This past Saturday I attended and presented at the Baltimore Educational Equity Summit, which was organized by Teach for America. The session of which I was a part was titled, “Using Social Media as a Vehicle for Change,” and looked at various strategies and tools organizations and movements have used to leverage the power of social media and digital tools to advance their causes and missions.
I just completed a six week online course on gamification offered by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The course was hosted and delivered using the online learning platform, Coursera. I took this course for two main reasons. The first is that I am very interested in gamificiation, particularly as it relates to education and learning. The second is that I am also very interested in online learning and the various platforms that are popping up to provide such a learning experience (for free much of the time).
Posted in Digital Strategy, Education/Training
Tagged coursera, games, gamification, online learning, university of Pennsylvania, upenn, Werbach
From June 24th to June 30th, ICNC in partnership with the Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, hosted the 7th annual Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict. As usual, myself, my ICNC colleagues, along with Fletcher faculty and staff worked tirelessly for months to bring 42 participants from all over the world to participate in this intensive week-long institute. Check out this blog posting I wrote for the Fletcher Features blog to get an overview of some of the highlights from the week. Personally, one of my highlights was meeting many of the amazing participants who attended this year. However, I did not get to know them as well as I would have liked due to the various aspects of the week for which I responsible.
Its fairly common these days to walk into a university classroom and see students equipped with some amazing gizmos, gadgets and tech giving them the ability to take pictures, record HD video, browse the internet, record audio, and publish content to social media sites. It is fairly uncommon, though, to see those powerful devices being put to use in the learning process.
I set out to integrate these devises into one of our Education for International Development classes this semester. The goal of the class session was to explore (i) the impact violent conflict can have on development, particularly the MDGs, (ii) the role education can play in creating or causing violent conflict, (iii) the role education (formal, nonformal, and informal) can play in building peace, and (iv) the role of technologies, both old and new, and social media in building peace through informal education.
Check out the Storify board to see the final product and to see what was discussed and shared during the class. Continue reading to see how the whole process unfolded.
Posted in Digital Strategy, Education/Training
This past weekend I had the pleasure of co-facilitating a day-long workshop exploring peace education and pedagogy at George Mason University. Peace educator, nonviolence trainer, and GMU professor, Arthur Romano, assembled the team of educators (pictured above), and the six of us facilitated the program described below:
“This day-long exploratorium gives students an opportunity to engage with a variety of peace pedagogies used by practioners in the field. We will be joined by first-rate peace educators who have worked in the US and abroad. They will guide us through a series of lecturettes and activities that promote deep introspection, personal story sharing, community building and provide opportunities to examine the importance of self-reflexive praxis in peace education. In all, the day will examine both critical and creative pedagogical approaches to the field and seek to provide a safe and experimental forum in which to explore alternative approaches to education.” Continue reading to learn more…
Posted in Education/Training, Presentations
This past weekend I gave a presentation (via Skype) on the use of ICT for nonviolent action at the Point Conference in Sarajevo. I was invited to participate by my friend, Darko Brkan, who had attended ICNC’s 2010 Fletcher Summer Institute. You can learn more about Darko by checking out this On the Ground Interview I conducted with him a couple years ago.
My presentation looked at four main ways nonviolent movements have been leveraging ICT in their struggles – communication, mobilization, organizing/coordinating, and documentation. Continue reading to watch and listen to a slidecast of the presentation…
Posted in Digital Strategy, Events, Presentations
Tagged burma, cell phone, china, colombia, communication, computer, digital, documentation, facebook, firewall, ict, internet, iran, media, mobilization, netizen, new media, point conference, sarajevo, sms, social media, twitter, ukraine, video, youtube
This past weekend my colleague, Maciej and I co-faciliated a skills institute at American University titled, “People Power: How and Why Civil Resistance Works.” We had 15 participants from a variety of backgrounds and covered a range of topics: history of civil resistance, conceptions of power, the role of media in civil resistance, frameworks for deciding how one considers what is violent vs. nonviolent, tactical innovation, backfire, and dilemma actions.
Click here to download the full course syllabus.
This past weekend I was in Albany, NY attending my sixth Democracy Matters summit. This year the summit brought together over 90 students from across the country to learn more about the role of money in politics, grassroots organizing, and to strategize about ways to engage other students and community member in the campaign to get big money out of politic and put people back in. Continue reading to learn more…
Posted in Education/Training, Events
Tagged activism, adonal foyle, burt weltman, campus, civil rights, colleges, corruption, democracy matters, gary holder winfield, grassroots, jay mandle, joan mandle, justice, money, organizing, peace action, politics, pro-democracy, public campaign, social, universities
