AU Spring Semester Ends with Pecha-Kucha

Even with a whopping 58 students in the class, the spring semester has flown by.  Since we like to elicit a lot of participation from the student, facilitate a lot of group activities, get the students moving around, and playing around with different learn space set ups, an increased class size, in a room with auditorium style fixed seating, made for some teaching and facilitation challenges.  But my dad and I made the necessary adjustments and, as far as I can say, had a good time working, yet again, with another group of AU students.

As we’ve done in the past, we ended the semester with students working in teams to design a education/training program that seeks to address one of many development challenges facing the finctional country of Afrinia.  The teams then present their program to the rest of the class, specifically addressing questions related to the major themes and concepts covered during the semester.  We did a little something different this year, however, with the presentations – we asked each team to put together a pecha-kucha presentation.

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Presentation for the One World Youth Project

This past weekend I gave a presentation on skills and approaches to teaching and facilitation for the One World Youth Project (OWYP).  OWYP is a great non-profit educational organization that links schools globally in service-learning to prepare the next generation for the globalized 21st century. In service of this mission they train college and university students  to go into local high school and middle schools to teach and implement elements of the OWYP curriculum which focuses on exploring the Millennium Development Goals and other global issues.  My presentation was filmed and will be put online to be used as a resources for college students who are “educators in training” interested in learning more about specific education approaches and teaching techniques that can help them be creative, culturally aware, and effective facilitators for OWYP.  Continue reading to check out my remarks.

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Global Day of Action on Military Spending

Today I participated in the Global Day of Action on Military Spending –  a global effort to draw attention to the amount of money countries spend on defense, war, and their military vs. other issues and human needs like clean water, basic sanitation, primary schooling for all, eradication of HIV/AIDS and other major diseases, etc – all of which can be accomplished by spending just a small fraction of what the world spends on war-making.  My good friend, mentor, and fellow peace educator, Barbara Wien, invited me to facilitate a session on peace education and nonviolence during a teach-in event that was held during the day of action on American University’s campus.  The goal for our session was for attendees to not just be aware about how much money is spent on war-making and the nefarious interests that profit from it, but to actually start thinking about alternative approaches, specific actions, and examples of how people, communities, and government’s can create security, fight for human rights, and advance social justice, without violence and war.  Continue reading to learn more about the day and the issue.

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AU Social Learning Summit

In the spirit of this summit, I decided to blog about the different panels I attended by copying what I thought were some of the key tweets that other participants had been sharing during our #sls11 “communal note taking.”  I was a panelist for the Peace through Tweets sessions and really enjoyed talking about the various ideas and debates within that field.

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Capital Area Association for Peace Studies (CAAPS) Keynote Address



This weekend I had the privilege of giving the keynote address at the 24th annual Capital Area Association for Peace Studies student conference.  It was such a pleasure speaking with all the students and then attending several of their project and paper presentations.  I also enjoyed putting together my remarks because it gave me an opportunity to (1) explain how the work of peace scholars is transforming the world and why that is important and (2) how my work in the field of nonviolent conflict and civil resistance in increasingly influencing the interest in peace studies.  Click above to listen or click read more below to read my remarks.

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Workshop on Citizen Journalism and Civil Resistance

For the last six days I was in Madrid, Spain to help facilitate a workshop that married the two fields of citizen journalism and civil resistance.  The goal of the workshop was to prepare journalists, bloggers, and communicators from around the world to better understand the strategic dynamics of nonviolent social movements so they can more effectively report on these struggles in ways that will help them to succeed.  26 citizen journalists participated in the workshop coming from the following countries: Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, UK, Phillipines, Mexico, Spain, Israel/Palestine, Brazil, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Macedonia, Ukraine, India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Serbia, France, and Finland.

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From Cairo2Hanoi Panel Discussion

Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion event organized by Viet Tan – an organization that engages in actions that empower the Vietnamese people. Specifically, they seek to roll back existing restrictions against two key human rights: freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly. These enabling freedoms are the pillars for civil society (Viet Tan).

The event looked at the role of social media in the nonviolent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and whether or not there are any relevant connections that can be made between those who engaged in civil resistance and digital activism in Tunisia and Egypt with those who continue to struggle in Vietnam.  I had the pleasure of speaking alongside to amazing activists and organizers.  Continue reading to learn more…

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The Social Revolution

This week I gave a couple a couple talks at Rutgers University.  I was invited by Dr. Kurt Shock, who is an associate professor of sociology and global affairs at Rutgers and is one of ICNC’s academic advisors.  I first spoke in his colloquium course, where I gave a presentation titled, The Social Revolution: Digital Media, Cyber-Pragmatism, and Nonviolent Movements, which I will outline in greater detail later in this post.  The second presentation I gave was to his undergraduate class on social movements, where we looked at the role of the internet and social media in social movements more broadly.  In both presentations I used the uprising in Egypt as a case study in exploring these themes.

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Training for Change Workshop – How to Teach Theory

From Thursday, Feb 24 – Sunday, Feb 27, I attended the Training for Change workshop, How to Teach Theory.  This is the second TfC workshop in which I have participated.  The first was their Training for Social Action Trainers (TSAT), which I found to be a highly effective, engaging workshop that helped me develop new skills as a trainer and educator in ways that made it more likely that I would actually use these skills in my professional work.  One of the TSAT trainers recommended that I take the How to Teach Theory workshop, considering both my work for ICNC and at AU – two teaching and training settings that require exploring theories and abstract ideas.  The goals of the workshops were: (1) increase your skills at presenting theory and concepts without lecturing, (2) gain confidence and experience in moving a group from stage 2 (reflection) to stage 3 (generalization) to stage 4 (application) in the direct education model/experiential learning cycle, (3) Identify key teaching concepts and theories in your teaching area, and (4) have fun!  Below I have outlined what was covered in the workshop and some thoughts on why I think they are important.

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Key Insights from Clay Shirky’s Book, “Cognitive Surplus”

Imagine treating the free time of the world’s educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus…One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time.

…young populations with access to fast, interactive media are shifting their behavior away from media that presupposes pure consumption.

The social uses of our new media tools have been a big surprise, in part because the possibility of these uses wasn’t implicit in the tools themselves…the use of social technology is much less determined by the tool itself; when we use a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another.  We want to be connected to one another, a desire that the social surrogate of television deflects, but one that our use of social media actually engages.

Access to cheap, flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things.  You don’t need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough.

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