Seven Mantras for Rhizomatic Learning

To contribute to the Practical Guide for Rhizomatic Learning (such a great idea from Dave!), I thought I would write up a few notes about the results of my learning subjective for #Rhizo15, which was to jumpstart my totally revamped approach to content in my Indian Epics class, a project that will occupy my whole summer. This course redesign was something I had been planning for months, so the timing of #Rhizo15 was perfect, and so were the topics that Dave brought up week after week, especially the content week. Instead of getting lost in the details, I'll try to sum up my experience in general terms. :-)

1. LET THINGS GROW. During Rhizo15, I got to watch my Indian Epics space split into three different spaces, and it was a very "natural" process, a growth spurt as it were, but it took a while: I was patient, and I waited until I could see which direction things were going before I made the new spaces. Things that are growing need room to grow in, and now I have three nice big spaces, ready for what will grow there this year: IE Images, IE Guides, and IE Comics.

Little by little grow the bananas.

(Congolese proverb)

2. PRUNE AS NEEDED. To make room for good new growth, you need to prune away the old growth, the wilted flowers, the scraggly-looking branches. For example, during the spring I let my book list grow and grow and grow to well over 100 books, but over the past few weeks, I pruned it back, with this result, about 50 public domain books for my students to browse: IE Guides. And now I can let it start growing again, and then prune it back again next year.... and so on ad infinitum and ad libitum.

Weeds spring up where we do not sow them.

(Kashmiri proverb)

.... BUT DON'T FEAR THE WEEDS. So, yes, prune as needed, but don't worry about weeding and pruning until you really need to do that. Let everything grow for a while, and then you can decide later what to keep and what to compost!

A good garden may have some weeds.

(English proverb)

3. LET THE SUN SHINE IN. Get rid of the so-called walled garden of the LMS... which is really just a dark dumpster, not a garden at all. Let the sunshine in! Everything needs sunshine to grow. Go open-by-default and put everything you can on the open Internet.

4. LINK EVERYTHING. If something is not linked, how will you ever get there? I believe in linking all the content, linking all the people, linking everything. A big part of my content development process is adding links and links and more links so that students will be able to go wherever their curiosity leads them. So, for example, here is a page from my Public Domain Ramayana, and here is a comic book Reading Guide: I don't like to lecture, but I sure do like to link! For a visual metaphor, here is a map of the Seoul Subway:

5. BLOG EVERYTHING. Just as with the Connected Courses experience last fall, the Rhizo15 experience confirmed for me what a powerful tool blogs can be for connecting people! My favorite thing about Rhizo15 was reading blog posts and finding new people to connect with that way, connections I hope will continue after Rhizo15 is "over" (scare quotes intended). So, I feel connected to other people in #Rhizo15 through their blogs (thank you, Inoreader!), and that blog-connectivity is also what powers my Indian Epics class as well. Here's a screenshot from the Inoreader bundle for Rhizo15 this morning:

6. BRING THINGS TO THE SURFACE. I am a big fan of using randomizers to bring things to the surface, helping people find things serendipitously that they might not have found before. This is especially important when there is a superabundance of stuff to experience and enjoy, so much so that consciously choosing which way to go is hard! In the sidebar of those three IE spaces — IE Images, IE Guides, and IE Comics — you will see randomizers that feature random student Storybooks from the past along with random images, and I will be able to add a comic book randomizer at the end of the summer! Whoo-hoo! Meanwhile, here's the Storybook randomizer: let the students from past classes help you with your learning now!

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And last but not least . . .

7. DANCE TO THE MUSIC. I've got my YouTube Indian music channel embedded in the sidebar of the Indian Epics spaces because music is fun and music is beautiful. You can never have too much music! :-)

HAVE
FUN 
LEARNING,
EVERYBODY!

:-)

Indian Epics: books books and more books

So, I really had not planned on getting this amazing grant from Univ. of Oklahoma Libraries to support OER development for my Indian Epics class, and I am still just trying to figure out the best strategies to use! And what a great dilemma that is to have!!! I've got a core of public domain content since that was all I expected to have... but now I've got a chance to go beyond that public domain content to do even more. In this blog post I'll try to summarize where I'm at with that right now and where I'm headed. Plus, since rethinking the content for that class (creating something like the "UnTextbook" in my Myth-Folklore class) is my "subjective" for #Rhizo15, I'm sharing this post with the rhizo world.

COMIC BOOKS

The obvious first choice was the complete set of Amar Chitra Katha comic books, and that is moving full speed ahead. I had already bought a complete set of those comic books for myself in April, and it was that event which actually set in motion the process of getting the grant. I had craved those comic books for years and years, and when the price plunged ($399 for all 300+ comic books, and free shipping from Mumbai... usual price was over $1000), I grabbed a set just for myself. Then, the wonderful Stacy Zemke, OER goddess in our Library, suggested that we could maybe get the Library to buy a set... and that evolved into me applying for the OER grant. My comic books (not shown: the hardback-bound Mahabharata and Bhagavatam which are on a separate shelf).

Meanwhile, the Library's set of comic books will reach Norman this week (it left Mumbai on May 13), and I am happily creating reading guides for the comic books, both to help my students choose the ones they want to read (I am so curious which ones will be most popular!) and also to create OER materials (CC-licensed, etc.). The comic books are not OER, but the reading guides I am writing definitely are! I've been sharing them with the ACK Twitter account and I am hoping to make some real contacts at ACK as this project evolves.

PETER BROOK'S MAHABHARATA?

So, that's $400 for the comic books in the Library, and that leaves $2100 in the grant... which sounds to me like so much money!!! I'd like to get a copy of the 5-hour Mahabharata by Peter Brook for students to watch; let's say that will be around $100 (yes, it's crazy: the 5-hour DVD version is really hard to find and really expensive if/when you did find it). The Library is investigating whether we can get streaming privileges for either the 3-hour or 5-hour version... and I'd be willing to pony up $500 for that (although I am guessing Parabola Media will demand more than that, in which case I am not interested).

KINDLES!

After Peter Brook's film, then there is $2000 or maybe $1600 still left. What to do with that...? What I am thinking is that I would like to buy and equip 4 Kindles for Library reserve checkout, loading them up with Kindle books so that the students' Kindle Library would match up with my extensive Kindle collection of India-related books, and that way they could then choose what they might want to read. Since I try to design reading selections that take 1-2 hours to read and write up, then the Library Reserve option could work perfectly for this, and I am guessing 4 Kindles would be plenty for a class that usually has 30 students and even 40-45 students (since I'd like to start shifting enrollment so that I get equal numbers in India and Myth-Folklore).

I'm just speculating in the dark now since I really don't know how Kindles work in our Library, although I will not be the first person to have done something like this (for example, I found this Kindle-textbook initiative at the Library website).

But just to get the discussion going, I'm guessing the Library would ask me to buy the Kindles; let's say those run $120. So, 4 of those Kindles is appx. $500. That leaves me $1100 or $1500 to spend on books! Right now my wish list would look something like what you see below: about $250 total.

SO THAT WOULD WORK: I could load up separate copies on four Kindles of all the books here! I also need to check and see if maybe we have some of these books in hard copy in the Library already. So, there could be hard copies on reserve also.

THE KINDLE/AUDIBLE WISH LIST

appx. $20 - Audible only:
William Buck. Ramayana. ($15)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Seven Secrets of Shiva. ($4)

appx. $80 - Kindle + Audible 
(I see there are big discounts for Whispersync combos!)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Palace of Illusions. ($12 + $5 audio)
John Jackson. Brahma Dreaming. ($6 + $3 audio)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Jaya: Mahabharata. ($10 + $6 audio)
Indra Parthasarathy. Krishna Krishna. ($3 + $5 audio)
Bulbul Sharma. Ramayana. ($8 + $17 audio)

appx. $150 - Kindle:
Ashok Banker. Ramayana. ($10)
Krishna Dharma. Mahabharata. ($8)
Krishna Dharma. Ramayana. ($8)
Maggi Lidchi Grassi. The Great Golden Sacrifice. ($25)
Anil Menon. Breaking the Bow. ($4)
Ramesh Menon. Mahabharata. ($7)
Ramesh Menon. Ramayana. ($10)
Ramesh Menon. Blue God. ($4)
R. K. Narayan. Mahabharata. ($10)
R. K. Narayan. Ramayana. ($11)
Patrick Olivelle. Panchatantra. ($6)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Pashu. ($5)
Devdutt Pattanaik. Book of Ram. ($10)
Carole Satyamurti. Mahabharata. ($20)
Ashwin Sanghi. Krishna Key / Rozabal Line ($9)

STUDENT CHOICES

Looking at that list, WOW, I am so excited: I would love (love love LOVE) for students to be choosing things to read from those books, with me writing up reading guides to help them find what they are looking for... and of course that is on top of the COMIC BOOKS... and it is also on top of the PUBLIC DOMAIN materials I already found (see my Ramayana: Public Domain Edition for a taste of that).

I have lots of questions about just how this works practically speaking with the Kindles, and one of my most important questions is whether the Kindles can be linked to a Twitter account so that students can TWEET THEIR HIGHLIGHTS. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I can start coordinating with Stacy and all the great people in the Library to see how this will work. One of the things I like about this Kindle strategy is that, for the most part, these books are not really expensive, so if someone decides they really like a book, buying a Kindle copy for themselves is not a big deal, esp. since there are no textbooks at all required for the course. And a Kindle book you can read on basically ANY mobile device OR on a desktop. I use the Kindle desktop cloud reader a lot!

So, a gorgeous book like Divakaruni's Palace of Illusions is one that would work for four weeks' worth of reading in the class... and if a student didn't want the hassle of going to the Library Reserve room, well, it's just $12 for the Kindle book, or they could get a used paperback for just $5, and that would take them through four weeks of the class. But they can also just read it on reserve in the Library, no problem. (Almost all of my students live in Norman or nearby.)

WHERE'S THE OER?

So where's the OER in all of this? The idea is that I will be writing up the Reading Guides to go with all these materials, helping the students to find the materials that interest them. And seriously, just getting right books in the hands of the right students is a huge challenge, but a fun one. This is all new to most of the students, so I can't just say "choose" without helping them to see what's there!

The Guides also will build up a body of open reference material for the class (and for anybody!) to supplement the abundant materials at Wikipedia. For a sense of how that works, see the Guides to the comic books that I have written so far: Amar Chitra Katha Comic Book Guides.  Some of them are incredibly rich sources for stories that are not easily found elsewhere, like Ancestors of Rama: A Noble Inheritance (a retelling of portions of Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha), or Vishvamitra: The King Who Became an Ascetic, just to take two examples.

I'm publishing the ACK Comic Book Guides there at a blog, and I'll have the Book Reading Guides at a separate blog (my old guides for Buck and Narayan are there already), and the posts at both of those blogs are CC-licensed, which is one of the terms (a good one!) of the Library's OER grant.

Okay, I am clearly getting too excited now. I need to go make dinner, calm down...... and then get all excited again this evening when I do some more work on the guides! Whoo-hoo!!!!!!

The Palace of Illusions:

UPDATED: Rhizo15 combination feed - more blogs added!

I've synched my RSS combo feed for Rhizo15 with the blog post list at Lenandlar's blog. I found a few new blogs to add as a result!

So, in addition to looking at the list to click through at Lenandlar's blog, you can also subscribe to the combination RSS feed if you use a feed reader: Rhizo15 RSS combo feed.

Alternatively, you can access the OPML file for that combo feed here: OPML file. You can also look at HTML scrolling view, 20 posts per page, here: Rhizo15 posts: scrolling. (Those are more-or-less in date-based order, but when I add a new blog, it grabs all the posts in that blog and puts them at top, with new posts at that blog then going into the standard newest-first date-based display.)

For Inoreaders out there, I made an Inoreader bundle: Rhizo15 Bundle. Anyone can view the bundle, which is a new way in fact to preview how Inoreader works as a feed reader... basically: it's Feedly on steroids! mega-steroids!

Admittedly, there continue to be a few blogs I cannot add to the combo RSS feed:

http://shukiesweb.blogspot.com
   (apparently not using a label for Rhizo15 posts?)

https://becomingeducational.wordpress.com
   (also apparently not using a tag or category?)

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing
   (Lee told me IHE uses Drupal for the blogs...?)

http://ryan-p-randall.github.io/tags/#rhizo15
   (I can't see how to get a tag-specific RSS feed here)

So, if anybody has insight into Drupal or Github, let me know! I've had fun learning for myself about how tag-specific feeds work not just at Blogger and WordPress (which I knew about already), but also at Known, Tumblr, and Weebly.

Anyway, I wanted to provide this update about the combination RSS feed... and now I am going to go do some reading and try to get back into the rhizo swing of things after having been out of town and (mostly) offline last week. :-)

another great cartoon from @dogtrax

Interview with Howard Rheingold

I just got back from out of town with so much to catch up on that I am not even sure where to start — and I'm sharing this with #Rhizo15 too as a promise to get caught up there soon!

First of all, though, I wanted to share this fun interview with Howard Rheingold along with a BIG THANKS to Howard for giving me this great chance to share the things that my students and I are doing at University of Oklahoma. Keyword: FUN! :-)

Teaching The Humanities Online: Blog post from Howard with lots of links and such, and here is the accompanying Vimeo video.

Laura Gibbs from Connected Learning Alliance on Vimeo.

I was so glad to have a chance to do this interview, especially as I will be attending DML2015 in LA in June and getting to meeting lots of new people who are doing great connected learning projects also! You can find out more about DML and connected learning at the DML Initiatives page. Participating in DML Connected Courses last fall was a really important event for me, and I would urge everybody to explore that DML website. It is full of inspiring stuff!

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Sunday, May 10 - PDE Ramayana done!

I am really glad about this: the PDE Ramayana is done! The first pass anyway. All 80 pages! You can see the index here: Ramayana Online: Public Domain Edition.

I'm sharing this as a #Rhizo15 post because this post is also a paean to LINKINESS, which is something magical about the web, and very rhizomatic too, I think.

Internet splat map by S. Jurvetson

The idea with this project is to give my students an online equivalent to the paperback book that, in the past, has been their first introduction to the Ramayana, a lovely English-language adaptation of Kamban's Tamil Ramayana: The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic by R. K. Narayan (1972). In Weeks 2 and 3 of my Indian Epics class, students would read that book, which was accompanied by Reading Guides I had written; you can see those here: Narayan's Ramayana Reading Guides. I wrote up those reading guides to help the students make their way through the book, and also to include LINKS and IMAGES so that they could go beyond the book, learning more (even much more!) about whatever caught their interest as they did the reading. The book was very nice but it suffered that from being a printed book: no links... and no images. I want a gorgeous color image on every page!

Public Domain Ramayana Translations

Now, moving to an UnTextbook model for the class, where the students will have lots of choices about what to read, including free public domain options online, I needed a good, solid introduction to the Ramayana — ideally, a version of the Ramayana that would be as satisfying as Narayan's book, which, for most students in the class anyway, turned out to be their favorite of the four books they read each semester. I found LOTS of public domain versions of the Ramayana in English, over a dozen... but none of them was really up to the task of providing a user-friendly, two-week overview of the Ramayana. They were either too short or too long, and the language was very dated. They are useful, and some of them are even very useful, but not so much as a first-time encounter with the epic. Plus, they would present me with the same problem I had with Narayan's book: there need to be lots of LINKS for students to use to pursue their curiosity, and there need to be lots of IMAGES to help bring the story to life in a visual way, not just words on a page. Digitized books which consist of page images suffer from the same link-deficiency and image-deficiency of printed paper books.

A New Public Domain Edition

So, what I realized I could do was to create my OWN version of the Ramayana to have online, a "public domain edition" that would be an anthology of the best bits of text from the existing public domain versions, along with public domain images, and lots of links to Wikipedia. This would not only be a good alternative to Narayan — it would probably be a BETTER alternative, except for those students who really prefer to read a printed book. Choosing the contents for this new edition of the Ramayana would allow me to include all the incidents that I hoped would catch the students' attention, telling the story in a fast-paced but clearly segmented way to reduce confusion, with the links and images woven through the text.

Plus, added bonus, it would give me a chance to introduce the students to those many different editions of the Ramayana so that during the second half of the semester, when the students have six weeks of free-choice reading, they would have perhaps have found some favorite authors that they want to investigate further. The idea is that they get to know both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata like this in the first half of the semester, and then in the second half of the semester they choose to do more reading of their choice: it can be all Ramayana or all Mahabharata, or a mix of both, or other kinds of Indian storytelling from the same time period, like the Panchatantra or the Jatakas, along with stories of the gods and goddesses from the Puranas and other religious texts. Hopefully the learning foundation provided by the first half of the semester will allow them to make great reading choices when the second half of the semester rolls around.

Making the PDE Ramayana

In order to make this happen, I decided to go with four sets of 20 blog posts each, with the blog posts being anywhere from 300-800 words of public domain text, plus some brief comments from me. I then made up a list of the 80 incidents from the Ramayana I would want to include, and that turned out to be pretty easy (but it is going to be so hard for the Mahabharata, eeek: I have way too many favorite episodes in that epic).

As I picked the Ramayana episode to include, I was excited at how many episodes I was able to include that were not in Narayan at all! In particular, I included the part about Sita's exile and the birth of her sons at the end. I've also got the demons Viradha and Kabanda, who are not in Narayan, all kinds of good stuff.

Next, I went through and started filling in the pages with chunks of text lifted from the most likely candidates, starting with the texts that have been fully digitized (not just page images). So, I did Mackenzie first, which gave me really good coverage, and then I did some verse segments from Romesh Dutt. I then filled in the remaining blanks with Gould and Sister Nivedita, along with a couple of pieces of Hodgson and one from Oman. When it seemed that Gould or Nivedita were way better than Mackenzie, I swapped him out. I even found a bit of poetry from Ryder, and I also used some poetry from Griffith (although he is going to be hard-going for the students who don't like poetry, so I used him on just two pages). I also used two very literary passages from Richardson (and I need to ponder if I want to include more from her). Best of all, I was able to include some of Manmatha Nath Dutt's literal translation for a couple of pages. Again, like with Griffith, Dutt's English is slow going, but very much worth it. It feels great to give the students a sense, at least indirectly, of the epic style while also letting them know that the whole English translation is available online like that.

Then, I went through the 80 pages one by one, adding an image to each one, along with a kind of "Reading Guide" to smooth over any gaps between the page and to add any extra information that the students might need (with their comments, students will be able to help me do a better job with those notes in future iterations).

So, that is what I just finished today! All 80 pages are done: the public domain text on every page, the comments from me, plus an image. REALLY cool images.

And, since this is all so modular, it's super-easy for me to keep improving this: I can swap out the text for any episode if I decide another chunk of text would work better. I can swap out the image if/when I find a better image. And so on.

In Praise of Images and Linkiness

And here's what I love about all of this compared to a traditional printed book. This Public Domain Edition of the Ramayana is soooooooo connected to a whole world of "stuff" online that they students can explore if they will just click on the links.

So, there are tons of links to Wikipedia articles about all the people and places in the epic, like Parashurama here:

Then there are links to the public domain sources for the Ramayana that I used, so you can click and read all of Frederika Richardson Macdonald's book if you want (public domain! free!), just to take one example.

Plus there are links for the image sources too so that people can learn more about the images if they want. And there are so many amazing images, like this gorgeous depiction of Lava and Kusha's encounter with Rama during his ashwamedha:

As you can see in that screenshot, there are links in the sidebar to all the image tabs at my image library, so for any given character, there are usually several images to look at, and lots of images for the major characters.

LINKS.

Going in all directions. Paths to follow. Your choice.

So................... CHOOSE!

Click.

Learn.

I am very happy about this, and so excited to see what the students will think!!!!!!!

And........ when I get back from Texas, I will start on the Public Domain Edition of the Mahabharata. That will be more of a challenge (the epic is so much bigger!) but also more satisfying (I am a far bigger fan of the Mahabharata). And for that one, Ganguli's literal English translation is already digitized, just waiting to be copied and pasted. :-)

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: May 8-9 - blog reorganization

So, Friday was a big BLOG REORGANIZATION DAY, and I'm flagging this for #Rhizo15 also because I'm wondering if my great fondness for blogging and the de-centered content development process it fosters is something for which the rhizome metaphor might work well.

What I realized was that the big, sprawling Indian Epics blog I had been using for the past several years was getting so "overgrown" as it were that I had to let the roots extend outwards so that there would be some new nodes to grow up and out from, while still having everything be connected "underground" as it were. In this post, I will try to show how this blog growth spurt works; I went through a similar process with another cluster of course-related blogs like this some years ago, and I was excited that this moment had come at last for Indian Epics! 

Here are the three interconnected blogs I've ended up with:

Indian Epics: Images and PDE Epics

Indian Epics: Reading Guides

Indian Epics: Amar Chitra Katha

As far as Blogger is concerned these are three separate blogs, but as far as I am concerned they are three interrelated blogs. Here's what holds them together:
* same basic template (all built off the "simple" template)
* same widgets in sidebar (more about those widgets below)
* identical overview paragraph (with links to all three sites)

At the same time, the three blog sites are very distinctively different from each other, with a different color scheme and a different choice for the patterned background. That sense of "different spaces" (but connected!) is important for the students because it helps to reinforce the sense that they are doing different things with each of these three class websites. The different spaces are also important for me in terms of content development, helping me to spread my content development efforts out in these three general directions, while still staying connected.

Although I had been suspecting for a while that I would have to do this, getting the OER development grant (whoo-hoo!) made me realize that the time had come to make this big decision... and, having made the decision, it was surprisingly easy: everything fell into place, and I was so happy about the blog space when I was done at the end of the day on Friday. If only remodeling a house were so easy, eh?

I was especially happy with the content in the sidebars. I often dither about that, but for this set of blogs, I felt really clear about what I wanted to include:
Overview: This top paragraph is what holds the three sites together; easy to write.
Labels: The labels are working really well for the three separate blogs now, so either one or two label widgets provides all the navigation needed.
YouTube Playlist: I am really excited about learning more about YouTube channels, and I will be encouraging my students to make a playlist for their blog too!
Recent Posts: There are three widgets in each blog sidebar for the latest posts at all three of them.
Twitter: Cleaning up the content allowed me to better imagine how to have new items every day for this Twitter stream, even during the summer! It's a hashtag widget so it will pull from both my Twitter streams plus anything that might come from students also.
Google+: I use this instead of the default Blogger profile widget.
Blog Archive. This is more useful for me than for students/visitors, which is why it is down here near the bottom.
RSS Feeds. I need to think of what cool ways I can re-use the RSS feeds for these sites over at Inoreader! I haven't even started to think about that yet.
CC License. For the two sites where the content is being created by me, I have put a CC license. For the image library site, the contents are public domain (at least, I am endeavoring to make sure that is the case), and I have linked in every case to the website where people should go to find the same public domain source materials that I am using.

So, the blog reorganization day put me off schedule, but I am so glad I took the time on Friday to get this set up and to move Reading Guide content over to the new Reading Guide site. I still have a lot of work to do moving over all the book posts, but those were a mess anyway, so I can clean them up as I repost them, and far better to post them in a new home suited for them! Most important: this all feels very comfortable, very stable, so I can safely let this sit while I go to Texas next week, and then I can see how it suits me when I get back next weekend.

My Rhizo15 "subjective" was working on this UnTextbook, and I have been really grateful for the discussions over the past couple of weeks, the discussion about content in particular and also about the role of the instructor in developing and sharing content. All those ideas and provocations have been percolating as I work through this, and I am sure that the results are going to be so much better than they would have been otherwise. So, thanks to the Rhizo15 gang for getting the summer off to such a good start, and thanks also to Stacy Zemke and the OU Libraries for supplying me with comic books and other books so that Indian Epics next year is going to be such a great experience for the students!

Now I need to see just how much of the PDE Ramayana I can get done before I leave on Monday. I had hoped to finish before I go. That's probably not possible... but I might give it a big push this weekend and see what happens!

HAPPY WEEKEND, EVERYBODY........!!!

If not Dave, then what...? Week 4 in #Rhizo15

So, in this week's paradox vortex, it's only appropriate to start the "if not Dave" post with ... Dave:

That challenge immediately made me think of a fabulous response Amanda Rachelle Warren shared at G+ in a similar discussion a while ago:

I am a coach, parent, mentor, cruel despot, enabler, cheerleader, resource, sounding board, index, FAQ sheet, sherpa, touchstone, motivational speaker, big sister, angry god, pack mule, lightning rod, turbine, mama bird, judge, jury, executioner, sidekick, mythical beast, and many other things. — Amanda Rachelle Warren

If you are a Google+ person, check Amanda out. She is a G+ goddess.

Is that list awesome or what? :-)

For the purposes of #Rhizo15 here I picked out what would be my top five. But first, I have to observe that the university calls me "lecturer" ... which is ridiculous of course because I DON'T LECTURE. Nice job, university.

So then, setting aside the official designation of "lecturer" (eeeek), here are my top five:

Teacher / Mentor / Tutor / Co-Learner: Yeah, that works for me (I'm one of those people who cannot imagine any other job really...), and it works for a lot of my students, especially the ones who have a desire to learn something that I can teach in that mutual coolness that is teaching and learning. So, the question then becomes figuring out just what it is I can teach (lots of possibilities) that a given student might want to learn (again, lots of possibilities). Some of them really do want to learn to write, and there's a lot I can teach them about that. I also can teach them a lot about blogging and social media. Sometimes there are students who really are interested in the actual subject matter of the class... although I teach Gen. Ed., required for graduation: I don't count on people necessarily having any interest in the subject matter, at least not to start with. So, that is how I have ended up with the current course design: one that tries to be responsive to student interests, assuming those interests are likely to include at least one of the following: writing OR web tech OR the actual subject of the course (Myth/Folklore is one, Indian Epics the other).

Cheerleader / Motivational Speaker / Lucky Charm: This is huge, especially as students are doing things that are often new to them, and with a fair amount of anxiety too. Students often have fears and worries associated with writing, and some of them have technology anxiety also. Cheering them on is good. The way the class works, they are doing all kinds of things that I find really exciting (creating stories, blogging, building websites, finding and sharing things online), so my cheering is not just some kind of rah-rah formulaic ritual. I am able to share my sincere enthusiasm with them all the time. (Yes, I love my job... and I've designed the course trying to maximize the love all around.)

Coach / Trainer: This varies a lot from student to student, but for students who are not good at coaching themselves, I can be the coach as well as the cheerleader. So, I try to get them on a good training schedule (this is especially true for the students who want to work on their writing; that takes a lot of discipline over time), coming up with the kinds of exercises that will help them work on weak points and build up writing strength. I don't expect this to work for every student, though. For a lot of them, their real work is happening in their other classes or in their internship, etc. I am glad the online course set-up gives me the flexibility to coach or not, in response to how much time/effort a student has available to invest.

Tour Guide / Sherpa / Pack Mule: This is probably my favorite of the different roles. If the Internet is a space, and for some students a foreign space (I often travel different parts of the Internet than they do), I love being a tour guide who shows them around. And yes, I'm glad to tote the luggage, stand in line to buy the tickets, etc., so that the students can focus on just taking it all in and having a good time. And it's even better when they say, "Hey, that was great, and now I'd like to just go off on my own and explore." For the students who are making a small investment in the class, this notion of "tour guide" is probably the one that describes our relationship best.

Librarian / FAQ / Resource: I love to read, and I especially love books. Love love love them. So it is my great pleasure to be a librarian in online digital libraries like Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, etc., ready to put heaps of digital books into each student's hands ... if they ask. If they even look like they might be about ready to ask. If they so much as seem to be about to glance in the direction of a book. And since these are free digital books, there are an infinite number of copies on the shelves; nothing is ever checked out so that I cannot just give a copy to the student who wants it.

Friend / Sidekick / Sounding Board / Big Sister / Parent / Mama Bird. This also varies a lot from student to student. Some students keep their distance, which is fine, and some students really seek out the instructor as a potential friend, and that's fine with me too. So we socialize (emails, Twitter, whatever), and sure, that can be about stuff that has nothing to do with class — just life and school and whatever. Sometimes students might be in trouble and they need help (someone who will just listen, some advice perhaps, etc.). Sometimes students are just super-excited about something they are doing and want to share that excitement with someone. It's nice: I really like the fact that, unlike office hours, this kind of online connection can happen in different ways at any time. And sometimes we get to stay friends after the class is over, which is really fun too.

And that covers a lot of Amanda's list. Since I have the luxury of creating an online class that is ultra-flexible, without me giving grades on work, I can avoid the angry god part, ha ha.

As for mythical beast: I'm not just a fox; call me a kitsune. :-)

(Wikimedia)

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Tuesday, May 5

We're going to some friends' Cinco de Mayo party, so I'm publishing this earlier rather than later today! After my first diary post from yesterday where I tried to summarize my progress so far, I can make this more like a true diary post: what I did today (well, in the 24 hours since last post and this one). And I'm sharing this with #Rhizo15 ... Twitter convo about content with Jesse Stommel et al. gave me lots of good things to think about as I worked away on the UnTextbook today, pondering content-as-exploratorium.

Comic books. I did two Ravana-related comic books and they are both going to be so useful, especially Lord of Lanka because it contains the stories of Vedavati (not in either of the books I had previously used for class) and the story of Rambha (in Buck only before).
Ravana Humbled: An Arrogant King Finds New Friends
The Lord of Lanka: The Rise and Fall of a Demon King

PDE Ramayana. This is my main focus right now as I want to get that done if I can before I leave for Texas next week. It is really fun writing up the Reading Guide portion to go with each page (including a few words about the source when a new source gets added to the mix), along with adding an image. I have now FINISHED the first 20 pages, which is the first day's worth of reading (total of 80 pages, four days of reading = two weeks). If printed out as a book, the PDE Ramayana would be around 150 pages I guess... but the whole point is that it is NOT a book. :-)

Ramayana Images. Illustrating the posts in the PDE Ramayana, I had to search for a few new images to include, like this one for Rama breaking Shiva's bow; I really wanted an illustration that put the focus on the bow, and I found this one by Evelyn Paul — it's an illustration for Monro, one of the books that will be a reading option later!

I also loved this Rama-and-Sita sculpture that I found at Flickr. Photographer: Indi Samarajiva.

YouTube. I was listening to background music today, and so I started building a Background Music playlist. Some good kirtans in there, other nice stuff.

IE UnTextbook Summer Diary: Monday, May 4

So, today (Monday) is the first day of summer for me, and I've already made a lot of progress on the Indian Epics UnTextbook, which also happens to be my "subjective" for #Rhizo15 (and as it so happens, the question of content posed for this week really gave me a lot to think about!). So, for this post I'll summarize where I stand so far with the Ramayana. This represents work I've been doing for the past couple of weeks as I've had time to spare... and now I will have lots more time. Goal is to finish the minimum Ramayana materials by May 23.

Ramayana reading options: I've pretty well cataloged the Ramayana reading options, and targeted (with an asterisk) the ones for which I want to write up Reading Guides. Of course, I already have the Guides for the two printed books I've been using. Here are the books I've identified online: Ramayana reading options.

Ramayana Reading Guide. The Reading Guide I wrote today is for Sita Sings the Blues, a video by Nina Paley. I LOVE THIS MOVIE. It was a real pleasure to make the Reading (Watching) Guide. This is a one-week Ramayana option. I really hope lots of students will choose it for the Week 4 "reading" after having read a more traditional version of the Ramayana; they will also have the option of choosing to watch the film during the free choice half of the semester, Weeks 9-14.

Ramayana, Uttara Kanda. I did a detailed link index for Dutt's literal translation of the Uttara Kanda, and I target two one-week reading options from that book. I would love to do this for all the books of the Ramayana (which is barely feasible) and for the Mahabharata too (which is crazy impossible, but I could link to Ganguli just as I have linked to Dutt here), but there's not going to be time, I know, although I do have a giant spreadsheet with the kandas and sargas numbered and titled so I will be able to navigate Dutt more easily. I am glad I got the Uttara Kanda done as a fully linked index that the students can use because my students are very interested in this material; indeed, the whole second half of Nina Paley's film comes from the Uttara Kanda.

Public Domain Edition: Ramayana. I am really proud of what I got one with the PDE Ramayana over the weekend! All 80 pages have content on them now, although I may swap some content out (in particular, I think students are just not going to be happy with Griffith's verse translation; it will be easy to swap that out with Dutt's literal prose translation now that I have started indexing Dutt). It was hard limiting myself to just the 80 pages, but it provides a really solid two-week experience, and I've included excerpts from 8 different sources so far; I hope to include more now that I've got my Ramayana sources indexed. Next step, writing up the Reading Guide portion for each page and adding images. Here's what I have so far: PDE Ramayana.

Comic Books: I need to check with the Library to see if they have processed the order (the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly... but they are moving forward at least; the idea is that there will be a complete set of ACK comic books in the Reserve area of the Library for students to read). I have completed two readings guides — Sons of Rama: Luv and Kush and Kumbhakarna: The Sleeping Giant — and when I finish this post I will be doing more comic book reading guides today! Whoo-hoo!

Images. I'm in pretty good shape with my image library so while I would really like to improve that, I'm not really stressing about it. I did some browsing for Ramayana images yesterday and found some new items to include for sure, writing them up as blog posts here (I have not done that yet: I have a lot of notblogged images at Diigo). For example, I made sure to include Shabari in the PDE Ramayana (I love her story!), and I found this Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi illustration from 1911 that I can use:

And searching for Shabari images led me to this YouTube video!

Which relates to the next item on the list! :-)

YouTube Channel. I've never been a good user of my YouTube Channel... but that all changed this weekend! I cleared out all my old likes and playlists (I just had a few, very random)... and made it all-Indian, a resource space dedicated to providing music for the UnTextbook!!! I am really excited about this. If I find a few videos each day to save and share, that will make it easy to include a music video of the day in my class announcements each semester. SO EXCITING!!!

So, I think that's it, and if I forgot something, I'll add it in tomorrow's post. And now........... comic books!!! :-)

Discontented, but in love with content: The #Rhizo15 paradox

So, today is really the FIRST DAY of my summer... Monday: but no school! And the first thing I wanted to do when I sat down at my computer was get to work on the Indian Epics UnTextbook. That is a good sign!

For this post, I want to explain more about the specific situation I find myself in with a class titled "Indian Epics" and what kind of UnTextbook experience I want to create. In the Rhizo15 posts from the past week, I see a wide range of reflections on content. Insofar as there are content camps, I am in what might be called the "discontented" camp, but in this post I hope to show that it is not that I am anti-content but rather that I am intensely aware of the difference between student-centered content and a traditional, top-down approach in which content is assigned by the instructor.

No Force-Fed Humanities, Please

In my case, I am teaching Gen. Ed. Humanities courses which are required for graduation, on the assumption that there is some diet of Humanities content that is "good" for the students, content food that I can feed them (by force if necessary) because the consumption of that content will benefit them. That force-feeding approach makes me very uncomfortable. It's not that I don't love the content; I'm the one who created the Indian Epics course at my school because when offered the chance to design a new Non-Western Gen. Ed. course, this was what I most wanted to do. I do indeed love these epics, and they have been a hugely important part of my life since I discovered them, thanks to Peter Brook's Mahabharata as shown on public television way back in 1989.

But for all that I love the epics, I don't expect the students will necessarily share that love, and I certainly don't want to try to force my feelings on them. Instead, I want to create an environment where the students can explore the epics freely and have their own experience of them, responding to their own curiosity and values, an independent experience, not just an awkward imitation of my own experience. So, while I think it's great that the Indian Epics UnTextbook will be free of charge, reducing costs is not my main goal (indeed, the paperbacks I was using previously were so cheap to buy used at Amazon that all four books cost less than $25). Instead, my goal is to do a better job of responding to those challenges by taking a student-driven approach.

Some History

When I first started teaching the Indian Epics class online in 2003 after having started teaching online with Myth-Folklore in 2002, I was really in a bind. From the very first semester of Myth-Folklore, I was able to give students a choice of reading (two reading options each week) and build the course in a modular way; the online resources were a small fraction of what they are now, but given the immensity of Myth-Folklore as a topic, it was easy to take a student-centered approach to the content from the start. With Indian Epics, though, everything was different. These were epics, not topics I could just "modularize" with weekly units so that every week was an independent choice. Plus, there were no readings available online (not even at Sacred Texts Archive); that meant, like it or not, I was going to have to make choices about books to buy for the class.

So, for the past ten years I had taken a very traditional approach, although one that I hoped would inspire my students to think about the content in a fluid, changing, subjective way: each semester, we would read TWO versions of each epic, the Ramayana as told by R. K. Narayan (Indian writer) and the Mahabharata as told by William Buck (American writer). In addition, the Ramayana books were themselves based on two different originals: Narayan was working with Kamban's Tamil Ramayana while Buck was working with Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. And that was good so far as it went: by reading multiple versions of the epics like that, it helped the students to see that there was no "objective" epic, but only versions of the epics, interpretations, stories told by particular storytellers for particular audiences, just as they would be telling their own versions of the epics, their own stories. This multiplicity was a real surprise to the students, and disorienting in a good way, especially for those students who come to the class with assumptions about the Bible as a monolithic text (and teaching at the University of Oklahoma, that is not an uncommon assumption).

Indian Epics and the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook

Then, last year, I was able to break up my Indian Epics reading list thanks to the UnTextbook I had created for the Myth-Folklore class which had a lot of options from India (Buddhist stories, regional folktales, etc.): 12 different India units to be specific. In Myth-Folklore, those units provide one or two weeks of reading, along with similar modules of reading from Africa, Asia, British Isles, Europe, Middle East, and Native America.

So, for the Fall semester in Indian Epics, to make room for the UnTextbook option, I made Buck's Mahabharata optional so that the students could choose units from the UnTextbook for those four weeks if they wanted. It was a huge success! The UnTextbook option went so well in Fall that  in the Spring I also made the second half of Buck's Ramayana optional. As a result, students had six weeks of epic reading and six weeks of optional reading from the UnTextbook, looking at other Indian storytelling traditions.

I should note, however, that most students actually still chose to read the Buck books. I suspect this was because many students are still most familiar with reading actual books for school, and the assumption that books-are-the-course is very strong. But here's the thing: because of the social nature of the course with students reading each other's work all the time, even the students who stuck to the books got to learn about the UnTextbook by looking at the stories written by the students who explored the other reading options. So, that was great: the class ended up being a richer reading experience for everybody because of the UnTextbook options woven into the mix. But it was, admittedly, a more diluted epic experience because the materials in the UnTextbook were mostly folktales, very much connected to India, but not necessarily to the epic tradition per se.

Summer 2015: An UnTextbook for Indian Epics

So, for next year, I want to take the idea of the UnTextbook while keeping the focus on the epic tradition, along with the ancient storytelling traditions embodied in the Panchatantra and Buddhist jatakas which were taking shape at the same time as the epics (and, indeed, you can see those stories told by characters in the epics themselves, which is very cool). That means I will be making a specifically Indian Epics UnTextbook this semester, one which is fully focused on the incredibly rich storytelling tradition preserved (miraculously!) in these ancient texts.

For the first few weeks of summer, I am focusing on the Ramayana, hoping to finish that by May 23 (I'm out of town for one week in there to see my dad). Then I will work on the Mahabharata for the rest of May and all of June, hoping to finish that by July 1 (I'm out of town for another week in there to go to the DML conference). And then by July 25 (and I'm guessing another trip to see my dad will take up part of July), I want to finish up the epic-related readings that I also want to include: stories about Krishna, stories of the gods and goddesses, plus Buddhist storytelling traditions. That will then give me the last week of July to make sure everything fits together before my husband's daughter and grandson come visit in first week of August, followed by a frenzied few days of getting everything up and running for students to start on August 11.

All told, I've got 14 weeks, of which 4 weeks will be travel/family weeks where I might get some reading done, but probably not much of that. So: 10 weeks. It's going to be a tight squeeze to get all the work done in that time, but I need to keep in mind the bare MINIMUM I need to get done... and not get distracted by the infinite possibilities. And really, especially when it comes to the Mahabharata, the possibilities are not just infinite but so tempting (I personally far prefer the Mahabharata to the Ramayana). So, it's good I am start with the Ramayana, ha ha, because I will be able to set more reasonable expectations that way.

I'll be keeping a diary here of my progress, so in addition to the Rhizo15 tag (where appropriate), I'll also be linking to Summer15 posts. And now.......... bring on the epics! My goal today is to write up the reading guide — but really a watching guide — for Nina Paley's GENIUS animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. It's in the public domain. It positively WANTS to be embedded in the UnTextbook.

HAPPY.

Yes, Content IS People: a post for #Rhizo15

Through a series of Twitter coincidences, I ended up having a back-and-forth just now with Gardner Campbell about the readings for Connected Courses. I had to confess that I didn't do a lot of reading for Connected Courses; I tried to keep up with reading the blogs in the blog stream and following the Twitter stream, which is also how I am approaching the Rhizo15 experience, focusing what time I have on reading the blog posts that people share. In fact, my first big Rhizo15 self-assigned task was creating an OPML file of all the blogs I could find both to read AND to share: Rhizo15 Combination Feed in Inoreader. So many blogs!!! And please add your blog if you are not there already!

And then I realized that this is relevant to the challenge for this week in Rhizo15 re: content. There are not assigned readings for Rhizo15 as there were in Connected Courses ... and that is totally fine with me. It's the blogs of the other participants that are really alive and important to me for the purposes of the (un)course experience. Yes, CONTENT IS PEOPLE:

So, at least for me the content emerges in the conversation itself rather than being defined in advance, even tentatively defined in advance by assigned reading lists. That is something that really makes sense to me in an un-course experience, which is how I saw Connected Courses (although I now see from Gardner Campbell that he hoped it would be more course-like) and which is how I see Rhizo15 (which seems very content - conTENT - with being an un-course).

Including some things while excluding others: that is exactly the problem I have with traditional class content, just as Dave emphasizes in the challenge for this week (and by the way, I absolutely love the open-endedness of Dave's challenges... they are totally working for me):

Now, in my own courses, it's . . .  complicated. Unlike Rhizo15 or Connected Courses, my students have not shown up out of sheer curiosity. They have shown up because they are required to take General Education courses, and that is what I can offer: University of Oklahoma upper-division General Education, Western Humanities and Non-Western Humanities, taught fully online. My classes always fill up pretty much instantly because there are a lot of seniors who need Gen. Ed. to graduate, and online is the option that fits everyone's busy schedule.

So, yes, for those courses, I do have to define some content. But my goal is to offer LOTS of choices to the students as the content goes (trillions of choices, ha ha, as I explain here in the introduction to the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook). More importantly, the REAL content of the course is what the students themselves create, as I explain here: The Shift from Teaching Content to ... Teaching Writers.

A big part of what finally prompted me to create the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook last summer was all the great projects my students had done in the past. Working with them on their projects over the years had made me aware of the kinds of stories that really appealed, along with the great public domain resources available to make those readings part of the class. So, I created the Myth-Folklore UnTextbook last summer, and the transformation in my classes this year as a result was AMAZING: students used to have a choice of 2 readings each week in that class, but now with a choice of 16 readings each week, week after week, the energy level was just buzzing, and now by using the feedback I have gotten from the students (they rate each unit), I will be able to add more/better units in the future.

And this summer, I am going to try to transform my Indian Epics class in much the same way (I made that my own Rhizo15 subjective in fact; details here: Summer is Coming). Epics are less modular than mythology and folklore, so it is a challenge... but in a big epiphany in December, I realized that it would be possible to make an UnTextbook in Indian Epics, and I've gotten feedback from students this semester that will help me do a good job with that this summer.

Here's the thing about content, though: even if I do an awesome job, including all kinds of wonderful things for the students to choose to read, I will also be excluding things... but then it will be students to the rescue! Because WITH THEIR PROJECTS the students will be bringing in all kinds of stories and topics that I did not find room for... not because I wanted to exclude any of those stories or any of those topics, but just because I ran out of time/space, or because of my own ignorance.

So, even with the UnTextbook, it will always be the students who are keeping the class alive and wild, going beyond any reading list I could ever create in advance, bringing in the topics and stories they care about the most. And by seeing what they bring to the class, I get better and better ideas of what to put into the UnTextbook. And around and around we go, in a circle of reading virtue!

Read on! Write on! RIGHT ON!!!!!!

And thanks to Gardner for prompting me to quickly write up this blog post tonight. I've got some ideas in here I need to unpack in more detail... but it's a start. :-)

Pondering a Virtual Book Club to go with #OpenTeachingOU chats...

Thanks to a #Rhizo15 post which reminded me just how much I like the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Getting into the Flow: a post for #Rhizo15 — I got the idea that we could maybe have a rhizomatic book club and, in particular, I would really like to get something like that happening at my school (University of Oklahoma), building on the good energy we got going with our Twitter chat experiments for #OpenTeachingOU this semester.

Our Twitter chats benefited so much from what I learned by watching and occasionally participating in various edu Twitter chats over the past couple of years, and I would LOVE to get ideas and advice from people who participate in virtual book clubs about what has worked best for them!

Those Twitter chats grew out of a phone conversation that Rob Reynolds (NextThought guru, and formerly of OU), Stacy Zemke (OU OER goddess) and I had back in February... we had fun talking on the phone together, but we realized it would obviously be even more fun — and useful! — to get more people in on the conversation, and sure enough, some people from OU participated, and some other people joined in too, which was just great: by making the conversation open and online, we managed to get some people together who come from different parts of OU, and also some people who are not at OU but who were interested in the topics at hand.

So, when I was thinking about how fun it would be to read Flow together with Rob and Stacy and any/all the folks I know online who would be interested in doing that together, I got the idea of proposing an "online book club" that might even be sponsored by our Center for Teaching Excellence. They offer all kinds of great face-to-face workshops, but so far they have not done anything with online workshops that are asynchronous, taking advantage of different kinds of online spaces to connect and share. If CTE would sponsor the book club so that the OU participants could maybe get the cost of the book covered (Flow for Kindle, for example, is $9.95), that would be really cool... but of course even without such sponsorship, we could make it work! So, I'm going to just brainstorm here some of the cool things I would like to see happen as a result of this.

Here are some thoughts in no particular order:

1. Read/re-read some COOL BOOKS about learning, education, communication, etc.! I know I would get so much more out of reading books together with others. Some of the books I have read in recent years that had a big impact on me and which are of general education interest would be Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, Daniel Pink's Drive, Gleick's The Information (AMAZING book, IMO; I loved that one), etc. And then of course there are all the books I have on my book list that I have NOT read and which a book club would prod me to read, plus I would benefit from other people's suggestions about what to read.

2. Have a chance to talk ABOUT READING with people. This is something I am increasingly obsessed with as I work on my classes: I am very happy with how the writing components of my classes work, but the reading components need so much improvement. What do we do when we read? How do we read? Why do we read? It would be so great to make this both a book club and a meta-book-club about reading itself.

3. Support DISTRIBUTED CONVERSATIONS that happen via blogs and other online spaces. I have been so happy with the results from curating a #Rhizo15 blog feed (more about that) — it took so little time and has resulted in a fantastic source of stuff for me to read and explore every single day! So, I know feel really confident about using Inoreader as a way to consolidate and re-share blogs and also Twitter and Google+ content so that conversations can take place across spaces. Given the size of #Rhizo15 (there 62 feeds now), I haven't been collecting the comment feeds for the blogs also, but it is do-able of course (I follow comment feeds for my students' blogs), so I know we could build a really cool distributed network of blogs, comments and additional online presence, just with simple use of Inoreader, nothing fancy required.

4. Support faculty in building ONLINE PRESENCE. For those distributed conversations to take place, faculty need some online presence: a blog, Twitter, Google+, something that lends itself to crossplatform connections (Facebook does not do that very well). I've found it very easy to get my students up and running with blogs on the first day of my online courses, and so I am confident we could get faculty up and running too, especially with the opportunities provided by create.ou.edu which allows them to own their own domain online if they want to do that.

5. Integrate book chats into our TWITTER CHAT schedule. I am hoping that we could carry on with our OpenTeachingOU Twitter chats, and once every two week seems a good schedule for that, in which case it would be easy to fold in some book chats into the mix over the course of the semester. I am thinking the book chats would not be 100% focused on the book itself, but instead would be a chat topic INSPIRED by the book, which would go in whatever directions it goes in, but which would be of interest to anyone reading the book for the book club.
Week 2: Chat topic whatever
Week 4: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 1
Week 6: Chat topic whatever
Week 8: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 2
Week 10: Chat topic whatever
Week 12: Chat topic INSPIRED by Book 3
Week 14: Chat topic whatever

The idea is that people would participate in the Virtual Book Club whatever way they want with the book club: blogs, Twitter, Google+, other online sharing... and for people who want something synchronous, there would be these Twitter chats, along with support for people getting started who might never have done a Twitter chat before.

So, I am curious what people think... people who do book clubs online... people who have been participating in our Twitter chats... OU people whoever you might be! What are good strategies for virtual book clubs? What really exciting/useful books would you recommend?

Update: Thanks to a rhizo15 connection, I have found this VERY idea-filled post from Laura Gogia: A Gathering Together: My #TJC15 Connected Learning Experience.

I'm going to try to write up a proposal for CTE next week sometime (since I'll be out of town May 11-15), so any ideas, suggestions, etc. would be much appreciated! The success of our Twitter chats was so encouraging... so I am being so bold as to hope for more. :-)