I'm still doing the weekly gratitude and joy practice blogging: "week 11, what a week right?"
March 17th, 2020, 8pm, Crescent City, NorCal
I’ve checked in with many of my people around the world and everyone reports doing alright.
Given the current state of things and after giving last week’s artist and album: 13th Floor Elevators – The Psychadelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators a cursory listen I made an executive decision to invite one of my all time favorite artists, Sinéad…
For our audio stars this week, I know our focus was supposed to be on material we could use for our radio shows and the class theme in general. In keeping with that aim, I chose to create another ds106 radio bumper that also advertised my groups upcoming radio show! My first step was to find some background music. I really wanted something dramatic but in the end, I felt like a radio bumper needs…
Tonight, I finally had a chance and was awake late enough to listen to story time on ds106 Radio! It was not at all what I expected which made it that much better. I wasn’t sure I would be able to follow along for a full hour but the story drew me in almost as soon as it started, even though I didn’t even know what was going on. While the story drew me, tweeting back and forth with everyone else…
So we came to the end of our radio show The DS106 Good Spell in 106 Bullets. We did it in 107 bullets, of course!
Just before the last episode somebody sent me the above diagram, it reminded me that cycles are an inherent part of life. It also got me reflecting on the nature of the ‘group’ that is DS106 as an online open community. In our last show we talked about the value of combining of open participants and those doing the course at a university for a qualification. We spoke about how this reciprocal relationship works - offering students at a university a sense of audience beyond the professor and open participants a sense of structure and physicality that supports learning.
The rest of this post is my personal reflections after the final show.
Looking at the diagram I see how little ‘we’ within the DS106 community we talk ‘about’ the nature of the group we are; attention seems always focussed in the digital output we produce and we relate through that over time. Using the ideas in the diagram as a descriptive and reflective model, I very much see the hashtag classroom that is #ds106 as a community of practice.
I remember starting to learn about it and seeing its potential for supporting learning; taking the first steps to get to know people and evaluating if this were ‘my kind of people’. Once I joined the question changed to how I could contribute. What Jim Groom referred to on our show as ‘we ask what we can do for #ds106 rather than what it can do for us’. This desire to contribute does not come from nowhere; it comes and grows as we see how being part of this group helps our digital practice. Some of us see what we do as art, others as story, yet others as mere artefact (that would be me when I started); but what brings us together is the practice we share and are developing. For some of us it is a limited enterprise, we need the credits for the course and for others of us it is a wider enterprise that supports the work we do elsewhere on an ongoing basis.
@ronald2008
The DS106 Good Spell show is a good example of the last two stages in the diagram. The ‘course’ I did, DS106 Headless, finished in 2013. Some people dispersed and some of us stayed in touch and continued to engage around the hashtag as ‘a force and a centre of knowledge’ that still exists and that is to some extent independent of who participates at any one time.
John and I started this little project as a way to stay connected *because* we experienced the value of the community. We kept making stuff. We stayed around to be of use to others as best we could whilst we moved on to other projects and life. Even when DS106 is ‘no longer central’ (in the sense that it takes up every waking hour of your life) ‘people still remember it as an integral part of their identities’. Online, we express this with the hashtag #4life and make jokes about how DS106 is like Hotel California - you can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave.
The last episode of the DS106 Good Spell Radio Show was very much and example of this ‘memorable’ stage the diagram suggests as the end of the cycle. We told many stories, spoke about artefacts we have made and created. And, of course, the show itself is the most amazing artefact. @johnjohnston has painstakingly archived it all, so anyone can binge listen all episodes!
As we spoke about what we made, the stories we tell through time and the way in which ‘DS106 is just like the Internet but with less trolls’ you can hear in our voices how proud of DS106 memorabilia we are and how much we all wish we had some DS106 socks! (in-joke, sorry. But if you are interested watch the latest instalment of the story here). We talked about the most significant symbol of all, the number 106. A meaningless symbol given life by the relationships and stories people chose and choose to build around it. We even made a radio programme on DS106 Numerology, of course.
source
We spoke about issues of inclusion and exclusion. There is a way in which DS106 does not set up to be inclusive. This for me connects with how our attention is on what we make and how we embody what we believe: ‘Show them, don’t tell them’ is a mantra for DS106. To me, this simple sentence expresses the essence of transformational pedagogy much more than much of the convoluted jargon I read on open pedagogy (critical or otherwise) elsewhere.
The ethos of DS106 means that it is not for everyone, there is a vulnerability that comes with being willing to ‘futz splendidly’ in public. On the show we spoke about how what was important to us as educators was to be as transparent as possible about the nature of the experience, make it okay for people to join or not - much in the same way as not everyone plays golf and joining a golf club is not something inherently good or bad, just a preference.
We may be more dispersed now than when I started in 2013, may be we only gather around the metaphorical campfire to reminisce about the great old days sporadically as other projects gain our attention. Yet, the important things remain and develop outside of the hashtag.
John and I are talking about a new radio show, I am furnishing a new home outside of Tumblr where I will show my ‘digital art’. I can now contemplate the idea of calling myself an artist as well as an academic. My new online home is with the best educational hosting company ever, Reclaim Hosting , run by DS106 folk. I started to build an online contemplation studio, again with Reclaim Hosting, at the stillweb.org with support from people I met through DS106. I even run a kind of daily create of my own, thanks to @cogdog, focussed on activities to ‘find stillness in movement (digital or otherwise)’ which I use in my university teaching on the LMS. All this and more would never have been possible without the people I have met through this great hashtag.
The joy of having been part of what Warren Bennis labels ‘a great group’ will stay with me for a lifetime and reminds me that open true ego-free collaboration is possible...even at times when competition and comprehensive doctrines seem to make up most of our educational dialogue online. As James Poulos explains,
We’re all succumbing to what philosophers call “comprehensive doctrines.” Translated into plain language, comprehensive doctrines are grandiose, all-inclusive accounts of how the world is and should be.
Whatever I do for #ds106 going forward will never pay the debt I feel for it offering me a learning environment that reminds me each day what true education can be.
A new bumper for this Sunday DS106 Good Spell #106spell on Twitter. The season finale is at 8.00pm UK time on http://ds106rad.io/listen/ and it is back next year at the same time, same place on February 7th.
Labyrinth Tales: A fairy tale radio drama in 10 scenes written by #Prisoner106 and #Burgeron106. The story of a Princess who fought The Evil Queen to become an un-princess and bring freedom and democracy to an enchanted land.
The radio show: https://soundcloud.com/clhendricksbc/labyrinth-tales
Listen to the show with DS106 Open Players chatting about their experience here: http://www.edutalk.info/the-ds106-good-spell-episode-38
Sept. 6, 2015 on DS106 radio. Listen at: http://ds106rad.io/listen/
Hat & cape image used with permission of Liana Kerr http://lianaspaperdolls.com/2010/05/12/villagers-cape-with-black-turtleneck-and-white-pants-from-the-prisoner/
DS106 #Noir106 Strike Anywhere Matches commercial for “The Fascinating Femme Fatale” radio show aired on http://ds106rad.io/listen/ on March 23rd, 2015. You can catch the entire show plus a lot more in our multi-media flip book at http://tinyurl.com/FemFatal
<before I get going here, I hate the new editor. Tumblr sort it>
So we were chatting at the splendiferous pre-show for our radio show and Jim asked us why we do it - ‘it’ being DS106 #4life. We said for fun and he joked he was talking to a bunch of fun junkies. It was hard to have a serious conversation as we laughed at Uncle Jim futzing the log in to DS106 Radio’s servers, we had so much fun and the show rocked. Please ignore unfounded reports that DS106 is an immortality cult, we just make art. This post is not about that, though. This post is about this: is it something bigger than fun that makes us collaborate across continents and work hard at producing something nobody is asking us to produce?
I have been reflecting on this question for the last few days, it is something bigger than just fun. I have spent a lifetime supporting groups in various contexts become a ‘team’ ‘work collaboratively’ ‘manage a virtual teams’. I can, and often do, drone on about best practice in group facilitation.
Yet, this question echoed to the learner in me not just the educator.
I could go to my usual space of creativity theory and the environment that makes creativity possible to answer the question. Or the place of ‘hard fun’ a la Papert and say DS106 is all that and more and paraphrasing Papert’s kid say: "It's fun. It's hard. It's DS106."
All the above would speak to the why, but there is more.
Today I was grading papers on Bohmian dialogue; one of my students answered the question for me as she quoted Bohm on Koinonia,
And perhaps in dialogue, when we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group [...] Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in therelation to the cosmic. Such an energy has been called 'communication'. It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word koinonia, the root of which means 'to participate' - the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole .
The other day, with another group of students, we talked about how hard it was to collaborate virtually when your team is spread out around the world. In the context of business, this seems almost impossible to do and people mostly complain about it and pay consultants to help them do it. For the first time, since I have been involved in DS106, I thought about DS106 in the context of my work in my business school - in DS106 we sign up on a Google doc and make it work.
The holly grail of large businesses - what is the difference that makes the difference? My students and I had a conversation about DS106 and they immediately said: Well, but that is not work! There are no problems likely to arise in that situation. I disagreed, but I could not put my finger on why. I took it to my reflection space.
rockylou22 and I were talking about the show this week, as we discussed work and play and expectations, Frame Analysis and Goffman came to mind. We use unconscious frames as a way of explaining "what is going on" and determining salience in a given experience. We filter important information, discard noise and build basic cognitive structures to guide us in our understanding of what is going on in a given situation. We do not manufacture these ‘life frames’ but adopt and adapt them depending on the situation. As we receive the email ‘shall we do a Radio Show?’ we put one frame around it: This is play. When my students get an email ‘shall we collaborate on this project?’ they put a different frame around the event ‘This is work and will be hard’.
Play carries with it a very different set of expectations than work. We treat people differently in one context or the other. Problems do not arise because there are no expectations, we ask unconditionally for what the end result might need and somebody may or may not step up to help. We marvel at the potential for partaking in the whole. In the pre-show with Jim we kept saying we had no idea how it would all come together. We are genuinely creating in the unknown space of possibility. As Bohm said, we participate to create not to impose our view or idea on the situation. We attend to the situation, and notice how ‘it’ is shaping. We support and participate within that. There is a sense of connecting to something that is even larger than Jim’s ego :) - there is a sense of participating in a whole larger than the group and larger than individual ideas.
Why do we do it? Because it is a place where we can create together without expectations. What is the difference that makes the difference? The play frame we put around it allows us to check the ego at the door and work together in the service of something more. What? Making art, damn it!
For those of you wanting a clear how-to, the google obliges: The spirit of Koinonia offers some steps to follow, but this is beyond steps and skills - it is a way to be in the world that is truly precious. #4life
