The Knitting Room

For yesterday’s Daily Create I made a knitting pattern to add to some socks. Though I don’t know how to do colourwork of any kind, generally designs are made on a grid – which doesn’t really look like knit stitches. I learned how to make a pattern in Illustrator (finally) but also made a template where I can colour individual stitches.

When trying to title this post, I looked up some phrases and idioms that included knitting, and was disappointed… nothing much new or interesting – surprisingly. So much of our language includes weaving references (as I realized when I first read this essay by Virginia Postrel) – maybe there’s just more digging needed.

That said, there are some biblical references (I also know nothing about the bible), both for human creation (being knit together -ie knit up) and for metaphorical binding (also, knit together). One blog dissecting all this referred to the womb as God’s knitting room. I’d rather God stuck to his own knitting, but I like the idea of my uterus as a knitting room.

Poetic Blunders

For today’s Daily Create I’ve been tasked to write a poem about a mistake I’ve made. Instead, I’ll write about a mistake I made in a poem.

I was taking a creative writing course and I didn’t like my professor. Worse, I was harboring low-level contempt. I don’t really remember why – but I remember she shared a book that she’d published that sounded awful. I assumed she’d received some accolades only because the can-con pool is so small. [Side note: though I remembered the book inaccurately – I remembered a title that didn’t exist, and I incorrectly remembered it as poetry – I was still able to find her immediately with the title as search terms. Memory is weird!]

Regardless, I wrote a poem for one assignment, and I was immensely proud of it. I’d agonized over it, spent hours with a thesaurus, and it was perfect. The metre was beyond anything I’d done before. And then when it came time to read it out loud, she stopped me. I was pronouncing buffet (as in wind buffeting) as buffet (as in all-you-can-eat). The rhyme scheme depended on it, and there was no way out. She provided a couple of suggestions but I hated them. Later, I went back and tried to fix it, but it wouldn’t work.

Something died that day. And I’ve seen this play out again with some of my students, so hard and inflexible and unforgiving in their youth. They design something with such a hard shell – the lines are so definite, the work is so complete – that any unexpected shortcoming kills the whole thing. They can’t compromise, the darling was meant to be all-or-nothing. It would be easier to slip into a parallel universe where buffet was pronounced buffay.

New Design Angles

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a Co-Design Community of Practice, which didn’t pan out but it has led me down some new paths.

Co-Design is a new term for me, though it represents a lot of what I do in curriculum design: ““Co-design” refers to a participatory approach to designing solutions, in which community members are treated as equal collaborators in the design process“ (as defined by the Sunlight Foundation). There’s a Medium article that goes into a bunch of related terms, including many I’m familiar with, organized into this handy map:

Beyond Sticky Notes has a great toolkit available for co-design (Aside: I’m again struck by the parallels between mindsets for co-design, and mindsets to transcend polarization). I particularly appreciated their “provocateur” role, as something that I would like to try in future projects:

Provocateurs are part of the co-design team and outsiders to the context. They deliberately don’t have professional expertise in the field and might not have lived experience either. They bring their curiosity and can soften the power differences between politicians, professionals, peers and community members. We learned this practice from Simon Harger-Forde at Innovate Change.

But then, there’s the Design Justice Network (this was introduced to me by Emma Blomkamp when I reached out about her Co-Design Community of Practice). Essentially, the Design Justice Network takes co-design one step further, and considers design as a tool for social justice. They have a list of principles that you can basically pledge to follow, which include things like honouring lived experience, centering design around those impacted by it, and positioning the designer as facilitator, rather than as expert.

Thinking about some of my recent experience with Participatory Action Research – there’s potential to be an inverse relationship between productivity and power balance1. I think at least for a work environment, there needs to be clear leadership, without too much power. Project deadlines and fiscal years are so often incompatible with this kind of work. In real life, sometimes members are not engaged, or not enough people come to a meeting to make a representative decision, or some team members have lost the plot no matter how much the rest try to bring them on board – and the project needs to progress. I also found this when doing design work with Indigenous groups – if you are prioritizing relationship building, without being disingenuous, project timelines must be fluid. You can’t plot relationship-building on a Gantt chart.

The Open Design Movement, as I understand it, is kind of like co-design but tends to be less structured, more organic, and potentially asynchronous. Think open source but with physical design as well. Design information is freely available, so that you can pick it up and modify or iterate, and then put it back down again. Open Design may be supported by Creative Commons licenses, or by a Copyleft license.

Copyleft contrasts with copyright, in that it provides free access to a product, and requires that any iterations, modifications or remixes extend the same free access. Creative Commons SA (share-alike) operates in the same way.

  1. I’m over-simplifying. I mean – not everyone (ie team members) has the time or patience for design to be completely emergent. Someone needs to steer the ship, or at least, propose direction based on synthesized knowledge. It’s not that someone needs to be in power, but they need to take on some facilitation/organization/administration duties. ↩︎

Another culling of the tabs

GLAID (Group Learning Activities Instructional Design): The GLAID framework aims to capture and synthesize best practices from various approaches to designing group learning activities. de Hei et. al. lay out eight components to the framework, with some explanation:

  1. interaction,
    Student interaction may be about information sharing, supporting each other with feedback, or working out the collaborative process. One common issue is that students often rush these interactions and don’t go into sufficient depth.
  2. learning objectives and outcomes,
    It’s noted that generally these are provided to the teacher, though the teacher may identify additional outcomes. Students do not set learning outcomes.
  3. assessment,
    Assessment should be of knowledge and skills, including assessment of the collaboration process. Individual assessment should be used, in combination with group assessment. Use assessment for and of learning, and consider assessment as learning.
  4. task characteristics,
    Assignments and learning activities should be relevant and challenging, should encourage learners to interact, and should be appropriate to group work. Broad instructions work well, as this allows for freedom within the groups to interpret and make it their own.
  5. structuring,
    Various types of structuring can support the collaborative process, including assigning roles to students, providing instruction on how you want them to work together, desiging activities that require collaboration, and reflective activities. Sufficient time both within the course, and in the timetable in general, should be provided.
  6. guidance,
    Guidance may be pedagogical, social, or organizational. Guidance may include modeling, providing feedback, being an expert, coaching, confronting, provoking and intervening.
  7. group constellation, and
    Small groups are better for the safety and intimacy required if students need to share personal experiences. Large groups can be broken into sub-groups to tackle different aspects of the project. Generally it’s preferable to create groups so that members don’t know each other too well.
  8. facilities.
    This includes technology and other tools to support collaboration and communication.

Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development: The idea is that groups naturally progress through the stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning, in this order, though they can skip stages (ie not all groups Perform) and have setbacks. Stages and characteristics are explained in good detail here, including emotional aspects to each stage and practical information on what the team needs.

  • Forming
    As the team comes together, conflict is avoided in seeking group security. Group members seek leadership. To move to the next stage, group members must move away from conflict-adverse zones.
  • Storming
    This stage is all about tension and conflict, power struggles, and group organization. To move to the next stage, members must move into problem-solving mode.
  • Norming
    The group builds trust and establishes processes. Leadership transitions to a shared model. This is a creative phase.
  • Performing
    Group members are flexible and interdependent. The group is very productive.
  • Adjourning
    The group comes to a close; usually the end of the project or course. Big feelings! Celebration, acknowledgement, and personal goodbyes are important here.

I’m thinking about the Storming phase. Most groups I’ve been part of, conflict is more subdued – people don’t come right out and argue, but group members disagree in a passive agressive way, or decline to voice their perspective at all. It makes sense, when belonging hasn’t yet been established, that the conflict-aversion from the Forming stage hasn’t worn off yet.

Building Trust in the Classroom: What a blind spot. Of course I know that trust is required to build relationships and to feel a sense of belonging. I intuitively work to cultivate an environment where trust can flourish. But trust also supports learning resilience (ie when the teacher encourages the struggling student, promising the learning curve will get easier), feedback integration (ie trusting the observations, intentions and expertise of the instructor when receiving feedback), and risk-taking. Like much of the literature, apparently, I have never looked at trust directly in my teaching and curriculum design practice.
Building on previously developed work, and through interviewing instructors on the ways they establish trust with students, Felten et. al. developed this framework to show the different types of ‘trust moves’ teachers make.

Another factor to consider may be predictability or consistency – as noted by McKnight and Chervany.

ABCs for the Daily Create

I wrote poems all the time as a kid. Usually rude poems about teachers, but that wasn’t the point – I loved playing with the rhythm and rhyming scheme. My favourite were limericks, they danced on their own. When I read today’s Daily Create prompt, my brain got started right away. I’ve spent the last few hours with rhymes in my periphery. Now that the baby is napping, I can put some things together.

A is for applesauce spilled on your knee
B is for bananas which is what you’re driving me
C is for cheesy jokes when you should be eating
D is for dill-y dallying, the bus will be leaving!
E is your sister egging you on. Peas in a pod, the bus is gone.

I asked Copilot to make an image for the poem, but I somehow triggered a meltdown – it said that sometimes even safe content can be blocked by mistake. Line 3 worked though:

A Wild and Precious Life

Today’s Daily Create prompt: What’s something you always wanted to do as a child but were never able to?

I finally picked up Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular, and somewhere in there is the point that it’s not getting older which is so terrifying or tragic, it’s your dreams dying off. This resonated. It chilled.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary oliver, Poem 133: The summer Day

A prof quoted this in one of my graduate courses – in hindsight it would have been right around when Mary Oliver died. At the time it terrified me. It still does. There’s nothing scarier than the finiteness of death, the unpredictability of life, the waste of missed opportunities, days squandered, potential untapped. This has been echoing in my head since, and I look it up in its entirety for the first time:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And I’m swept up in it, in the knowing that it was speaking to the underside of my fear all along, that I cannot be content with a small and good life, that I’ll miss the moments, that I will never properly appreciate witnessing my children’s childhoods.

Speaking of childhood. What’s something I always wanted to do as a child but was never able to?

I remember the death of one dream. I wanted to be an archaeologist. Starting in grade 8, maybe, and I held on to it for a while. I grew up in a tiny town and hadn’t traveled, but it was something I could imagine myself doing. In grade 10 or 11, in a Career and Personal Planning course, we used a computer system that gave us career matches based on questions we answered, and then told us more about the job markets. This would have been in 1996 or so. Of my top two matches, one was archaeologist – I was elated. Then, it told me there were only a handful of jobs in my province, and they were in museums.

That was it. Perhaps if I had discussed it with an adult with some sense, they could have talked sense into me. But I didn’t share my dreams, and now I can’t remember what most of them were.

AI Generated using Copilot

So, here’s an AI-generated picture of a me-like person, in some parallel universe, an archaeologist in the field.

Curriculum design taboos you should try today

Rules are meant to be broken.

  1. Courses with vague intentions are a waste of time! Your lesson should have a clear purpose and stated learning objectives, and then you should teach and assess to that purpose! Avoid digressions and tangents because you’re not being paid to chase questions down rabbit holes!

    Courses always need a thread to follow, and we can’t suffer every fool prof to let conversation take us where it will. However, the most memorable moments in my education were happy accidents, moments that were unplanned and sometimes unrelated. Being open and responsive to curiosity allows the students to become active and engaged participants, taking learning into their own hands.

    We often have courses that are heavily planned and prescribed, and as teachers we need to protect nooks and crannies for possible magic.
  2. Avoid sensitive or controversial topics at all costs! When in doubt, give a trigger warning!

    When will students learn how to have difficult conversations across divide? How will they build resiliency and learn self-regulation when confronted with something triggering?

    This needs to be handled skillfully, but normalizing and appreciating difference and conflict in the classroom will help set up learners to participate in a diverse civil society. Supporting students to care for themselves in the classroom will help them feel more safe in the real world.

    That said, this isn’t a cruel psychological experiment. When sensitive topics come up, they should only be entertained if they are relevant to the course purpose, so that students aren’t blindsided.
  3. Memorization is a no-no! They can always look it up on their phones!

    I’ve been starting to question this one. I remember hours spent learning how to recite The Ballad of Semmerwater in grade 5, and studying the lyrics to my favourite songs. Times tables, new vocabulary, all the rules and exceptions in spelling. Playing music and remembering dance moves. So much of history and culture has been passed down orally, it’s a part of us, isn’t it? Memorization can feel really good, like we’re meant for it.

    Consider creating a larger lesson around memory, when students have a lot of new and unfamiliar content to digest. Get students to come up with their own mnemonic devices, and present their strategy to the class. They could work in groups to write songs, map word associations, and write lines as performance art. Observing their own ways of thinking, and the thinking of others, will help them build more attentiveness to their learning style.
  4. There is no place for course content without a real-world application!

    In the classroom, we are often preparing students for the world that was. Better if we’re teaching to the world that is, but what students really need to think about is the world that will be. There are connections between the past and the future, but there will also be transcendent leaps, where technology, cultural shifts, and changing environments suddently alter the playing field beyond recognition. Learners will need imagination, and the ability to make new and divergent connections. Even in the most practical courses, there needs to be room for whimsy and dreaming, what-ifs and whatnots.

This post is for DS106 Daily Create, where I was prompted to generate a blog post title and run with it!

Rabbit hole wrap-up

I’m sad to end another iteration of ONL. By the time the next one starts up, I wonder if I’ll have time to join again. Round 2 did not disappoint.

I enjoy so many things about the course, but I think the biggest one is divergence. New and different people, perspectives, and ideas are my jam. The experience is refreshing, inspiring and expansive. The world got bigger, and I have more energy and desire to create and explore.

As a follow-up to my last post, I am getting a start on closing open tabs. I’m creating a resource guide of all the interesting stuff I want to remember, reference, and/or invesigate further. The items below came from ONL referenced materials and course-inspired rabbit holes. I don’t know how I’ll organize it just yet, but it’s a place for the ideas, until I make a place for the ideas – highlighted items are for future investigation.

Co-Design1 Community of Practice: Emma Blomkamp launched CoDesignCo in 2022, and I was soooo excited until I read that it’s already in sunset mode. This is something I wonder about CoPs – how often do they sustain life, without feeling like they are being forever rolled uphill? Searching for CoPs online for curriculum design, they seem to be affiliated with (and exclusive to employees of) specific universities. There’s more about CoDesignCo in this UX Magazine article, including this great nugget:

A framework for building learning networks for systems change, focusing on the enabling conditions: mindsets; relationships; processes; and structures. Image source: McKenzie 2021.

This framework is speaking to me. I especially like “install boundary spanners” and “build a collective memory” – but I like just about everything else, too.

The Walkshop Model: Teachers at Örebro University in Sweden developed this model for beginner programming students. I’ve seen some similar things before but here’s their process:

  1. Divide students into random groups.
  2. Post problems around the room on walls where you can also write (ie, post paper, whiteboards, etc).
  3. For 2 hours, groups circulate around the room and work on problems. The teacher and senior students listen and observe, and assist when needed.
  4. Occasionally students are told to talk with other groups to compare thinking and solutions.
  5. Halfway through the time, students are prompted to reflect on the ways they learn, and the ways they are contributing to their group. This gives them an opportunity to change the way they behave in their group for the 2nd half, if they feel the need.
  6. At the end, the students watch a video of the instructor with a colleague, talking through the way they solved it, and what guided their thinking. They can watch this video from home.

I really like 5 and 6. They are what make this activity complete and well developed, beyond what I’ve seen before. Hearing the instructor with a colleague, talking out their own thinking, is invaluable.

This model could be used for design challenges, ethical dilemmas, and many other kinds of problem-based learning.

Dancing with Systems: Now this is exactly the kind of woo introduction to a subject that I go crazy for. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist and systems thinker, who among other things was the lead author on Limits to Growth, which through computer simulation (in 1972!) posited that our economic and population growth trajectories with limited available resources aren’t sustainable. Seems controversial. 🙃2 Dancing With Systems is a posthumously published work on how to disrupt systems for positive change. Hackernoon summarized her key guidelines well. The abbreviated list follows:

  • Get the beat: get to know it before you muck with it
  • Listen to the wisdom of the system: look for what’s good and self-sustaining
  • Expose your mental models to the open air: put your assumptions out there to be challenged, and be open to change your ways of thinking
  • Stay humble. Stay a learner.
  • Locate responsibility in the system: look for the ways the system itself creates certain impacts, not just how it behaves to random outside stimuli (ie specific external events)
  • Make feedback policies for feedback systems: create an evaluation culture
  • Pay attention to what is important, not to what is quantifiable
  • If something is ugly, say so
  • Go for the good of the whole
  • Expand time horizons: think about short term and long term
  • Expand thought horizons: take an interdisciplinary approach
  • Expand the boundary of caring: not just our immediate community
  • Celebrate complexity
  • Hold fast to the goal of goodness

DS106: AKA Digital Storytelling is… I think it’s an open online course which also runs at an actual university sometimes. Not exaggerating, it took me the better part of an hour to confirm that this is actually still a thing. The website feels like a ghost town that thrived in 2005, all broken links and outdated references. Posted content is almost exclusively from 2011-2013, back when the teacher was fresh and full of passion, or had a budget, or perhaps before they lost the password to the website back end. It’s like teaching that once-annual class and reaching that powerpoint slide and oh god I still have that data from 10 years ago dear lord why haven’t I updated that yet. But if you click just the right link, you can find evidence of recent activity. There are residents in the ghost town, after all.

I have so much curiosity3 – why hasn’t someone tidied it up? Are there enough open learners to foster a sense of community? If I start this course will I be sucked into a spooky alternate reality internet nerd drama (I hope so)?

Scanning the more recent activity, there’s mention of Daily Create prompts like “find the background code of a website and use it for art” or “explore poetry of endangered languages”. Fuuuuuuuunnn! After a little hunt, which included signing up for a twitter account only to find a twitter post pointing me somewhere else, I found the Daily Create site. Today’s prompted to leave a message at the anonymous answering machine at After the Beep. I did. Does this mean I’m registered?

  1. As far as I can recall, this is my first introduction to the word Co-Design – defined as “a participatory approach to designing solutions, in which community members are treated as equal collaborators in the design process” – though it’s much of what I do. ↩︎
  2. WHY have I only figured out TODAY that this is a sarcasm emoji? Where have you been all my life? ↩︎
  3. Curiosity and mystery on the internet is something I want to investigate more. I almost never feel curious on social media. 2 hours worth of DS106 exploration was so refreshing and motivating! ↩︎

Sticky notes & Open tabs

I applied for a job recently, and it got me thinking about one of my shortcomings when interviewing with people who don’t know me already. I’m a great synthesizer – I can hear and process many pieces of information, and quickly articulate big-picture meaning in a way that many people have noticed and appreciated as exceptional. However, as soon as I have done this, my brain discards many of the details. I don’t care about the name of the theory, or the theorist. Perhaps in a connected way, I can re-experience favorite books and TV shows, because I’ve forgotten the details. In my working memory, I am very detail-oriented. I don’t miss things. I know I’m great at my job. I remember the names of a class full of students very quickly, but if I meet a new person on the street that I suspect I’ll never see again, I have forgotten their name by the time it’s out of their mouth.

Again, this is a problem for job interviews. It’s also difficult when I come across a piece of information that I know will be useful… but I haven’t hit the appropriate context yet.

My passion is curriculum design. In my perfect job I’d be helping instructors from diverse disciplines design learning activities, courses and programs, while teaching a course or two myself. Bigger picture, I’d love to be building teams, culture, and capacity. My current job isn’t too far from this, with about 50% paperwork thrown in. Thinking about applying for other jobs (with less paperwork), I realize I need to find a way to track and organize all the great ideas I’ve come across, and come up with. This iteration of ONL has added many new ones to the pile. Currently I have a few half-baked blogs, some folded-over book pages, a bazillion open tabs, and old work journals with sticky notes poking out. Realistically, I’m not sure I’ll go back into all the past stuff, but I need to develop a system for going forward. A blog with a good tag system? A wiki? A giant annotated bibliography for my brain?

I’m deeply curious about how other people’s brains work. Is your brain a filing cabinet, a map, a junk drawer? What systems have you developed to support your thinking (and not-thinking)? How are you integrating all the things you’ve learned in ONL?