Post Category → #antigonish2

bringing back the participatory: a story of the #ProSocialWeb

So. We need to talk about the web.

Disclaimer: I spent the early part of April living the Very Best of the Web. I’d doubted, frankly, that “best of the web” was a phrase I’d be likely to use again, but…life is funny.

A whirlwind journey landed me in Virginia, Nova Scotia, and Ireland over the first half of the month. In each space and with every collection of people, I framed the web in dire terms.

“We need to talk about the web,” I’d say, and I’d launch into a rat-a-tat battery of images depicting digital spaces in our present: the weaponization of attention. Monetization. Quantification. Algorithmic-decision-making. Surveillance. The enclosure of commons by totalizing technical systems. Basically, THIS:

https://me.me/i/fun-fact-the-internet-nas-once-a-fun-place-for-21441614

I’m fun at parties.

But the conversations in the hallways and the restaurants and pubs and hotel spaces – and, yep, online – after each of those talks actually reminded me what the web can DO.

Because I would not have been in any of those rooms if it weren’t for the web.

The participatory web, originally – the old-skool Web 2.0 where readers were also writers and contributors and people were tied together by blog comments – but also social media. Twitter. Even Facebook. Together, these various platforms have networked me into some of the most important conversations and relationships of my life.

And at each stop on my trip in April, ties that had started online brought forth hopeful, meaningful exchanges, and real intellectual and emotional connection to other human beings in spite of geographic distance between our day-to-day lives. Moments of shared purpose and learning and capacity-building. Even in 2019.

This is the the Very Best of what the web makes possible. It was a mini-version what Jim Luke called, in his #OER19 reflection, “technology in the service of people.”

I was basically living the paradox that I was flying around trying to talk about: THE SYSTEMS WE ARE EMBEDDED IN ARE TOXIC. BUT THEY ARE ALSO AN IMPORTANT INFRASTRUCTURE ENABLING US TO WORK TOGETHER AND KNOW EACH OTHER.

We *do* need to talk about the web. But not just so we can all opt out and go home. Those of us who are already there, and for whom the web is more than just Google and a garbage fire, need to talk about it differently.

We need to make the participatory web visible again, in our small human corners of it…even amidst the sea of bots and surveillance and polarization.

NOT because we can drown all that out. So that we are not drowned by it. So we can help others struggling against the current. So we can build rafts, together…until we figure out how many rafts it takes to make a dam, perhaps.

***
Obviously, the toxicity doesn’t stop with digital systems.

It was Earth Day yesterday. I need to stop flying around. I need to work towards the fundamental, drastic changes that will mean my kids have the possibility of a long-term future on this planet. I gotta go deeper than the “one-car family with a hybrid car” schtick and actually change.

I’m reading pieces like Monbiot’s Only Rebellion Will Prevent an Economic Collapse. I signed up for notifications re Extinction Rebellion protests in my area. I note my area does not have an Extinction Rebellion Coordinator.

That kind of work is hard: change work, drastic non-status-quo work. I didn’t even know what a Community Organizer *was* until Obama came to prominence and people started throwing the term around in a loaded way.

When the next US President got elected, though, and terms like “fake news” started to be tossed around like grenades, there was a hot second where I thought maybe *I* could coordinate something. My professional background is part media literacy and part adult ed, and late one night I rambled my way to the idea that maybe we could model off the 20th century Antigonish Movement – an extraordinary Eastern Canadian legacy that brought people together to learn, and to fight The Company Store.

I thought an Antigonish 2.0 for community, citizenship, and information literacy might be a way to address some of the yawning literacy gaps of our own time.

A LOT of people signed up.

I found an amazing ally based in Antigonish, and we started writing grants and spreading the word in places like Educause and via DavidsonNow’s #engageMOOC.

And then we hit a wall. And realized that – whoopsie! – a lot of models of coordination and community organization require a structural position of power within whatever community you’re trying to organize. The #Antigonish2 model needed universities as its centre layer, in addition to networks and communities.

As precarious staff at our respective universities, my ally & I could hustle up a network and publish and write grants on our own time and plan community events and even generate *some* institutional support, but ultimately we did not fit funders’ models for Principal Investigators and we did not fit our institutions’ ideas of the package Strategic Change should come in.

You cannot leverage an institution when you have no real foothold IN the institution.

***
So. Ultimately I uprooted my family from the Maritimes, and #Antigonish2 lay low for the better part of a year. Until I got an invitation – thanks to the networked and institutional roots my ally had laid down – to go TO Antigonish and deliver a keynote for THATCampX in April.

That keynote is here. Its ending is probably more radical than its opening…but it posits that datafication and AI are the new Company Store. And it suggests that resisting the technocratic systems encroaching on our institutions and our lives means – in part, for those of us already online – bringing back the participatory web.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is, however, a call to action…and a way of returning the #Antigonish2 name to its rightful home while building next steps for the network who were keen and generous enough to sign on. It’s rooted in what Dave & I have been calling “the #prosocialweb:” an invitation to think and write and build together.

The idea of the #prosocialweb assumes that our small social worlds matter.

Few decision-makers have lived the Best of The Web. What if those of us who have were able to make it visible? To counter the Company Store mythology of capital data solutions that’s gone viral among our leadership strata?

If our contemporary information ecosystem has taught us anything, it should be that that humans are VERY vulnerable to social contagion. All the systems we’ve accepted are neither natural nor inevitable.

And the system I am positioned to make a difference in – at the coordinating level – is networks…so the web and this idea of the #prosocialweb is where I’ll take the subversive hope that underpinned #Antigonish2, for now. To try to counter misinformation, yes. But also to try to push for change, and for a more pro-social and humane digital space through three key ideas: complexity, cooperation, and contribution. To try to foreground the “ethic of care” that Kate Bowles called for at #OER19, quoting Giroux:

“Hope is not a pipe dream, it is the most important resource we have. It is the heartbeat of our politics.”

If no one believes there are alternatives to this inexorable march towards The Company Store of datafication and automation and extinction that we seem to be on…there won’t be.

But the people I’ve met through the participatory web keep me believing in alternatives. And believing I am not alone.

#engageMOOC – The Twitter Chats

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
***

So. #engageMOOC is officially underway, officially lively, and very much still officially open to people joining in, even if just to listen for a part of the conversation or dip a toe in the waters.

Or write a whole opus or three. Whatever works.

There’s a lot going on so far.  We had a first live hangout (that lead Designer Sundi Richard saved from confusion and delay) and that a whole crew of participants waited through 20 minutes of dead air to start. Huge thanks, patient people.

We migrated #engageMOOC over to Future Trends Forum with Bryan Alexander today, for a rollicking conversation that included an admission that I do not like to count, in research. ;0


But the best parts of the course are emerging where the conversations are beginning to take hold.

In our discussion forums, there are conversations about whether John Perry Barlow was wrong, and questions about online engagement and community and anonymity, and musings about social consequences of bad online behaviour and what we should do when the shouting starts.

These conversations are what the course is FOR. People have been responding to each other, connecting, being generous.

But. The container of EdX in which #engageMOOC mostly lives is a constrained space for a lively open conversation. All platforms have limitations. A platform designed primarily to deliver content rather to foster discussion has significant limitations for a course that aims to convene a conversation.

Enter Twitter.

TWITTER for conversation, you say?

I READ THE NEWS, you say. TWITTER IS WHERE PEOPLE LOSE THEIR JOBS & GET DRAGGED IN SHAME FOR FLOSSING INCORRECTLY.

Okay well not entirely. But Twitter, for all its *very* real issues – the pile-ons, the tactical decontextualization of people’s statements, the sea lions and the “well actually” folks – is designed for open, public conversation AND is still viewable even for participants who don’t have accounts.

The #engageMOOC hashtag is chock full of comments, requests, connections, distributed blog posts expanding on ideas…it’s happening.

We’re going for more.

One of the things we want to do in this course – even within its tiny pop up time frame and the limitations of our course space and our Google hangout provocations – is open up the questions and ideas people have brought to the table.

So tomorrow and the Friday after – the 16th and 23rd of February, starting at noon EST – we’ll have a Twitter chat, using the #engageMOOC hashtag. It’ll start at noon, and we’ll ask a question – based on participants’ intro questions for the course – every ten minutes or so for an hour. Participants can reply…or start whole new conversations and questions of their own, all on the hashtag.

If you want to just read the chat, click the hashtag. If you want to contribute, simply post or reply…and use the hashtag. If you can’t show up in the hour but have ideas to share to the conversation, the hashtag is *always* open.

Twitter chats are usually fast and furious. Do NOT feel you have to take it all in. You can’t. I can’t. Nobody will. It’s okay.

This in itself – this letting go and just focusing on the parts of the stream that you’re engaged with for the moment and letting the rest float on past – is a key web literacy, and (I think) key to getting any actual enjoyment from the web in an era of constant information abundance. THERE IS NO TEST AT THE END. Be wherever you are.

Join us, if you can. #engageMOOC. Try to remember the hashtag, if you’re tweeting. Answer the hell outta whatever question or branch or rabbit hole in the conversation interests you. Try to talk to some new people on the hashtag. Twitter, for all its faults, still has broad networks of engaged thinkers and learners and professionals of all stripes interested in sharing ideas…and a lot of them are in our course! The chats may be an easy way to build recognition and fledgling relationships – via follows – that you can take with you when our two weeks are over.

Thread your ideas (ie reply to yourself) if it takes more than one tweet to say what you want. That way people can read the whole train of thought.

And maybe try – if you think someone’s wrong – to offer an alternate perspective in a non-polarizing way. We’re aiming to practice what we preach, here: stumbling together towards a less polarized information ecosystem.

See you Friday at noon EST. Bring questions. :)

#engageMOOC – The Schedule

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)

Hear ye, hear ye…

Our pop up MOOC – Engagement in a Time of Polarization (#engageMOOC) – starts…MONDAY.

It’s only two weeks long, so sign up right here STAT and feel free to dip in & out however much works for you. There will be four topics over the two week run, some video interviews with people waaay cooler than us, one core provocation or reading for each topic, and one live hangout per topic. Plus some background readings for the keen amongst us…and some Twitter chats.

Here’s the schedule. Mark your calendars. Sign up: it all goes live Monday.

We’ve been thrilled with the uptake so far and encourage anybody half-thinking about it to just…join in! You can participate via the discussion boards, OR in the open – every topic will have a challenge we post publicly. You can engage through blog or video responses and post using the hashtag #engageMOOC. Contributions to the hashtag will be gathered and shared back to participants: we’re hoping for some distributed discussion, and welcome participants to open up new channels, too, as you wish.

The Monday Feb 12th intro hangout is a provocation in and of itself…we’ll be debating “Does engagement even matter today…and why?” Sign up or watch the hashtag to view live & throw in questions. See you there. :)

Engagement in a Time of Polarization: An #Antigonish2-style Open Course

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
***

“The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.”
– John Dewey, 1939

Thursday, the FCC voted to end #NetNeutrality.

Okay, I’m in Canada. But most of the platforms and providers I use – for my teaching, my professional presence, my research, my entertainment, and all the blurry spaces in between – are not. They’re primarily US platforms.

So the repeal and what it means for education concerns me – even up here in the Maritimes – as a scholar, a higher ed professional, and a member of society.

(Sure, the open internet is a TERRIBLE platform for speech and justice. Point. But as Tressie McMillan-Cottom states very clearly, “the end of net neutrality also means the regulation-by-capital of online spaces where minority groups shut out of traditional media, politics, and economies have thrived.” So things are only set to get more stratified from here on out. That’s a problem.)

It’s not a problem any of us has a tidy solution for. But. Maybe it’s time to announce that some of us are convening an open conversation to try to grapple with some of what’s at stake: politics and polarization and participatory models for engagement and change.

From February 12-26, 2018, Dr. Natalie Delia Deckard and myself will facilitate a two week “pop-up MOOC” on EdX, with Davidson Now.

We want to invite you to join us.

Engagement in a Time of Polarization will be a discussion as much as a course, with provocations and live hangouts with leaders of this cultural conversation of the moment. Mike Caulfield, Chris Gilliard, Kris Shaffer, and (hopefully) Zeynep Tufekci will all join us, supported by Davidson’s Sundi Richard and staff, faculty, students and alumni. And all of you. 

It’s the next step for #Antigonish2, as a concept and a network. We’ll explore some of the history and legacy of adult ed participatory engagement, then dive into what this means today, across education, government, and media.

All welcome. Please share.

Songs of…Experience?

(this post is crossposted from #Antigonish2.com)
***

November.  Rolling on an Amtrak train across North Carolina, on my way to Triangle SCI. Our team – one of six chosen for the Institute, woot! – will spend four days in Chapel Hill working on scholarly storytelling and digital storytelling. I’m here because of #Antigonish2 and its emphasis on participatory engagement models…I’m excited to see where the conversation leads.

But the journey is a story already, really.

This is the first Amtrak train I’ve ever been on. I heard Tom T Hall songs on a jukebox in Charlotte last night that I hadn’t heard in years. This is a part of the world I only know from books and songs. Just being here feels like some kind of peak Americana.

We just whistled past a little brick house by the side of the tracks with a big hand-painted sign in front of it that reads “THANK YOU JESUS.”

It leaves me wondering about the versions of North Carolina I am prepped to recognize and absorb, and all I’m missing. Whose stories I’m missing because they were not the stories I grew up on as my own/not my own, north of the border but somehow part of a shared dominant cultural narrative. I think about Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.”

I joke on FB that I flew from Charlottetown to Charlotte – both named after the same 18th century British Consort – and the airport promised me Billy Graham but I ended up with Burt Reynolds & I’d call it a win. All true. Still odd to visually revisit the white patriarchs of my 70s-80s childhood.

Anyway, I am here. Trying to tell it is never the same as the experience.

I am thinking about about storytelling as experience.

Academic and scholarly forms of storytelling – or knowledge dissemination, if you prefer the formal term – don’t tend to privilege the experiential. They tend to be abstracted, content-focused. Yet I keep seeing a FB link about how we can’t change people’s minds just with facts and content…I can’t find this FB link thanks to spotty train wifi, of course, and maybe it’s fake news (edit: it’s here, thanks Bob Gray!)….but with a grain of salt or two, I think we might want to begin to consider – from the big picture of academe – what we lose when we tell our stories the way we do. For the often-intentionally limited audiences we frame ’em for.

On the plane yesterday I read a blog post by Keith Hamon in which he explores the #MeToo hashtag as hyper-object and experiential…that there is no unity or single artifact to emerge from the hashtag, but rather the noise is the point. I also read an article in which major alt-right Twitter personas were just outed as Russian trolls. So much of what has shaped public narrative in the last 16-18 mos is still something we don’t fully have literacies to process, because tactical uses of Twitter make possible the unleashing of any narrative into an experiential environment that can convert biases and prejudices and positionality into perceived reality, into things people can’t unsee or unknow.

The combination of the two pieces got me thinking that being literate in a hashtag world involves recognizing that media are now experiential, full stop.

We are part of the circulation of this entity we cannot grasp as a whole. We need a new focus on literacies to make sense of it all…that was always the point of #Antigonish2…but the idea that they may be experiential literacies is one I’ve been bumbling towards. I hope to dig into more deeply this week.

And I want to find ways to put those diggings out there, where others can join.

When academic stories – academic knowledge – are mostly tied down in restricted and expensive journals and specialist language and reliant on journalists and audiences busy with nuclear threats and Nazis in the streets and catastrophic natural disasters and shootings, what gets lost?

This is what I’m thinking about, rolling across North Carolina with Amtrak spotty wifi.