new laptop

Finally decided to level up my laptop game. The old Acer R13 still runs great, but I decided that I needed something a little more powerful. I justified it by reminding myself that I'm in a doctoral program.

Don't get me wrong, I love Chromebooks. And, that old Acer is battle tested. I'm pretty fond of it. I’ll continue to use the ol' Acer in the coming the school year. But, for now, I'm probably I'm the happiest I'll be all year...because I'm geeking out over the new Macbook Air Space Grey with Magic Mouse.

*also had to get the USB-C to Digital AV MultiPort adapter because it's a huge dongle

TLT

Transformative Learning Theory [TLT]

Mezirow's 10 Phases Transformative Learning. 

Just getting started on this book. I've got some notes (pictured above), and I've been reviewing connections to the past class on the ethics of a scholar-researcher. Tying to make connections to previous texts, and to my own life. Looking for that "disorienting idea" that is necessary to start this 10 phase process.  

One of the texts suggested writing as an impetus of change. Perhaps I should continue to write more autobiographically. 

This intersubjectivity, or the internal conversation with our different self-positions, which is made possible by writing creates a fluid space in which thoughts change and hence a fertile ground for transformation. 

K.G. Willink and J.M. Jacobs

key words/phrases from other texts:

  • personal transformation 
  • transformative pedagogy
  • experiential learning 
  • self as relational
  • care and intersubjectivity
  • relational, dialogic pedagogy

summer reading, part II

Summer Semester, Part II  

Transformational Learning

Scholarly Writing - Style

June 24-August 10 

A complete list (with articles and video links) can be accessed here or in the site menu under READING

#alwayslearning #nevernottired


mindset

mindset matters 

The required studies for one of my current courses, Transformational Learning, covers a wide range of situations. Most of the literature speaks to education, but some speaks to other situational relationships. All of them touch on mindset, however. 

Some of the authors and speakers (in the videos) do not use the term "mindset" specifically. Some of the other terms used are more clinical and some are more colloquial. But, all of them speak to mindset in some form or another: 
  • ethos
  • conscious decision(s) 
  • mentality
  • psyche 
  • behaviorism
  • mental make-up
  • mental processes
  • personality study
  • psyche
  • science of the mind
  • way of thinking

How do you go about knowing something? 

What do you think knowledge is?

What does your inner voice say?


social bookmarking

The past few days, I've spent some quality time thinking about social bookmarking. 

Here's why: the "required studies" in both of my 8-week summer session classes presented lengthy lists of readings that were often in the form of PDFs and web pages. The next two courses in the Summer Session, that officially start Monday, are no different. One area in which I struggled these past eight weeks was organizing (and annotating) all of this material. 

Because the "scholarly research" and writing process for the courses loops back with frequent regularity, I have decided that I need a simpler system.  Referring back to the BlackBoard LMS only ends in frustration.  The links to these articles in BlackBoard are neatly packed into folders for each week, but the links open a series of tabs > Library > Database > etc.  

Previously, I downloaded the PDFs and saved them to Google Drive folders for ease of reference, but I found the PDF comment/copy feature a little clunky. Simply reading a PDF on a small screen is torture, and annotating is an exercise in futility. Really, what I want is to eliminate the PDF component altogether. And, surprisingly there are practically no "social bookmarking" sites in operation in 2019 although the use of "social media" has been steadily increased for year. I'm not sure what that says about society...that's a commentary for another blog post. I just want a functional markup tool that allows me to stayed organized, and maybe collaborate.  

I have used Pinboard ("Social Bookmarking for Introverts!") for over ten years, and I love it. But, it's not built for markup and lengthy annotation.  I almost forgot that del.icio.us (remember that site?) was purchased by Yahoo! and eventually by Pinboard. And, that made me think of Diigo. Diigo works great for annotating, but I'm still on the fence about paying for the upgrade. After all, it's been about ten years since I've used Diigo extensively. It's a good stop-gap solution for now. At least Diigo allows me to tag, sort, and organize the web pages and PDFs, and it allows me to share them for collaborative assignments.    

But, I worry about file size and storage.  I don't want to pay extra to host a massive list of bloated PDFs. Maybe the answer is to find an open-source solution that would allow me to convert a PDF to Markdown. Smaller file sizes and easily stored within Drive. Maybe I just host my own...