Wonder or Wander

This is part of what was discussed at the panel discussion. Alyssa Kuzmarov, founder and director of Productions Oracle (Montreal-based youth media organization) Giuliana Cucinelli, leader of mProject and incorporating "remix": technical skills of the youth are so natural--" born with the knowledge "--as they are "saturated" by new technology and this adaptability makes mProject, which is run at a high school as an extracurriculum, so fun for the youth. (Expression: shed lights on it ) Janice Dayle, journalist and arts professional: used social constructive method--dialectic discussion without giving instruction--to bring out topics from participants. The youth she had did not know how to email , so these skills were taught throughout the workshop. This was a federal government-funded community-based workshop, so the participants might have been from different socioeconomic background. Maureen Marovitch, founder and co-owner of Picture This Productions: ru...

Mary Foster & Rémy Huberdeau. http://www.peoplescommission.org Foster talked about the enhanced national security measure, which is under review in the supreme court. According to her, permanent residents and even citizens become vulnerable under this measure and face deportation and detention overseas. Many cases, allegedly as a connection to terrorism, are likely to be made up based on 'outsourcing' information uttered during some one's torture or suspicion originating from their race and ethnicity. Hearing individual cases, People's Commission set up 9 commissioners in order to gather collective data in light of individual cases, publicize it and 'break silence'. Through a public conference the People's Commission organized, individual stories were told and the content was recorded in video. The outcome is distributed as comic books, videos and teachers' manual. Huberdeau mentions the quality of video was a factor to select certain stories out of...

This is something I will remember from the panel discussion in Pro Seminar class today. Turn every moment to an opportunity for my growing along the way. Things come and go but the only thing that stays with me is my thesis. Take a full charge of it through ownership. Thesis is a foundation of my career and further development and Ph.D is a license for conducting independent research. For academic career, try to publish rather than attend conferences. Be specific about career from the beginning and watch out what's available out there. Read widely and take courses even in other departments to build theoretical groundwork--try reverse citation to see how a theory is used in other work--but more important is writing everyday no matter how small, as writing is a process of shaping my knowledge and ideas.

Written as preface for the conference (globalization and transfer of knowledge), but excluded from the text. But I spelled out my standpoints here. Globalization is commonly discussed in the context of worldwide economic integration and borderless free markets and free movements. While this discourse is mainly driven by a strong globalization thesis in that globalization is an inevitable worldwide phenomenon, Keck and Sikkink (1998) conversely argue that the current globalization is only the composite of decisions purposefully made and suggest that a different globalization could be possible. Whether favors or not the current trend of globalization, however, it seems generally agreed that technology advance and distributed networks have made the globalization possible and changed the way we live and act upon it. In particular, Hardt and Negri (2004) asserts that a global network power, which consists of dominant nation-states as its primary node along with supranational institutions an...

Chambers, Cynthia. (2004). Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. Vol.2(1). (pp. 1-19). "When the researcher/writer's life is the site of the inquiry, not the topic of inquiry, the research makes visible and audible the complicated interconnections between the topic of the writer's gaze and her ideas, values and beliefs." " Try is as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question: does this path have a heart? " "What matters hides in improbable places such as dreams, just beneath the surface of a story or a lie or memory and what matters springs up in the middle of the contradiction between what I say and what I do." "...as a form of inquiry...write regularly...even for 10 minutes a day." " Have you said or written everything you want to say about this topic? " "In turning points, we rise above our every-day world and come to see, hear and understand life and bein...

King, Roger. (2004). In King. (Ed.), The University in the Global Age. pp.45-66. NY: Palgrave MacMillan Globalization, as a process destined to move toward global age or global society, is being adapted to local cultures and structures rather than bringing standards. While internationalism generally emphasizes cross-border exchange of knowledge and people for public goods, the recent notion of borderless education tints the internationalism with a commercial force. However, university system remains the least globalized sector nowadays . The globalization practically refers to increasing worldwide integration of economies driven by liberal capitalism and is deployed in a complicated way in the higher education system. Globalization is best considered as a compression of time and space (Harvey, 1989; Scholte, 2000; p.50) and rationalism in knowlede production system facilitates globalization because both intrinsically proclaim to produce universally objective truth. " Rationalist,...

Altbach, Philip. (1998). Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing. The university has been always a global institution since the medieval period (all the modern universities stem from the European model in the medieval epoch and the universities in the medieval were more international and taught in Latin students all around Europe until nationalism swept around the continent in the 19th century. p. xviii), and now with the global economy and communication technology advance, increasing internationalism among universities has become a main operating engine of knowledge based society and created an international knowledge system. (However, access to knowledge is limited by the availability of resources, such as books and the Internet.) Market forces--ideas are as important as products--of the institutions of industrialized nations and local demands--academic degrees from the 'center' is useful at the 'periphery'-- of developing nations have pushed greater internationalism in high...

Liberal analyses on education emphasize equal opportunity to every one to help develop full potential such that a working class student can become a millionaire. But critical analysis looks at different unequal background/condition that students bring in and their disadvantages. Contemporary critical analysis looks at white advantage; Canadian education has strong public schooling system throughout the country with exceptions in some provinces, which include QC and private schooling practically does not exist. The strong government interception has brought bureaucracy while private schools always have a strong impetus for profits; contemporary education issues in Canada originate from diversity and technology.

Keck, M. & Sikkink, K. (1998). Cornell University Press. The authors focused on networks in order to conceive transformative and mobilizing actions to the international political system and named networks of activists formed on the basis of common values and discourse--notably human rights, women right, and enviromental issues--'transnational advocacy networks'. The core of the relations among actors in the network is information exchange. The quickness and accuracy of generaing information and the effectiveness of the deployment are the most important factor for the network. The network works such that boundaries between domestic social/political struggles and those at the international level are blurred through colletive pressure applied at a domestic level. This mechanism is called boomerang effect, "which curves around local state indifference and repression to put foreign pressure on local policy elites"(p.200). In other words, when state repression is too st...

Linda Tuhiwai Smith. (2001). 4th ed. New York: Palgrave. Historically research about indigenous culture benefited those who "wielded it as an instrument" and the knowledge was not shared with the indigenous peoples. [ This reminds me of the privatization of indigenous knowledge through the patent system (Hardt & Negri, 2004) ] Under the influence of imperialism, research became institutionalized through scholary networks such as university transplantations, not through academic disciplines. The majority of researchers were rather like travelers who had curiosity toward the indigenous and spread the tales to the Western society, and moreover, knowledge gained through research was constructed around the Western bias. (pp.1-18). As one of the discourses of imperialism, the author categorizes post-colonialism or globalization as a discursive field of knowledge such that colonialism is not a finished business yet, which brings with new ways of exploration about the subject. He...

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004). NY: The Penguin Press. Empire is referred to as a new global sovereignty ruled by a network power, which consists of dominant nation-states as its primary nodes along with supranational institutions, major capital corporations and other smaller powers, just like the Internet, a distributed network. The combination of these elements constitutes a global order, which is characterized with unequal participation at all levels and a global state of war. Multitude, an alternative concept to this, preserves differences while seeking to communicate and act in common. Here the authors suggest two faces to globalization. One is the spread of hierarchy and conflicts spread by Empire and the other is the creation of networks for cooperation that preserves both difference and commonality (Preface). [Thus, globalization is a contemporary Janus , which has two faces looking at two different directions.] WAR By the global state of war, the authors mean that war is be...

Those who do not have power over the stories that dominate their lives, power to retell them, rethink them, deconstruct them, joke about them, and change them as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts. --salman rushdie

Giroux, H. (2008). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Neoliberalism is "an ideology that subordinates the art of democratic politics to the rapacious laws of a market economy"(p.10) and corporates deploy its power freed from political constraints through the educational force of the dominant culture to the extent that democracy is hardly conceived as a public good (p.9). Against the corporate-centered globalization which stemmed from the neolibralism, global public sphere should be acknowledged to extend local resistance to a global scale, as solving global problems need global approaches (p.13).

Wotherspoon, Terry. (2004). 2nd Ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Sociology, which was first used by the French writer Compte in the nineteenth century to read the rapidly changing society after the Industrial revolution, is foremost a study of society and is divided into diverse fields which are determined by the perspective each study takes. Three major perspectives are structural functionalism--focusing on the orderly social structure, like a living organism, thus fundamentally aiming to stablize the structure by identifying and removing harmful elements in the social structure--interpretative analysis--emphasizing a micro level human interactions and social symbols on the basis that the world is socially constructed and the reality exists only through the member's relationship with other members, language, knowledge, etc--and critical sociology--as seen in Marxism and feminism, analyzes fundamental structural inequality of the society and aims to subvert the underlyin...

The original purpose of mass education was to train people to be able to do their job after the Industrial Revolution and this impetus obtained the public consensus in that the education gave people the equal opportunity, which still holds true in theories of education. However, critical approaches attest that the acclaimed equal opportunity only keeps the existing social structure and perpetuates class divisions because students bring different social/cultural/symbolic capitals to class (Pierre Bourdieu), which makes the starting points different, thus they argue that fairness in education has to be emphasized. In a similar context, critical education/pedagogy comes into play in the fields of education by questioning Euro-centric knowledge and education system and attempts to teach different perspectives in the main education system.

Gail Jardine. (2005). Peter Lang Publishing My main concern [is] to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous individual modes of behavior (Foucaut, M. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1. 1976/1990). Jardine summarizes Foucault's work from pedagogical perspectives with an emphasis on "disciplinary knowledge" acted on individual, that is, knowledge is not outside of power and disciplinary knowledge especially trains individuals in a particulary society to comply to the system of power (p.10). Another emphasis is given on Foucault's contribution to empowerment of individuals, "care of the self", in his own word. [This is quite new to me and triggers my curiosity. The author quotes Foucault from various sources and, in particular, The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), in which, according to Jardine, a framework useful to analyze systems of knowledge is given, and Power/Kno...

Kincheloe, J., & Berry, K. (2004). Open University Press. This book describes the concept of bricolage as research methodology. In the introduction (pp. 1-22), it is understood as interdisciplinary methodology, which combines cross-disciplinary approaches in order to avoid monological reductionism. Kincheloe admits that this method is quite challenging to beginning scholars (p.4). [then, what should I take from this book?] He continues the periscope of bricolage which should understand social construction of knowledge and subjectivity. Importantly, researchers who employ this method understand that different points of view bring out different interpretation because of the complexity of knowledge, "ever shifting boundries between the social world and the narrative representation of it" (p.7). He continues to emphasize the complexity of knowledge and everyday life in the second chapter (pp. 23-49). Among the notions that indicates this complexity are there intertextuality,...

Henry Giroux. (1999). Fastback series. Phi Delta Kappa International. Giroux affirms that the commercial power suffocates higher/public education by measuring the knowledge produced in the process of education as a commodity to sell. According to him, corporations, which have the fundamental standpoint that knowledge is capital to invest, instrumentalize knowledge by selecting higher education research projects/models based on the profits they would bring, and this practice reflects the ever-creeping perspective that education is a process of "vocationalization" and "subordination of learning to the dictates of the market" (p.16). He finds further evidence of the corporatization of knowledge in higher education in the way that government and educational institutions build their relationship with corporations: for example, corporate leaders often represent government or educational institutions in the media and persuade the purpose of higher/public education to the p...