Image Credit: Mathias Ripp via flickr.com/photos/56218409@N03/29080604766

One of the first talks I heard after moving to North Carolina in 2017 was Linda Sarsour speak at Davidson College. I knew she was a Women’s March organizer and activist, but to be honest, I didn’t know much else. So I Googled her to find a first page of search results being dominated by accusations of ties to Hamas and controversy related to whether Zionism and Feminism can coexist with Sharia law.

That’s not what she talked about or focused on. She told us her story and her take about the state of our country.

Her first suggestion for activism, listen.

~ Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. A country that treats everyone with dignity and respect. We must remind ourselves the times in our history when we have done horrible things. She ultimately calls us to stand up for the horrible things happening on our watch, but to also listen, be open to people’s stories, start with things that we share. Think about changing call out culture to call in.

Since the election I’ve been trying to find ways to understand the numbers, groups, people who voted for the 45th. I absolutely want to call on me, you, us, people, to be their best, and not hide behind the comfortable, the known. I also understand this as a privilege, to have the time, the opportunity, the safety to seek out this kind of conversation. From my privileged position, I asked a republican colleague out to non partisan lunch. I actually don’t consider myself to be a Democrat, but I definitely come across as a vocal liberal. I asked this particular person because I was confused at actions versus the politics that I saw in their presence on campus.

Here is some of what stood out to me in our conversation.

That idea of – “If I can do it, then anyone can. Why wallow in what you can’t control? Figure out what you can do in your situation and do it! Do anything to make your situation better.” Which, yes, if you have had anyone in your life who has struggled and overcome those struggles, you are proud and happy for them. Everyone can agree that it is possible and good to overcome adversity. But this isn’t the only way for a story to go. I guess I wasn’t aware of how strong this narrative plays out in conversations about social programs and maybe even more so in talking about inequalities and what to do about them. That the ideal to stand above and overcome is more powerful than actually getting rid of the obstacles that are getting in the way. Therefore those that aren’t able to overcome are then just weak?

The second thing that stood out was the local / personal factor that becomes so important. I think this is important, in fact when I think about being a responsible digital citizen, the only way to approach a diverse global complexity is to understand your own situation and share it with others. But it also can stand as an excuse to not move past what we don’t understand. Our context and experience isn’t enough. If we wait for something to become part of our own personal experience in some way, things would slow to a stop. Empathy is trying to understand someone without having that personal connection. If you consider yourself a person not burdened by what is happening in your personal local world, then you need to make the effort to go beyond it.

A third piece that stood out from our conversation was the one issue to rule all issues. That some folks approach politics as needing to fight for this one issue above all, which then allows for excusing a lot of other things (behaviors, policies, incongruities). I won’t name the issue, although I’m sure many of you already know right off the bat that it is one of two or three that have made politics unbearable. When I asked my colleague if he would leave his daughters alone in a room with the 45th, he said no. He wouldn’t trust the man alone in a room with his daughters. BUT, this one issue. This was the hardest part of his thinking for me to hear and try and make sense of. I think it is dangerous and really a perfect excuse to let a lot of things go.

Lastly, when the conversation was over, I realized that I had spent the hour listening to him. I know I had asked him to lunch, but he literally asked me no questions about my thinking. I view this in two ways. My first thought is wow, he is completely unaware and if felt like this was a very male thing. He professed, I listened. I have been in this position many a time. But it could have also been that he felt he was on the defensive. He was justifying his actions and beliefs. Now, almost three years later, this defensiveness is so present in our political dialogue. It makes things hard. But it is my challenge to focus on. How to talk through defensiveness.

This brings me to a story from a few weeks ago. I was sitting on our back porch, having some drinks with some friends from home (New Mexico). One of them used Jew as a derogatory term for being stingy with money. The rest of us were like, whoa, not ok. Things started to get uncomfortable. My partner then stepped in and said, look, I know. I’ve done it too. I’ve said something that I then realized was a straight up racial slur. This gave space for us to have a conversation about why certain terms that still get used without really thinking about them, come from very specific places of discrimination and hate. It allowed us to address the behavior in a way that didn’t put one or several of us on the defensive, but rather made it a conversation for us all to take part in and not feel like we were going to be called out. This is an example on a small scale, but as my friend pointed out the following day, this is what we need to start trying to do more.

I’m writing this here, because of the messiness of conversations that I’ve had and the sick feeling in my stomach after so many interactions both online and face to face. I need to talk through it and make sense of what might be going on, to then go back and continue to have thoughtful, informed conversations. Have you worked through defensive conversations? What are your stories?

What is my work? I’m interested in what it means to be a human in a digital world. As the internet continues to be a complex, exciting, dangerous, uncertain place, I think taking part in it and processing our way through it collectively remains an important part of academic spaces AND being human.

VINE – an online community

Why not start with Vine? The first online community that I took part in that consisted mostly of people I had not met in person was a community in Vine (the 6 second video platform) in 2013. Now an interesting example of what happens when a platform becomes extinct but makes some effort to leave archived artifacts, Vine at its height had a robust animator/creative contingent. When I say robust, I’m not talking about the Vine Personalities who performed for crowds (who I enjoyed watching), but a group of 200-300 creators, pushing the limits of the platform, experimenting with its animation and short form capabilities, and sharing their work with each other. This is the first time I took part in making things for a public audience. I will go into what I mean by “public” a little later in this post. What I want to highlight here is THE SWITCH I experienced from making something that may or may not be seen by people, to being able to see more of others’ work while working on my own ideas. I’m introvert that can get caught in my own thoughts, and this way of working got me out of my own head. Now let me again say that this wasn’t about going viral, it was about a different way of working. My partner Daniel Lynds and I eventually created a joint account and I think the most revines we ever got was 53 for this random Vine. Disclaimer: This only makes sense with the sound on, thinking back to a world where the Happy song was sooooooo overplayed.

#digciz

Working in the open started to become my preferred way of both learning and working. It translated into my professional life as well as personal life. I was able to spend some time developing more professional NETWORKS through Twitter during a period when I was only working part time. I made my first online friend and collaborator Autumm Caines and we started an informal series on Digital Citizenship. We invited guests to come and speak to digital citizenship through the lens of their research, work, life experience. I think this is a great example of the following which I have found to be part of how I understand digital humanities:

1. digital humanities as a practice
2. public engagement happens during, not after [This comes from Steven Lubar’s Seven Rules for Public Humanists]
3. bringing different expertise together, role of facilitating
4. a critical look at the digital
5. networks at work

who / audience / public ?

One of questions we were asked to think about was Who is your AUDIENCE when you do digital humanities? Or: is there a “public” in your digital humanities? I see this in two ways. One, audience has to do with the networks you have formed or found. There are always certain groups who relate to or are interested in different subject matter. Someone who has worked in public has hopefully found some of the networks that care about the things they are working on, even if it is at different layers. It’s important to think through who that might be and be as expansive in our thinking about audiences as we can. However, I think there is another side to public work that puts things out there for the audiences you don’t know about. You don’t close the door to who might want to take part. If you have different networks, don’t assume that someone from your gym doesn’t want to take part in a conversation about data collection. It is also this space of the who that is unknown that helps us not talk specifically to one crowd and to be more accessible.

#DigPINS is a structured four week facilitated learning community that aims to develop a network of colleagues who explore digital Pedagogy, Identity Networks, and Scholarship (or DigPINS) together.

This Friday, January 18th at 4pm Eastern, the current #DigPINS community is having a live twitter chat to explore the meaning, value, and challenges of networks. We will be talking generally about networks both on and offline. By Networks we mean:

A group of identities that are connected through shared experience, mutual interests, and similar work or goals.

Autumm Caines

We are excited to be joined by Donna Lanclos (@donnalanclos), who will help us explore this topic in the open. Donna is an anthropologist and folklorist who researches, writes, and speaks about information, digital and physical places, and higher education generally.

I see my work as relevant not just to libraries or universities, but to conversations about how we as a society make sure that people have opportunities to learn how to think critically, to practice those skills, and to find their voices.

Dr. Donna Lanclos

We welcome you to join his conversation, using the #DigPINS.

What are some of your current or future goals? Either individual goals or team goals. What are you and your colleagues at your institution talking about? What do you want to be doing?

What are some of the challenges you have faced recently in trying to work toward those goals?

I look forward to seeing some of you in Nashville and for those of you who can’t join in person, I will share out the conversations and work done during the conference.

#OLCdesignthinking #OLCinnovate

So how did the first day go?

I’m still processing and will continue to do so. We were asked to do something active after our first day. This post is my attempt at a green dot.

There are many of us in the room, and we are talking about sensitive topics. This is a challenge. I looked ahead at the criteria that we evaluate the facilitators on and what we may also be evaluated on if we lead a training as part of the institution wide implementation. There were things about whether or not they responded to the group, whether they seemed authentic, realistic. These are hard, especially when thinking about the end goal. But having just been talking about goals within a professional team, these seem worthy. The facilitators, two men who have shared some of their complex backgrounds and positionality, appear to be there because they care, and use their expertise to push something they see as absolutely valuable.

Especially today, in this landscape of complex communication and information that we are trying to navigate, it is helpful to focus on something that can build community and has the potential for building further individual capacity. And I am for that. I am with that.

If you clicked on the link above and looked into Green Dot, it is active bystander training. It is a community growing/building approach to involve as many people in a community as possible to take part in helping prevent particularly sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking.

I’ve learned a lot day 1. My takeaways include, don’t take on too much all at once, meet people where they are, don’t alienate, but rather find out what someone is willing to do, prevention work is specific and takes critical mass.

Let’s see how day 2 goes.

Reflect on a social/community site that has been transformational in your work as an ID.

I’ve reflected about becoming more active in open online spaces here. One influence that I have not gone into depth about is the #digped community, with Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris at the center. These used to be my favorite Twitter chats, and to be honest, I miss them. The prompts were thoughtful and the community was large enough to get a diverse conversation going.

I set up a TAGS Explorer on February 1st, 2016. I know there are others who did so before then, but it was a nice way to see who was participating. As June 4th, it reports 90, 336 tweets, but it no longer updates.

There was a point when I could still load the data visualization, and it looked like a pulsing swarm. Jesse and Sean announced the ending of the #digped chats with a prompt to others to explore and push boundaries. It was like breaking up the swarm, the lovely numbers, to go out and do in other spaces, grow in other places. I have yet to ask them if they have seen their call manifest or is that even possible?

But it was in those chats that my work as an ID changed its focal point. I moved away from what I thought I SHOULD be doing to questions about what I was doing and why? I think these are important questions for everyone, especially in education, because they give us a way to connect. In the same way that we want students to be engaged with what they are learning, we should be engaged with our work and the people around us. Although others of course did not automatically change the way they perceived me or my position, I started to at least know how I wanted to be part of the higher ed community.

This is timely in that I’m headed to DigpedLab in Fredricksburg Virginia at the beginning of next month, which follows my experience with #digped. I look forward to being on the hashtag again!

I’ve been asked to share my story or path to where I sit professionally now. It truly has more to do with people than with anything else. Tracing back leads to different rabbit holes, with no beginning, but I’ll try.

At a recent campus event, a student overheard me saying that my undergraduate degree was in religion. A religion major herself, about to graduate, she came up to me and asked me whether I thought that degree was worth it, and did it help me do what I wanted to do.

I have never regretted doing an undergraduate degree in something that is not thought of as an employable major. This same student told me how she was thinking of going into social work, and went on to explain why this made sense, with a slight question in the background “does this make sense?” I’ve always thought of my undergrad years as random. A time when I had the freedom and privilege to study anything I wanted, not necessarily connected to my career trajectory, except for the fact that I needed a degree to do most of what I’ve gone on to do.

I’ve always thought of and explained staying in education as feeling like I get to contribute to the good parts of our society. It started with that, liking the idea that I got to spend my time helping people learn things. This got more complicated when teaching English in other countries, to students who didn’t have much of a choice. Then it changed to being about building relationships in order to better understand the individuals I was working with.

So I come back to the newly graduated religion major student, who unlike me, was already connecting what she learned to what she might want to do. For me, who hadn’t seen the connected path, in retrospect the dots do connect. As a young adult I was very interested in finding meaning in life. I wanted to read and talk about it. I wanted to find out what others had thought and were thinking about it. I found it fascinating to have professors so knowledgeable and entrenched in a particular practice of a particular religion, who were also still questioning and unsure of their own beliefs.

Now, later in my life, I still think about the meaning in life, but in a less philosophical way. We make choices, and through those choices we make meaning. Education, although both under siege and dramatically changing in a capitalist society, is a place with space to make meaning. It is a place we can study, think about, and talk about problems in society and visions of what we want want society to be. And technology? In an often digital dualist landscape, I work toward understanding our relationship with technology. It is a main part of my meaning making, and this is how I understand critical instructional design.

I really love the prompt from Maha and Kate in week 3 of the #digciz June 2017 convos about hospitality and feeling at home. Why and how do we bring with us our ideas of hospitality, which may overlap and/or be different from those we are interacting with, into a space with those who may feel or not feel at home?

Having just moved, thoughts of feeling at home or not at home are very much with me in my physical space. Time is a big part of this in any environment. There are always those who have been there before you, different waves of people come and are in a space. Who is already there in that space, how long have they been there feeling at home or not? What relationships have already been formed and what forms of hospitality do they use (or not)? Has anyone been excluded? Can I add something, what? I think this respect or at least awareness of what is already happening in a space is an important piece.

As my partner Daniel and I look for a house to live in, one of our major considerations is about hosting. We want a space that is inviting and comfortable for others. We are two, but we have a large dining table because we enjoy having people over. We like to share the music we listen to with others when they come over, but we also like playing the things we think others know or we think they might appreciate. Hosting gives us a chance to become a part of the community. There are also questions of accessibility. We both have a parent who passed away recently (this is a relative term) and the thoughts of whether my 94 year old father would be comfortable visiting this house are in my head. That thought should be there, even without a specific person in mind. But that is a different post that is still coming about Domains 2017!

A synchronous conversation that Kate and Maha led drew my focus and attention from host to guest. What is a good guest? When Kate asked us to start with stories about hospitality the first one that popped in my head was a one of being a guest. I taught for three years at a university in Oman in a small city / town, Nizwa. The students mostly came from all the surrounding, much smaller, villages. Hospitality was very much valued, and a student inviting a teacher to their home was a very welcoming gesture. Most social events were geared around family, and in that way, the invitation to a foreigner was then a distinct form of hospitality.

My first invitation was from Maryam and it included an invitation for my husband as well, which almost seemed like a requirement [she told me that her father very much wanted to meet my husband]. I knew this was going to be a several hour affair (we were invited to lunch) and that we would be separated and having different experiences. For Daniel, he was walking into a three hour lunch with a group of men he had never met and who may or may not speak any English. For me, I had Maryam as both my host and translator and she took that role very seriously and with heart. I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about. What a good student Maryam was. What stays with me about this experience was the food. Lots and lots of food, and the custom of continuing to offer me more and telling me I should have more. There was goat, lots and lots of rice, and fried fish. I liked the fried fish best and that was recognized and offered more than the other foods. I did not want to be rude, so I kept accepting and eating. I didn’t know that if I left some on my plate, they would have stopped offering. I was operating on the fact that it was best not to waste food and it would be rude to leave some. When the dessert came out after a straight hour of constant eating, I felt I might literally explode. I nibbled on a piece of fruit and was a little more forceful (awkwardly so) about not wanting anything more to eat. They had no intention of making me feel uncomfortable, it was me who didn’t know the customs. I imagine that when I left, there was conversation about wow, that girl can eat.

As an introvert, this experience was exhausting. It took a lot of energy to listen, watch, and pay attention to my surroundings and my behavior within those surroundings. It was much harder than being a host, where I had the control of what was going to happen. But this experience allowed me a more private view into the culture I was living in. I got to see Maryam with her mother, aunt, sisters and cousins in their home, and that was special. That made me feel more at home.

So one idea I take away from this week’s #digciz chat is being the guest comes with its challenges and responsibilities. The other is hospitality for the stranger. What does that look like? How do we encounter it in physical spaces? When we talk about digital identity, part of the conversation is about signaling and having something to point to. When you have traces, people can know something about you before interacting with you, you become more human. But is this a requirement of the web? If we are talking about being good citizens or caring people within a place, shouldn’t that extend to strangers? If that is the norm, then wouldn’t that change behaviors and perceptions of online spaces?

Encountering strangers out of context makes me think about being on a plane. Even as an introvert, there is often some conversation started or acknowledgement of those sitting in your row. There is no need to introduce yourself by name, but rather ask about where you are coming from and where you are going. Or notice what that person is reading, watching, doing. This also comes back to the sync conversation and what was mentioned about private spaces or lack of private spaces. Roz suggested learning from cultures who are used to little privacy as a way of getting used to the noise and lack of privacy in online spaces. On a plane, especially in coach, we are very close to each other (often touching or brushing up against one another because of the small space) for a period of time in which we can’t really escape. And because it is physical, the instinct is to be courteous.

Can we use these experiences and our understanding of them to help us in online spaces? Can this idea of home and hospitality be used in our conversations about digital identity so that we are not starting from a position of me but rather us?

The word intentional has been popping up in a lot of conversations I’ve been having lately about device use, digital pedagogy, instructional design, civic duty, and activism. When something is intentional, you know you are doing it, you have hopefully thought about it in some way and made a decision. The lack of intentionality is also something to notice. I point this out not to introduce this as a binary, but rather that neither intentionality nor lack of intentionality is inherently good or bad. At the moment, I am finding it a useful lens.

This post is about my intentional practices to have a digital presence. I’m going to start off with a reflection of where I am at right now, how I got here, and how I would like to continue. My latest #vandr map (done a couple weeks ago) shows where I live online, and more specifically the places where I mainly signal and cultivate a presence: Twitter and WordPress (this blog). (More about #vandr mapping here).

Where I started:

I joined Twitter in October 2008. I did not really use Twitter until 2014. I started to dabble then and it wasn’t until 2015-2016 that I had a purpose and reason to tweet more and others started to see me. I found ways to participate in conversations. I made connections from Sundi to @sundilu that people could see if they looked. However it was my blog/website that was essential to feeling like I was a person online. It is where if someone looks for me, they will find a collection of things that signal some of what makes me.

My first blog was not really a blog at all. It was a blog used to document my wedding in 2005 and share it with others. Oh the look of blogspot really does date it. It is still there, and every once in awhile I’ll point someone I have newly met to it if for some reason they are interested. The first real blog with continued posts was a joint blog with my lovely life partner Daniel Lynds when we were living in Oman, which we started to share our adventures with those back home (mostly Daniel’s mother Mamie). It ran from 2008-2009 and my voice was quiet. My first WordPress blog was in 2012. It was a teaching blog for when I was teaching English at United Arab Emirates University the year they adopted iPads across the English Language Program. I then also started a personal blog which was very short lived. I would say most of these petered out when I didn’t directly need them for their specific purpose. They did not morph or change into anything, they simply stopped and live as they are. There are a few other sites floating around out there that I created for different purposes. It wasn’t until I heard about Domain of One’s Own that I intentionally decided to put things in one place, a place that I had some control over.

And now:

So here I am, at a point where I need new intentionality. My activity surges and wanes, which is fine, except that I don’t want it to. There is always more to learn and I have to get up from this comfortable bench with a great view in the middle of a hike, and continue walking. My work with Domain of One’s Own challenges me to consistently revisit and be aware of my digital self. It doesn’t happen naturally, it takes time and intention. My plan here is to come up with an intentional plan for the next month that nudges where Twitter and my blog sit on my map, both towards what I would consider fully resident and a little up into the personal which I see others do and am envious. The question is how?

The next month intentional plan:

~ Twitter Lists. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m following enough active folks that I need to break up my home feed. I’ve done this with hashtags, but following @autumm‘s advice, I’m going to try lists. This might help me follow accounts related to my interests outside of education. I might not like it, but I’m going to try it.

~ #Lowered Bookclub, Stanford MOOC – The Active Citizen in a Digital Age, and June #Digciz chats (soon to be announced) are three things happening in the next month that are opportunities for discussion, interaction, and writing. I’m going to make sure they are a part of my day.

~ I’m going to take at least one day a week totally off from following/participating in said happenings.

~ I’m going to run more. Yup, that is part of my intentional practice. The idea for this post came to me while on my Sunday jog. Running for me is a time when I listen to music and think. It is essential and I think it is closely connected to my digital practices. I’ll check back in next month and see how my intentionality is working out.

When are you intentional?

My instructional design process has been influenced and has developed alongside and due to a growing digital presence and participation with others in online spaces. It was during a few months of working part time in 2015 that my need for interaction and professional development prompted me to be more active online, opening me to many new perspectives, critiques, and approaches to teaching and learning. I had a place to get out of my head. For me this wasn’t natural, and I may not have really gone out of my way to join in conversations I wasn’t invited to, or find ways to talk to a few people within this large herd, if I didn’t actually need it at that time. There have been a lot of awkward moments along the way, and there will continue to be. Sundi, don’t act giddy when you meet someone you follow on Twitter and who most likely doesn’t know who you are. But back to why I view this public practice as essential.

If you work at an institution, you are entrenched in that institutional culture. Your everyday is the physical place you work and you are most likely working with the dominant narratives of your institution, whatever those may be. These of course can be narratives that empower your work (for me these would be an openness to cross department collaboration or a commitment to a mission that supports service and social justice) and they can also be damaging (little institutional support, an unclear mission, or lack communication within the institution). However, our institutions don’t exist on their own islands. I have found that spending dedicated time outside my institution’s dominant narratives (mostly online) is an essential way to stay grounded, expand my perspective, and connect what I am doing to the larger world. I think this is often done at conferences or within closed professional networks, but these often exist in their own limited space and time.

Being open to be part of this chaotic public, how it is perceived, how people are treated (differently), and how it changes, are all important pieces of being aware of technology in society, exploring what learning in digital spaces looks like, and what it can look like.

And I need my bubble burst ever so often.

In what ways do you keep your world open?