Our online book club’s reading of We Make the Road by Walking continues. And it’s becoming something both new and awesome.
Ten days ago I tried to summarize all of the activity going on by looking at the many things fellow readers were doing. The Twitter hashtag was on fire, people were blogging like mad, folks were assembling web resources and making art.
So this weekend I started summarizing book club activity since that post, and it became too huge to fit into part of a post. Check it out:
Much more bloggery occurrs. Kate Bowles has a brilliant post on spaces, communication, politics, and potential. Amy Collier meditates on leadership, chapter 3, and changing academia. Adam Croom writes on yearning, incompleteness, and chapter 4. Alyson Indrunas takes us to the Pain Cave. Alan Levine dives deeply into codification. Maha Bali meditates on the book’s note about education as seeing the world. Autumm Caines writes about beauty and community.
Meanwhile, Terry Elliot did a fine thing. He set up a Hypothes.is instance for the entire book. (In the interest of openness, I’m on the Hypothes.is board) Then Adam Croom used that resource to create a Horton/Freire quote generator. For example,
Twitter discussion continues to leap ahead at #HortonFreire. Readers pointed to more readings, as we often do. Ray Maxwell suggested a companion book:
Kate Bowles was reminded of this article about some of Britain’s ragged schools.
Alan Levine’s TAGSExplorer instance shows just how huge the Twitter conversation has become:
Meanwhile, on the physical plane, EdSurge’s Alison Dulin floated the idea of a first-ever Horton/Freire meetup. Lisa Hubbell reads aloud to a stranger.
And Kristen Eshleman, who helped inspire this very reading, spoke movingly about social justice in the spirit of Horton and Freire at last week’s Future Trends Forum.
So what does this mean?
On the one hand, I’m ecstatic. As a fellow reader, as a teacher, as someone who lives online, this reading shows the fine potential of web-based collaboration and creativity. What a supportive, outrageously thoughtful, and inspiring group!
On the other pseudopod, I wonder… what is this? Almost three years ago I floated the idea, tongue in cheek, of an exploded Twitter book club. But that doesn’t do this justice, because so much occurs off-Twitter. Is it a cMOOC, a #DS106 for pedagogical reading? There are definitely commonalities: the reliance on social media, the powerful role of learners as makers and connectors, the dis-integrated nature of the experience, the aegis of constructivism. Yet this isn’t a class. I’m not teaching it formally, nor am I expert on Horton and Freire.
Or is this something new?
I know that I love it, and want more. I suspect others feel the same.
We’re coming up to the end of the book this week. Can we do it again?
What do you think?
I have a couple of book suggestions:
Dave Gray’s Liminal Thinking (he might be very approachable to participate)
Walter Mosley’s Folding the Red into the Black (or developing a viable untopia for human survival in the 21st century)
Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin’s The Neo-Generalist (where you go is who you are)
As for your generalized uplift at the end of the post howsabout a poem from David Whyte to lift it more:
THE HOUSE OF BELONGING
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close-grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
– David Whyte
©1996
There is much in the book that match this experience, so kudos for setting it up that way.
A few years ago Ben Rimes organized a DS106 Book club https://sites.google.com/site/bookclub106/home there were weekly discussion hangouts and use of the (now defunct) Google Moderator to surface and upvote questions for discussion.
I recalled from long ago a social reading site where people could discuss a book they were all reading, it was called Book Glutton. It is no longer around, but they linked to a new service that might be viable http://www.readups.com/ It seems like you could also run some of this as a group n Hypothes.is and maybe gather around a twitter tag.
I was absolutely sure I only had one book club book in me, and now find myself savouring this experience so much I’d really love another.
The hypothes.is creativity is compelling. I’d also suggest a mastodon instance as a more capacious chat environment. The 500 chars really makes a difference, although at the moment tagging is inconsistently working.
But down the road, down the road, maybe.
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