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This is kind of in response to the Zoom genius prompt, and kind of a continuation of a previous post, MYFest Regrets and Lessons Learned, based on a conversation Maha and I have been having by email.
I learned a lot about Zoom this summer. When I was living in rural North Carolina, my Internet was not really Zoom-friendly. But it's more than that: Zoom really had very little appeal to me. I totally understand how people who were used to in-person classrooms and in-person meetings embraced Zoom... but that was not me. Literally decades ago, I decided that classrooms just could not be the democratic spaces that I wanted them to be (more on that below), so I started teaching online, and back then teaching online pretty much meant teaching asynchronously (we're talking dial-up modem days, people). In addition, when I started teaching online, I was no longer part of an academic department at my school, so I didn't have in-person meetings. I was all online, asynch all the time.
And I loved it.
I have no doubt that it is the best way for me to teach. And it also happens to be the best way for me to learn, two things that are not doubt related.
So...... about classrooms. As a student, I was always bored and frustrated. I did my learning on my own from books, or in small study groups with my friends. Plus I generally learned more at work than I ever did in the classroom because the jobs I had were always about doing things, making things, producing things (I had some awesome, interesting jobs; at least, I always thought they were interesting!).
Then, as a teacher, I could not help but take up too much space in the classroom. I talked too much. I talked too fast. And I had no idea what my students were thinking most of the time. How many students would ever speak up in class? And did they ever say more than a few sentences? I felt lost.
But once I started teaching online with students blogging, everything fell into place for me.
I finally had an idea of what they were thinking and learning day to day. What they wanted to learn. The obstacles they faced in their learning.
Which meant I could help them along.
I could connect with every student.
I could never do that in a classroom, and I could never do that in a Zoom. (Unless it were ultra-tiny; the writing workshop I'm doing by Zoom right now has a half-dozen participants, and it's amazing; it feels like a study group, not like a class.)
So, kudos to all the people who have figured out how to make Zoom work for them as teachers or as learners.
My goal right now is to figure out how to take my schools as an asynch teacher (a.k.a. coach/cheerleader) and make that more useful for MYFest next time. I honestly didn't do a very good job of it this time around, but this was all so totally new. Pretty much everything about how MYFest was organized was new to me! And new things are hard.
Which is true also for asynch if people are not used to that.
And even more so in a pandemic. Probably the worst possible time to be doing new things.
Anyway, I am glad I came up with my "daily announcements" idea for next time. When I was teaching, my daily announcements blog was just part of our blog network. For the next MYFest, I want to see if it can turn into a blog hub making our Zooms more into a network.
I'm VERY excited to try and see what happens.
And I'll just add, in the spirit of networking: MYCELIUM.
If you don't get that, you can learn about mushrooms here, ha ha: MYFest Dreamscape.

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screenshot of the Twine design space showing the 17 "boxes" that are part of the game.

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I spent a blissful day today making a Twine game inspired by amb's book Emergent Strategy. I had been wanting to do some kind of Twine this summer (the last big Twine I did was Cryptid Encounters for DPL last summer!). The Twine interface has changed in the past year, so this was such a good opportunity to learn the new interface while getting into that rapturous FLOW that is designing with Twine. There's something about the formality of the code but the open-endedness of the system that is ideal for me. I can spend hours working on a Twine and barely even notice the time. So, I'm glad to offer my services as a Twine coach to anyone who wants to give it a try! Here's the game I made today: MYFest Dreamscape. It was prompted by the Dreaming Higher Ed Futures track, and I'm excited to share it with the group on Monday. Plus I built this so that it can be expanded with more dimensions of content and more writing of my own too... I'm sure something will prompt me to come back to this soon. It's a very fractal thing; that is, I can iterate the shape of what I created this time, adding new dimensions of content and reflection, expanding the dreamscape with new thoughts and ideas. And reading amb this summer has given me so many thoughts and ideas!
P.S. I also posted lots more notes at the SPLOT: Twines and Fractals.

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I read several books prompted by MYFest this summer, and the one I'll write about here is adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy (read online at Internet Archive) since I want to use the metaphors there to launch a little Twine experiment. I am really fascinated by the elements that amb uses to organize her presentation of emergence; all of what she is writing about in this book resonates with me personally, and I believe it is profoundly needed if we are going to make educational experiences that are meaningful, transformative, and sustainable. Here are what amb calls the "elements" of emergent strategy:
Fractal: The Relationship Between Small and Large
Adaptative: How We Change
Interdependence and Decentralization: Who We Are and How We Share
Non-linear and Iterative: The Pace and Pathways of Change
Resilience and Transformative Justice: How We Recover and Transform
Creating More Possibilities: How We Move Towards Life
She also links this up to the metaphors and emblems used by the Complex Movements folks at DesignJustice.org: myceliums - ants - ferns - wavicles - starlings - dandelions. I found a great image of the emblems here: Back to the Future: Complex Movements Make Revolution.

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The prompt for today was about syllabus-writing... but I'm not writing syllabuses anymore (although if I were, MYFest ideas and strategies would be all over the place!). So, since that prompt wasn't relevant, I picked one that I wanted to do instead: the dinner party defying time and space. I have learned about new authors and educators this summer, while also deepening my understanding of people I had heard of before. So, it was hard just to limit myself to 5 people to invite (I now have a dining room table that seats 6)... so here are the 5 guests I would so like to sit down and talk with: Octavia Butler and adrienne maree brown (we could all just sit and listen to the two of them talk all evening: wow!), along with Gloria Anzaldúa (whom I learned about in the Dark Matter y la Facultad workshop) and Grace Lee Boggs (whom I learned about from Mia Zamora), and also my beloved Ashley Bryan, whose voice we got to hear thanks to the magic of video recording in one of the Readers Theater sessions. Oh my gosh, I get the shivers just thinking about the magic that could result from those writers, thinkers, educators, storytellers, activists there at the same table together. I would be enraptured. :-)
And hey, since we are defying time and space here, we could also defy the size of my dinner table, so I could also invite Felecia and Mia and Karen and Heather and Helen, who are my MYFest links to these brilliant, beautiful people.
Gloria Anzaldua from Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/kkendall/821171626
Ashley Bryan at NPR
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/05/1078536079/ashley-bryan-childrens-illustrator-and-author-has-died-at-98
Grace Lee Boggs at Wikimedia
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grace_Lee_Boggs.jpg
adrienne maree brown at Wikimedia
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adrienne_Maree_Brown_on_The_Laura_Flanders_Show.jpg
Octavia Butler at Wikimedia
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Butler_signing.jpg

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For the ripples prompt today, I can say exactly how MYFest will be rippling forward... we already have a September date for a Readers Theater to just keep on going! How amazing is that??? Plus Jim is working on a script too, so that will be rippling forward also. When I started MYFest I was looking for the support I needed to get myself grounded and begin writing again. I never expected to get to read with people like this, and to hear voices (including beautiful children's voices!) bringing the stories to life. With ripples of scripts and readers yet to come! I feel like the luckiest writer ever, thanks to MYFest!

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Instead of doing the elevator pitch for today (because, I am pleased to say, I do not actually ride in institutional elevators anymore, ha ha), I wanted to do the "regrets" post, because I really do regret not having been more proactive about the asynch spaces of MYFest starting back in June. This is the first time I ever participated in a Zoom-driven event, and I am just not a Zoom person. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot about Zoom and its potential... but I also realized that when you have a calendar of Zoom events, it really sucks all the oxygen out of the asynch spaces. Everyone's attention is focused on the calendar events — especially when it is such a full and exciting calendar like the MYFest calendar has been all summer long; wow!
My previous experience with events like MYFest (well, kind-of sort-of like MYFest) was with asynchronous cMOOCs (remember the cMOOCs?), like Dave Cormier's Rhizos or the Connected Courses experience (which I am pretty sure is where I first got to know Maha!). Those events took shape before Zoom ate online education, and the focus was on people blogging and tweeting, and the RSS network that allowed us to pull together the contributions people were making in their separate spaces into a shared space. I still have my blog posts from those events, and it is so cool to be able to look back on all that years later: Connected Courses, Rhizo15, HumanMOOC, etc.
Well, that didn't happen for MYFest. I got a blog network framework set up, just assuming (wrongly) that most people would be blogging and/or tweeting. But instead, we were mostly Zooming. Alan ran the wonderful DailyCreates for MYFest, but most of the regulars there were not actually MYFesters, but the ever-inspiring DailyCreate crowd (it was really fun for me to reconnect with them at Twitter as a result this summer!).
There was the Slack of course, but I did not learn to love the Slack, mostly because things in the Slack are not meant to be linkable or shared beyond the Slack. No RSS. And no personal streams either like at Twitter. So the Slack, while I'm sure it has its virtues, was not my kind of space. Plus it's going to all disappear, even sooner than we expected, based on recently announed changes to the Slack plan itself.
So I've been thinking about what a good solution might be for next time to better promote asynch spaces and engagement. A good SIMPLE solution, because MYFest is already pretty complex as it is; it required some huge effort from the organizers, especially Maha and Rissa, and it would be good to think about ways to decrease that effort required going forward, and definitely not to increase it.
So, I thought back to my fully online fully asynch classes, which lasted 14 weeks (pretty similar to MYFest)... and one of the best things I did to build a sense of class community was the Daily Announcements, which were also available as a daily email for people who wanted it in their inboxes. It was a blog, of course, and it modeled blogging for my students, while also sharing information with them every day. With MYFest, it would be so easy to do a daily email like that, highlighting items from the previous day's events, things from the Twitter, things from the Slack... making the curation part of the community-building right from Day 1 and continuing all the way through.
So, I hereby volunteer to do a Daily Announcements blog for the next MYFest. There would be a SEPARATE email with all the Zoom registration. This would not be about Zoom clicks and urls; this would be about the PEOPLE of MYFest, and what we were learning and doing every day, day by day by day.
I honestly feel really badly that I did not do this for MYFest22... but that's how it goes doing something for the first time: I taught those online classes for quite a few years before I really found my groove. And one of the best parts about that groove, both for the students and for me, was the Daily Announcements, so I would like to do that for MYFest23.
I think it would be totally fun, while also being a useful problem-solver. :-)

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For the MYFest Souvenir prompt, I knew I would write about this coffee mug, which I acquired thanks to discovering it as Veronica Howard's Twitter avatar way back in June (and meeting Veronica was a high point of MYFest for me; we had never met before!).
I was so excited to find it as a coffee mug.
If you want to know more about the "Be Gay Do Crime" meme, which is new-ish as memes go, you can find out about it here: The Short But Fascinating History of “Be Gay, Do Crimes”
The words have been attached a lot of different images, and there are even multiple versions of the possum one; the coffee mug version is the one Veronica had, and the one I like best too. So, I'm proudly using this mug as a LGBTQ+ ally, and also because... possums.
I've always been a fan of possums the animal. And of stories about possums. My most beloved cat ever was named Possum. Then, last summer, at Digital Pedagogy Lab, I did a project on possum stories of the Catawba people.
So, when I see the Be Gay Do Crimes possum on my desk (I'm using it as a pen holder so that I can see it all the time, not just when drinking coffee!), that makes me think of Veronica and of MYFest, and it makes me think of the possums of DPL and also of my cat possum. All good things.
I've got a lot of intangible souvenirs of MYFest, but this coffee mug is my tangible souvenir. :-)

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personal photo of room demolition inside my house

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Under Construction: Metaphor + Gratitude

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Under Construction: Metaphor + Gratitude

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So, I’m going to start with the metaphor 🙂

Back in April I moved into my parents’ apartment in Austin. It needed a lot of work; my parents lived here 30 years, and they didn’t do any remodeling before they moved in. A lot of the electrical is from the early 60s when the building was built. And over the past 10 years or so, they were both in not great shape, so a lot of things just fell into disuse and disrepair. End result: lots of work to do. About half of my home now looks like the photo: demolition underway!

And here’s the metaphor: a big part of my life looks like that too, metaphorically. But what I have learned from the process of working on the apartment: sometimes this is the only way that the needed change can happen. Sometimes things just have to get torn up. Torn out. Thrown away. The fabulous carpenter, the great painter, the wonderful electrician: they know what they are doing, and they know this is what happens. Torn up. Torn out. Thrown away.

Of course, the difference is that I don’t think the drywall and the carpet and the wiring feel badly about this. Whereas I have felt pretty bad about the unexpected remodeling of my life, in addition to the apartment remodeling, and that’s where MYFest gratitude comes in.

Back in April, on literally the same day that my husband told me he wanted a divorce, Mia called me and invited me to help work on the curation aspects of MYFest, maybe creating a Pressbook (I love Pressbooks!), or who knows what — all very emergent, very open-ended, like all of MYFest. I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell Mia about what was going on in my life, but since I burst into tears as soon as we started talking, well, of course I had to tell her. And Mia was just amazing, so kind, so supportive; she was the first person I told, and I will be grateful to her forever for helping me through that evening.

And then… MYFest! Because of course I said yes, so glad that I could have something beautiful and new and different going on in my falling-apart life. I got here on April 21, with lots of fun and exciting MYFest things-to-do right away, along with all the other un-fun and even scary things I had to do as a result of moving into a new place unexpectedly.

And then MYFest itself started, with events already in May, which seems like a lifetime ago for me. (And in a sense it was a lifetime ago: this really is a different time in my life now, and it happens to have started with MYFest.)

This post is already long, so I’m not going to try to list all the fabulous things that happened day by day with MYFest. That’s what my little MYFest Padlet is for. I can scroll on back through all those posts, remembering the lovely people and the deep discoveries and ALL THE FUN……..!

So, that’s how it happened: how I had a totally fun summer in the midst of torn up, torn out, thrown away.

These two words are small, but the meaning is very big. To everybody who made MYFest happen: THANK YOU.

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Since I can only embed one video here at the Padlet, the post over at the SPLOT is the place to go: I was able to include 4 videos there, including this one: Rang Rangiya.

MYFEST PLAYLIST: MAATI BAANI

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Rang Rangiya - Maati Baani Ft. Komal Rizvi

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I was so struck by the spiral writing exercise we did for Dreaming Higher Ed Futures... it's like ripples, but different, so that is the metaphor I want to write about. More specifically: MYFest is not just a spiral, but also a spirograph.

Spirals start out SMALL, and then they get bigger. The theme of "small" here at MYFest has meant so much to me. I always work on a small scale... but I am a believer in the way that small things grow, and the spiral shows that happening.

As spirals grow bigger, they radiate OUTWARDS. That is what I hope I can do with MYFest, taking what we have learned and done in all these sessions outwards into my future work, sharing and connecting with others as I do.

When you iterate a spiral, beautiful and unexpected things can happen. And that's what spirograph does: it uses slight deflections and iterations to turn the curve into amazing shapes. When I was little, I played for hours and hours and hours with my Spirograph. Here's an online Spirograph.

Iteration is magic, and it's all about small too: just small changes as you iterate results in wonderful new patterns.

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I've had a lot of mind-blown moments in MYFest so far, but the one I want to write about is LeRoy Saiz's talk for Dark Matter y la Facultad. (THANK YOU, LEROY... and many thanks also to Felecia and Heather for making that track happen!)
First, a tiny preface: a friend of mine told me a while back that he wanted to learn Nahuatl. I thought that sounded very cool, but my ignorance was pretty much total. I had a dictionary-definition of Nahuatl in my mind (and barely even that). I just knew that I didn't know anybody who had studied Nahuatl. So, yes, very cool!
Anyway, because of that, as soon as LeRoy started talking to us about being a Nahuatl speaker, and about his journey to learning about indigenous ways of knowing in Nahuatl texts (TEXTS)... well, I was totally absorbed in every word. I hope LeRoy writes a book someday! You can find out more at the website Heather and Felecia created for their track: LeRoy Saiz.
To find out more about his work, I used Google, and it led me to his masters thesis online! Here's an extract from the abstract: "The purpose of this study is to identify a Xikan@ Indigenous identity and determine the factors that situate othered or sub altern Indigenous identities in the peripheries of Indigeneity. As exemplified through auto-ethnography and traditional storywork, the creation of a Xikan@ methodological approach can articulate the need to maintain hemispheric approaches to Indigeneity, while respecting the uniqueness of local epistemologies such as Xikan@ Traditional Knowledge (XIK)."
How amazing does that sound?
So, I can put a specific date ... July 6 ... on the moment when a whole new world of learning got opened up for me. I've got LeRoy's thesis to read, plus all the books by Gloria Anzaldúa that Felecia introduced us too. And all of that is going to lead me to read more, and more.
Which means that now I am even more excited about my friend who wants to learn Nahuatl. It's not just a dictionary word for me anymore. Instead, it is a whole world of meaning, a world I learned about thanks to MYFest.
MIND. BLOWN.

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Mary Poppins pulling artwork out of her bag gif

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In one of the planning meetings last week, Maha’s daughter started us talking about Hermione and her magically extended bag… and that led us back in time to Mary Poppins and her magically extended bag.

I’ve been keeping a Padlet mini-blog I guess you could call it, and that gives just SOME of the things that would have to go in my MYFest suitcase! Here’s my Padlet (I post something MYFest-y every day). This is the first time I’ve ever used a Padlet as a blog, and it’s been a total success, at least for me. Quick, easy… which means I was able to add at least something every day. I like blogs because, like Mary Poppins’s bag (and Hermione’s too), they are infinitely extensible.

You’ll find a few links to slidedecks there in the Padlet, and that is one of the projects I am excited about for this last month of August; I want to collect links to ALL the slidedecks that are available. I saw so many FABULOUS slidedecks during MYFest, and for me going back to slidedecks is a great way to jiggle my memory, better than trying to use the session videos.

So, as I “pack” the slideshows into my MYFest bag, I will make sure to share that with everybody else too. More news about that as the collection takes shape.

Crossposted at MYFest Reflections.

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The beautiful background image is by Lori Branham from the mission at San Juan Capistrano, CA.  CC-BY-NC at Flickr.