Tuesday, December 12, 2017

From one dot to another...

Dear Dot...er dot...er whoever....

I realise that you may not recognise yourself as Dot or dot.

But, whether you do or whether you don't...





I mean.

You mean?

That's already quite a lot...

Enough?

It will have to do...

I mean.

What are we on the grander scale of things?

Are we anything more than mere specks...dots...star dust?



NOT.

Even BOWIE.

And he was GOD.

To put an over fine point on it.

Or a comma, a semi fucking colon;

Huh?

Well.

I mean.

You don't understand.

Me neither.

You mean.

We are punctuation to posterity.

(What might it mean? He doesn't know. He leaves it as a véhicule for divertissement.)

Ha ha.

That's French.

Yes.

Entertainment.

Ooh. la. la.

Ah?

Là.

A question mark?

Ha!

An exclamation mark!

A colon:

A mad dash -

ONwards...


SHIT...
-ASH.
DUST!


Shh.... (a final acronym...)

Written off, or laid down.

FLAT.

R.I.P.

Underscore _

CHANGE PARAGRAPH

I mean.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” 

Carl Sagan



We are the world.



Well...a bit of it.

Punctuation to posterity.

Beat it...Michael.

Dot to dot.

DOTS...



A dot, I spent hours going dotting a page.

WHAT THE FUCK FOR?




I know not why.

I mean.

That is enough.

But there was something in the dots.

There was a connection.

Prosaic!

Prozac?

A hashtag. 

Does that have a dash?

#decdoodle.

Whatever.

Just a link.

#  (absurd when you think about it...on a grander scale of things)

There was a feeling.

It sparked creativity.

I suspect it is what is essential here.



What did you say Carl?


"FOR SMALL CREATURES SUCH AS WE 
THE VASTNESS IS ONLY BEARABLE 
THROUGH LOVE"

Carl Sagan


I suppose that is what creativity stems from.

What connects?

YES!

What connects? God damn it!

TEDx

OH HI!

X now?

Amy...?




Love learning or its pendants: 
Love yearning 
Love mourning 

Drives us.
CRAZY!


YOU
CRAZY
FUCK!

What else is there to do?

Here....



So I connect dots.




With a hashtag.

#decdoodle.




And I groan at Despacito.



And then the dog says...















Monday, December 4, 2017

Out on a limb without a leg to stand on.



It's 9:30 in the morning and this wasn't supposed to be happening.

I had other things planned. 

And yet.

Here I am live-blogging a process with all of it's pauses and....history. 
(he adds as an after-thought at 9:38)

Well I find myself leaving this twine of Ariadne. 

God knows why. I don't believe in God.

I come here and intersperse a line...forgetting why.

I take a few deep breaths. 

Other things jump in via DM.

10:34 I spend forty five minutes speaking with my friend Marcin over in Poland about two conference submissions.

I return to this page...to what had already been written.


9:38 


I read through it and come back to CFP's (I interpret that as call for publications)

I select "The Scholarly and the Digital." rather gingerly. 

Rather gingerly? 

Yes. 

The term "Scholarly" is not one that I would associate as one of my preoccupations.

But I suppose it is time to reassess that.

10:40

Indeed what does it mean to be "scholarly" in complex digitally saturated times.

How do we pull "this" together?

Who pulls "what" together?

This "pulling together"....

What if it means "pushing apart"?

What it it means "letting it flow"?

What if it means "constantly reassessing" boundaries?

What if "scholarly and the digital" "loosely, momentarily hangs together"?

What if we left the centuries built "church walls  of academia" to rediscover "an ambulatory perhaps heretical oralistic dialogue"?

What if we break down the altar to the written word?

What if truth is negotiable, context bound, often provisional but essentially timeless?

What is truth if more than love?

How can love be anything more than intensely personal?

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel. 

He was in a sense my starting point here, when reflecting on a slide count: 73 slides for 30 minutes.

I found myself stripping away any hope that I might have had for a comforting, timed, rehearsed, linear script.  

I was out on a limb, without a leg to stand on.

I find myself returning to Jesse Stommel.

I plonk a quote here:

“Digital pedagogy is becoming, for me, coterminous with critical pedagogy, given the degree to which the digital can function both as a tool for and an obstacle to liberation.”
~ Jesse Stommel, “Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain”

Blimey, "(Un)Mapping... [(Un)Mining?] the Terrain?

Where is that link to the page I had?

I end up tweeting the link to myself from my phone.


"To queer Open is to imagine it as an emergent space always in process. Open Education is not confirmed by courses, platforms, syllabi, hierarchies, but exactly resists those containers, imagining a space for marginalized representation — a space that recognizes our unique embodied contexts and offers opportunities for liberation from them."

Jesse's words above will accompany me in my reflection.

Fluidity in thought, in identity, in containers, in dialogue, in contexts, in scholarship.

Fluidity....I find myself connecting to #lesmauxdesmots.

There are those words which, if small, become battlefields.

LIFE, DEATH, 

BE LONGING, 

i, I, MY, MINE, ME, YOU, YOURS, HE, HIS, HIM, SHE, HER, HERS, IT, ITS, THEY, THEM, THEIRS, WE, US, OURS.

RIGHTS, MEANING, VALUES.

LOVE, FAITH, HOPE, 

Fluidity, scholarity, solidity...

I embed Jesse's keynote from Digital Pedagogy Lab's Vancouver 2017 iteration.

I prepare for more close reading, listening, watching and put this on pause to head towards a class. 11:30

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