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Saturday, 5 August 06 :: contemplating

i'm at work today. i don't have any friends to hang out yet with in town on the weekends (sad sigh. but note, i'm freakin' exhausted, insominia has kicked in with the change of LIFE), so i'm working right now.

what is it that i'm contemplating? is it possible to make trainings about various types of oppression safe in an open courseware environment (like educommons)? safe being: often times when people start recognizing themselves as oppressors, they tend to get defensive and have other negative emotions, and in an environment like the internet, where anonymity is pretty easy ('no one knows you are a dog') to maintain, it is sometimes easier to strike out and run. is it possible to create safety in an open courseware environment (here's usu's open courseware site). is it even necessary? is this kind of use of knowledge sharing such that the safety issue wouldn't need to be addressed? and then there's the question of meaningful change within the person going through the trainings. as my prof pointed out to me yesterday, meaningful discussions are possible over the internet -- very possible, afterall, abigail and john adams carried out very meaningful discussions on paper, when mail took a lot longer to deliver than it does now -- but another question i have is what motivates a person to want to face tough stuff within themselves? i know why i did, because i'm a masochist? ha!, but why do others? and would the trainings be used in the meaningful way they are ment to be used in? and would it lessen the power of the project if they didn't? and who would they be? and has somethign like what i want to do already been done? maybe the folks here at COSL already know answers to some of these questions, but i don't know any of the answers. so thats why i'm at work, instead of at home napping, where i'd really should be -- trying to find someway to turn the brain off, so i can get some rest.

posted by brooke at August 5, 2006 02:53 PM

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about
i'm brooke, born in '73. i am currently a phd student in instructional technology. this is the blog where i capture all the neurotic, and the few non-neurotic, moments that seem to come with being a phd student (if you want to read less neuroses and more professionalism go to: oer's, dl's, reuse and culture: it's about a phd student researching digital resources in a multicultural world). i have been from eugene, oregon for a long time.. 8 years specifically (its my home now, but i grew up in southwestern virginia), but now i'm here in logan, utah at utah state university. after finding my roots in eugene i never could have expected that i would leave that liberal oasis and head to utah. but i did and there are days when its a blessing and days when i'm tempted to go back to oregon and beg the folks at lost valley educational center to let me move in. but i won't leave because there are days when this process is better than any kind of high i could ever imagine. what else? i collect things, i have 2 cats, 2 kayaks, 2 laptops (i'm a geek - one mac, one pc). i can be emailed at brookesblog@rivervision.com.