Agee on East German teacher on Dialectics

Agee, J. (1981). Twelve years : An American boyhood in East Germany (1st ed.). New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. excerpt on East German teacher on Contradictions and necessity.

Instructions for use of wordpress sites in my courses

[I am posting these instructions to invite suggestions for changes and improvements.]
Quick tips: Minimal email exchanges with instructors. Use this link to report broken links or other glitches, not email. Use posts or comments to raise queries about ideas and course content (see Preamble below). Include 645 at start of subject line if you have to email.

Design for learning that gets constrained by Learning Management Systems

I want my online course materials to address a set of design principles that might be grouped under the umbrella of expanding access—expanding the range of influences on the students’ learning and expanding access to the learning materials from courses. Most of these principles are difficult or impossible to pursue on existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs).
I have to organize my course materials in ways that may be unfamiliar to students. I continue to work on three fronts: guide and coach students into getting used to my approaches; make periodic changes (such as when a certain platform is discontinued) and elaborations (example); and articulate the design principles—this last being the topic of this post. (Comments welcome towards revision of the post and of the principles themselves.)

Taking Yourself Seriously: A Fieldbook of Processes of Research and Engagement

A book of tools and processes to help readers in all fields develop as researchers, writers, workshop facilitators, and agents of change

Purchases. More details

Innovations in online education under the umbrella of expanding access

What follows is a summary of a set of innovations I have crafted in online education that may be grouped under the umbrella of expanding access—expanding the range of influences on the students’ learning and expanding access to the learning materials from courses.

Online Synchronous Teaching

When students participate over the internet in regularly scheduled class meetings, discussion and small group interactions needs to be structured so that they feel as included and engaged as they would if they were students in a classroom. In other words, teachers should follow the Slow Ed Tech guideline of “modeling computer use on best practices to ensure learning without computers.” Appropriate practices include:

The form of Taking Yourself Seriously

The forms (Levine 2015) of Taking Yourself Seriously (TYS) are ones in which the students and participants bring themselves into to grow and develop so that they leave having more self, i.e., more tools in their toolbox, to bring into the forms of work and life outside TYS. The students/participants take up/in the tools by experiencing their use and practicing them in projects of research and engagement, including engagement with themselves, that is, taking themselves seriously.

What relationship does it have to democracy to claim that the outcome of a referendum, such as Brexit, must be carried through come what may?

What relationship does it have to democracy to claim that the outcome of a referendum, such as Brexit, must be carried through come what may?
Consider this: in a representative democracy, elections decide who represents the people. These representatives contest elections, citing positions of policy on various issues, but by no means on every one that might arise in the course of government. Moreover, once the election is over, the Parliament or Congress decides the what and how of policies to enact, drawing on advice from people who have examined the details and evolving circumstances.

Manifesto

A synthesis of elements from a course or workshop, selected and organized so as to inspire as well as inform your efforts in extending the course/workshop topic further. An excerpt from an example, then some elaboration:

Plan for Practice

A plan with two dimensions:
How you will put into practice in your work, community and other settings the tools, processes, and knowledge being learned
How and with whom you will practice putting these into practice. Given that things are surely not going to work out perfectly the very first time, include how you will take stock of how well your Plan is working so as to adjust and improve.