Tuesday.

Yes!! Yes!! My proposal was accepted for DML2013. I will have 90 minute presentation with up to 10 seats! I'll update with the abstract later.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. The fourth annual conference – DML2013 – is organized around the theme “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices, and Remixing Youth Participation” and will be held between March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Read More.

Great thing about PennGSE is that they reimburse students up to $150 to attend conferences, up to $300 to present!  I just got back an additional $150 and will reap excellent exposure and priceless wisdom for my project!

UPDATE: Presentation Draft

Localizing the World Wide Web for Social Action

Drawing upon the research of The Kinder & Braver World Project, specifically Shock (2012), one must begin to recognize and uphold that young people have played a major role within every progressive social movement, engaging with many of the new media tools of their time to “create, circulate, and amplify movement stories” in concert with direct action.  With increasing literacy in using digital tools to enhance learning and exposure in educational settings, we must continue to stand in the historical legacy to unite our voices and stories with concrete strategies to actualize the transformations that drives our passion to speak. How do we begin to reconcile local action within globe-reaching digital spaces in regards to civic engagement and social justice curricula? What are effective techniques to emphasize the balance between the creation of digital media and the need for active reinforcement of ideas? What happens after the media? My research seeks to investigate the connection between critical digital literacies and actualizing the social justice aims within the local community. Christopher Rogers has a project in process for the city of Chester, Pennsylvania that will engage youth in a participatory action research project to determine and implement digital solution(s) to create a more responsive connection between community members and city services. This comes as an expansion of a pilot project where youth engage with digital music creation tools to create an album dedicated to uplifting youth perspective on critical social issues.  In the workshop, participants will be introduced to Chester, PA through behind-the-scenes footage of the Chester Sound digital music lab while engaging in an informal conversation about connecting the power and potential of digital media tools to drive community movements and the struggle to actualize change. 

Friday.

Just finished up writing a major essay for EDUC 550. One of my professors asked me to come to campus tomorrow to help with a tour of young impressionable high schoolers. Sort of excited about this!

Wednesday (cont.)

GSE LAB redesign.

Wednesday.

An ode to the GSE Computer Lab

2am in the GSE Computer Lab. I love this place. Especially at night, most people leave GSE somewhere round 7. The stragglers and 7-9 classes roll out at 9:01 (no time wasted!).  A few stragglers stick around in the computer lab to work on this or that. They are usually gone by 11pm.  Then it’s just me. [maybe a couple more people but I’m not sure if they want to be exposed in this blog].  They redesigned the computer lab over the break. Taking out the cubicles for the island—the post-industrial redesign [NO WALLS]. They added some softer recliner laptop chairs for all those folks who decide to invade the computer lab to only plop their laptop in front of an open available desktop.—I’m different. I have this iPad yet no device to effectively type papers.   But back to the point. I’m usually playing either A) a sports podcast, B) a hip hop podcast C) pulling up an album on Youtube.  Books out. Phone on the charger.  Volume on the comp all the way UP! It’s like my own personal home base. Most folks at GSE know me for being here mad late, but I don’t think they know just how much fun I have when I am here. Actually, I’m glad they don’t. MORE COMPUTER LAB FOR ME.

Wednesday.

Finishing up the first week of the new semester.

A couple thoughts--Graduate School Grades
--interestingly enough, I am more interested than feedback on my final papers than my final grade. Sometimes my grades match with my professor, sometimes they do not. Advice purposes: Keep your expectations above the professor's expectations and you'll be fine.

New Semester
--I love my use of electives. Thank God that I chose not to pursue the Reading Specialist certification so I could have them.  I have a class on Video Games, Digital Literacies, Black Male Development [independent study], Education & Social Entrepreneurship, and Multicultural Children's Literature.  Advice: All other things held constant, do the thing thats best for you.

The Job Search
--I'm looking. You know of anything out there in the interwebs...please let me know.

That's it for now. Also, I have a new blog starting soon for my digital literacies class. Shall be interesting.

-Chris.

Monday.

 

This post has four reasons for being:

1)      its an act of desperation

2)      to remind those who would like to be reminded

3)      to remind those who would like NOT to be reminded

4)      to inform those who might not know.

^^from one of my favorite poems of all time and also might serve as my new year’s resolution

 

 

Lately, I have been gearing up to write my final paper for the semester. It’s a 15-20 page paper for EDUC 723: Multicultural Issues in Education.  It’s a research paper in which the topic for myself keeps fluidly changing as I navigate the texts available regarding the interrelatedness between critical race theory and education. There’s the general critical literature review that I could do right….but that’s just too easy.  

Funny how I asked for an extension just so I can have the opportunity to get my thoughts right on this one—like Christmas isn’t next week.  One part of my mind says nothing would give more pleasure than to be able to return to my borrowed NetFlix on-demand IPad app.

But the other side…the deeper, darker side is perplexed.  I’m finishing up my first semester at Penn GSE.  For all intents and purposes, its been a great ride.  I’m over-satisfied with the direction of the RWL program and overjoyed at the faculty connections I have made.  My advisor is Dr. Gadsden—don’t let me forget that I owe her this 15-20 page monster paper.

 

 

Why the build-up?  While working on my final class portfolios, I realized something about my work at Penn.  I was doing the assignments. I handed them in on time with proper citations and all the academic jargon that you need.  However, I totally forgot about pleasing the most significant portion of this entire experience—myself.

All these things that I have written, did I write them for me?  At the end of the day, what did I get out of it? What did I learn?  Most times I have no idea.  Of course, I retain some information.  I can spit a couple quotes from Lisa Delpit, I understand New Literacy Studies as formulated by James Gee, but what about my own theories, have I challenged them?

It all started when I found this document that I created two years ago to begin this journey into literacy.  Program Proposal for Chester Community Publishing.  Coming off of a solid year where I founded and administered the Chester High Entrepreneurship Club, Chester Community Publishing would be the next step.  As formulated, Chester Community Publishing sought to incentivize reading and writing in Chester, Pennsylvania by creating a community-owned publishing house where profits were split 50/50 between the program and the author.  What is a book anyway? Just a couple of PDF’s and maybe some scanned artwork.  I could do that.  Next thing you know, I had an entire proposal written.  Awesome period in time. Sadly, I can’t remember the feeling that compelled me to do it and that’s what caused me to begin the internal conversation of where my current motivations and passions lie.

Jump back to paper preparation. Now I’m trying to find articles that will work for this paper.  I come across this monster effort by Charles Lawrence: The Word and the River: Pedagogy as Scholarship as Struggle.  Man, I was in church when I read this—check it:

“I press on, despite my fears, with the sense of exhilaration and fatalism that one experiences in battle.  Perhaps I have the skill to walk the tightrope, to tell just enough of the truth to be bought out instead of wiped out….”

“It is the work of those [scholars] who remain cool and distant in the face of suffering because it is not their liberation, their humanity which is at stake…”

“Even when I managed to remain true to my convictions, professional pressures required that I employ language and references that threatened to make my work inaccessible to a large part of the audience I hoped to reach.”

“The disguises of abstract argument, hypothetical case, theoretical construct, and polite form have been removed. The full force of my feelings has been recaptured and expressed”

 

…

 

…And there’s more.

There’s just so much to this picture.  In many ways, I have been avoiding my own voice to embrace the so called academic cocktail party. Cite this here. Include a quote from this. The word “capitulation” comes to mind.  I feel lost at times. I don’t have that feeling that I started with. I’m here to uncover some truth and bring it back to Chester.  So I ask myself again…what did you learn?

The great part about it is now I’m beginning to have that real conversation with myself about exactly what do I want and I’m seeing that critical race theorists are bringing in what I’m searching by the truckload.  I then read more unassigned articles in the past week than the rest of the semester.  I have no idea what I am doing—well, actually I do—but I need to get writing on this paper.  You can’t be having life realizations during finals season. But yo…Check this jawn out from Charles Lawrence:

1. Speak simple truths to power.
2. Making our own communities our first audience.
3. Creating a homeplace for refuge and hard conversations.
4. Defining boundaries (knowing who is us and who is them).
5. Starting small (knowing that small is important and good).
6. Remembering that we are beautiful and that we are bad (or "the bomb").

from http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1400/1603_ch1.pdf

I’m on this new mission to really embrace the ME first in my education.

 

 

 

Enjoy the Christmas break everyone and look forward to returning next semester ready to dig in.

Tuesday.

"This guy is the hardest worker at GSE. He lives in the computer lab. This man right here knows everything about this place. Mr. Rogers is the kid you want in your project group- to get that A, lol"

--Kevin B.

That being said, It's nothing like blasting your favorite new mixtape through the GSE computer lab at 2:45am.  When everyone leaves, the building is mine.  Is this because the workload at GSE is that much to have me up that late at night? Partly.  I like being at GSE.  Being home sometimes can be very distracting...

The GSE Computer lab is open 24 hours with PennCard access...with a water cooler down the hall...and also access to the first floor classrooms.  In preparation for a presentation last week, I borrowed one of the classrooms for an impromptu movie screening.

My advice: Your paying top-dollar for it, you better take advantage!