pedagogy

By Sushimita Maryam, Bangalore, India

(This article was first published on IndiaAhead.com and is re-published here with their permission and the author’s)

Life is a bag of mixed experiences – some interesting some not so interesting – but all relevant, all impart learning, all best lived in the present. So when a student from one of the groups that I was facilitating an intercultural dialogue with asked me – ‘Sushmita what about you- what has been your great experience?’ as they were all sharing their own, I was taken aback. Not only because I was not expecting to be asked a question (that is a part of my job as the dialogue facilitator) but also because it is really hard to pick just one.
That dilemma though was only for a moment –and it seems I did not have to really think hard.‘Soliya!’ I heard myself say, straight from the heart. It is impossible to not see how incredibly rewarding an experience is when you are right there living it. ‘It is great to be here getting people from different parts of the world to talk to and listen to each other. As much as it is a wonderful learning opportunity for you, it is for me as well. This feeling of high watching you all connect with each other despite of the differences that supposedly divide you is amazing.’ I said to my group that had ten students – 2 Jordanians, 3 Egyptians, 2 Americans, One Italian, One Dutch and One Pakistani.

What is the challenge in ‘talking to each other’ and in ‘listening to each other’ and why is there the need for a facilitator to get people to do that? I would have asked that question had I not been doing the work that I do now as a mediator and as a dialogue facilitator. Continue reading Unprecedented Interconnectedness: opportunity or threat? →

School wasn’t about that…

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, pedagogy

By Scott Johnson, Canada

My name is Scott Johnson and up until 6 years ago I worked in the building trades both being an apprentice and then teaching apprentices. My last 5 years of work involved helping build online courses at a small college in North East Alberta, Canada. A year ago the Provincial Government here cut funding to education and my job disappeared. Given that trades education hasn’t changed over the almost 50 years since I began working I’m not sure why I persist…

It was never my intention to become a teacher or be associated with education. My experience with “school” (that’s what I’ll call it) was not good, but what can you do in life without learning some things? School’s all about that, right? Anyway growing up with teachers, professors and all kinds of professional people as neighbors, it seemed natural that school was where I too could learn cool things that made me interesting and capable like them.

Except, school wasn’t about that. It was a closed system of rules and structure invented to present a world that could fit inside a school. It was orderly, lessonized and so important to itself that you could actually fail school and be blamed for being stupid. Lucky for me I had smart parents who taught me how to extract information from the world—what I wanted from school and couldn’t get. Continue reading School wasn’t about that… →

Building a Community: What We Value

Contexts Matter, EdConteXts

Praveen Yadav, Umes Shrestha, and Uttam Gaulee
(facilitators of ELT Choutari, an English Language Teachers’
and bloggers’ network from Nepal)

praveenThe world is getting far more connected, but not all connections are the same. Nor do connections automatically achieve the social, professional, and other purposes that the Internet is often credited for by those who have full and unhindered access to it. So, building a professional community, developing resources for it, and engaging its members from the ground up takes a lot of time, courage, and collaboration by one or more members who can stick to it through ups and downs, excitement and frustration.

umesIn this blog post, we’d like to share the story of how we, a group of English language teachers in Nepal gradually built an online professional development community by the name of ELT Choutari. In a sense, this post is a detailed answer to the question that was asked by a colleague who commented on a story that one of us (Praveen) wrote for EdConteXts in June: what do we value as measures of success of/in our network?

uttamELT Choutari is probably the first English Language Teaching (ELT) blog-zine of its kind in South Asia. It was formed in 2009 by a group of dynamic ELT professionals of Nepal who felt the dire need of scholarly and professional engagement in the virtual world. To involve teachers across the country in professional development through online conversations, the team set up a blog, which was called ‘Nelta Choutari’ until recently. NELTA is the acronym for Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association where members of this informal group belong, and Choutari is a Nepali word meaning the space under/including a tree, the traditional public square where members of the community gather to share ideas and debate issues, tell stories to pass on or generate knowledge, solve problems, and sustain community.We changed the name to ELT Choutari in order to emphasize the group’s independence and informality and to be inclusive of the international scope of our readership—even as we remain grounded in Nepal and continue to share ideas and experiences of teaching/learning in our unique context. Continue reading Building a Community: What We Value →

Context Matters – views from around the world

clmooc, Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, pedagogy

By Maha Bali and Tanya Lau (EdContexts Facilitators)

As facilitators of EdConteXts, we tend to notice when others speak about context in sensitive and thoughtful ways, and we thought we would share some of our “picks” this month for posts we’ve come across on the web that showed sensitivity to context in education. This is like what CLMOOC call “Find 5 Friday” (#f5f) – so here are our five for this month.

Hybrid Pedagogy (open access journal)

We like the journal Hybrid Pedagogy for many reasons, including the fact that they published a couple of articles by two of our facilitators (Shyam and Maha) just before EdConteXts was launched. A recent article we liked on Hybrid Pedagogy by Janine deBaise debunks the myth of “best practice” in education. She poses the problems of using any best practice guidelines universally and regardless of context, without considering individual student needs, abilities and interests, and gives examples from her own teaching.

Continue reading Context Matters – views from around the world →

Memes, Contexts, Connected Learning

clmooc, EdConteXts, MOOCs

Shyam Sharma and Maha Bali

Shyam and Maha wrote this post as a reflection on MakeCycle#2 where participants made their own memes as an assignment in #CLMOOC. -Ed

Imagine going to a party where you know everyone, but when the conversation begins, you are lost. You dig out your cell phone to look up the definition of what everyone is talking about, going on to skim through a Wikipedia entry. You also ask one of your friends to explain one of the sample images that you found on the web. But the more you learn about the subject, the more you struggle to understand what everyone is saying.

philosoraptorOne of us felt something like the above when first reading about memes as the focus of the second week of clmooc, a connected learning community/course that we participated in. Having lived in the US longer where he also studied popular culture in graduate school, Shyam knew about memes as an internet phenomenon. But for Maha, the subject was new.

Derived from Greek “mimesis” (imitation), the word “meme” refers to “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture” (according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The Wikipedia entries for “meme” and “internet meme” also highlight that memes act as units “for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices.” Indeed, memes are understood as cultural analogue to “genes” in biology in that they “self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.” Thus, memes can be hard to understand for anyone outside of particular cultures and contexts. Continue reading Memes, Contexts, Connected Learning →