First steps forward

I do want to make clear that I support the point that a first step forward can be crafting a specific plan for supporting dialogues between participants in the participatory workshops and then launching the dialogues based on the agreed upon plan. I request that we have a specific plan within the next two weeks and then use loomio to put the plan to a vote and then take action. Am hoping this can be done.

I do like the idea of a plan for supporting dialogues between participants in the participatory workshops and that there should be multiple approaches to supporting dialogues (I can't imagine that all groups will want to use living-posters). I'm looking forward to participating in the voting facility on loomio and to working with whoever emerges as being willing to coordinate/lead on supporting the dialogues. I'll do what I can next week with the Bluewater, Action Research Network (BARN), with Bolormaa Batmunkh from the Mongolian National University of Education (MNUE) and the Network Educational Action Research Ireland (NEARI) who are also meeting in April.
Jose - we missed you this evening (your Tuesday 04-04-17 in Australia, our Monday in the UK) . Hoping you can make it next week. Parag sent round the following contacts for the Participatory workshops:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ajnJ9RnEiBd06FaiCqNuIp4QA-1USKVBZQ5HKz1-oqk/edit?usp=sharing

with the request:

"Please share this link to anyone who may want to add their contacts."

@lonnierowell @jackwhitehead can we consider whether these specific issues belong in their own specific threads here in loomio e.g.

"supporting dialogues between participants in the participatory workshops"

?

just getting a sense of how we organise discussions here on loomio

thoughts?

jose

Thank you, Jack, for your work with the three upcoming workshops. These will be, I am confident, very worthwhile additions to the dialogue. Very good.

Hi Lonnie and Jack, several people have just just joined the loomio group, so may not have gotten updates on the issue of "support dialogues between the participants in the participatory workshops".

So it may need to be restated here and then we need a call for proposals to address the issue.

By the way, hello everyone!! Welcome to the loomio group. You can familiarise yourself with loomio on your own time, but basically it works like this.

1. start discussion thread in main page (I'm writing in one now).
2. when someone has a proposal they click "start proposal" (upper right)
3. proposal process starts and people vote
4. from decision then implementation starts

Thanks for the additions, Jose. Have heard from three people so far re: proposal sent out last night. All are supportive, with two expressing cautions about keeping things simple. I think the simplifying will be evident once we make the switch to loomio and have the conversation threads organized. Would you agree?

Hi Lonnie,

I agree with all the comments about simplicity.

Our challenge is that there are multiple dimensions of the organising of the GA.

Compounding this is that we are dispersed around the world.

The assumption with using loomio is that it will facilitate better organisation and decision making.

But when talking to you the people who design loomio, they are pretty much said good old fashioned facilitation skills are still very much important.

The technology cannot do it for us, I can only support us.

But yes, loomio is supposed to help simplify what is already a complicated organisational process.

Dear Janel
We sent out a brief with suggested questions to discuss:
· What knowledge ecologies are appropriate/recognized for our context? And why?

· How can we (do we) address the decolonisation of knowledge, curriculum and / or pedagogy within our teaching and research?

· What are the political and pragmatic implications of the decolonising education? What principles/philosophies might inform them?

· What research methodologies might advance such the decolonisation of education

These are just suggestions and any other relevant questions are fine. we also suggested that people compile a summary of the answers to post on the website and/or that people do digital posters as suggested by Jack.
Hope this helps! We are having our SAERA one tomorrow ...

LX

LESLEY WOOD
Research Professor
Faculty of Education Sciences
(Potchefstroom Campus)
NORTH-WEST UNIVERSITY
POTCHEFSTROOM
South Africa
Zuber-Skerritt, O., Wood, L. & Louw, I. A Participatory Paradigm for an Engaged Scholarship in Higher Education: Action Leadership from a South African Perspective. Rotterdam, NL: Sense

Co-editor: Educational Research for Social Change.http://ersc.nmmu.ac.za

Tel +27-18-299 4770
Mobile: +27 082 296 9202
Fax+27-18-299 4788
Fax to e mail:0862386933
http://www.nwu.ac.za ( http://www.nwu.ac.za/ )

Vrywaringsklousule / Disclaimer: http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html ( http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html )

"Jose Ramos (Loomio)" notifications@loomio.org 2017/04/06 04:40 AM >>>

Thanks for sharing Lesley. This helps me understand the big picture. Now my next questions:
How do they capture their discussions?
and
Are they sending the results/outcomes of these discussions to anyone on the planning committee for the 16th?
Thanks,
Janel

I concur with Lesley on the questions suggested.

Thanks so much Lesley and Mary for providing this context.

Hi janel
You can capture in written form or make a digital poster or a short video. For example we are going to do a world cafe and then summarize the answers to the questions on the brief and I will encourage people to make a living poster also. Outputs should be e mailed to myself and Mary. We then feed into 12 June workshop and put on we
Hope that helps
Lx

I'm wondering about the desirability of focusing some of our discussion on the nature of knowledges? I'm feeling reasonable confident about the meanings that I and others use in their thinking with ecology and democracy, but I'm less confident about the meanings that others are giving to 'knowledge(s)'

Love Jack.

Hi everyone

There have been several issues that have been surfaced by various people.

A - @jackwhitehead put forward the issue of "support dialogues between the participants in the participatory workshops".

B - @janelseeley put forward the proposal for "suggestions for a world cafe type format" for the june 16th - this concerns the broader process / framework that I and @wrayirwin put together.

C - another conversation concerned: "do the small groups that are currently meeting, or will meet prior to the 16th, have particular questions or ideas they are examining that they will bring on the 16th?" so this concerns the issue of the relationship between participatory workshops and the june 16th briefly discussed by @marymcateer and @lesleywood this was also a question for @cesarosoriosanchez in the general meeting last month.

D - finally, @jackwhitehead also suggested " focusing some of our discussion on the nature of knowledges?"

My feeling is that if we do all of these at once, it might be overwhelming for many of us, as we are just getting to know the system.

So my suggestion is that we work on one of these together as a group. Once we get a feel for how to tackle one of these in loomio, we can move on to the other issues / challenges.

I would like to create a proposal to vote on to start discussion and work on item A.

How does that sound to people?

thanks

jose

Jose,

The test vote was not the one you are referencing in your "hi Everyone" email, right? I think your list of items arising through loomio discussions is a helpful step. I support your idea of a vote on which item to start with. I also like the idea of Jack's beginning a conversation thread re: the nature of knowledges.

Jose, you asked for a proposal. Mine is that we should focus on supporting dialogues between the participants in the participatory workshops and with the convenors of the Pre Assembly/ARN workshops on the 12th June.. Once we have initiated dialogue we could focus on other issues such as the nature of the knowledges being generated and shared by participants in the participatory and pre Assembly workshops.

I had a pre-conference workshop on Friday and had over 40 people from various institutes of higher learning. I used a world cafe (which worked well) to answer the four questions we posed in the brief - this summary will be put up on the website and then people are free to respond. I did explain the living posters and showed some, but no one actually wanted to do one - this is the problem of working in a big group. So, would the inputs from the workshops not be the start of a conversation between participants? Is it not enough just to post the summaries from the workshops, either in digital poster form or written and then encourage interaction?

Another point that came up - our keynote before the world cafe was Prof Aslam Fataar, one of the leading education philosophers in SA and his input really helped to stimulate thinking around decolonisation and democratization of knowledge. He was very interested in attending the GAKD and ARNA but realised it was during the Ramadan fasting and travelling through time zones and over 2 days would be very difficult for Moslems. Plus it is a time for family etc. So perhaps we were not very inclusive in our choice of dates? Nothing we can do now, but maybe we need to acknowledge it?

Thanks for this, Lesley. Much to reply to here. For now, yes, I think a statement from us re: the dates and Islam is called for. Will check with Joe on this one. More soon.

Hi Lesley - perhaps we could share some thoughts, with all the participants in the participatory workshops we have organised, to see if we might stimulate/evoke some dialogue that might help to share the 'knowledge(s)' we are creating as a contribution to an 'ecology of knowledges'? As a start I could share your EJOLTS paper with all the participants in the workshop of the 4th February and explain that you have helped to coordinate another participatory workshop in South Africa.

HI Jack
Is that paper not a bit outdated? You are welcome to share it - I will post a summary of our workshop soon (lot to get through!) and there are some good questions arising which could be starting points for discussion and feed into 16 June. Can we not create a participatory workshop space on the website instead of just posting in the news section?

Hi Lesley, Lonnie has created the discussion group for the participatory workshop. I've just posted (14th April, 2017) and it would be great to hear about the SA workshop.

Hi again,

I just read back through the conversation, and I see that we are pretty much on point here. Well done. Jose has suggested a proposal and vote now, which I think will be very good practice. We can then move on to one or two more conversation threads, keeping in mind that this first one has been on "first steps forward.

Hi everyone,

I just got off a call with Lonnie and Christine. A few things were suggested.

This group has become a general GAKD organising / coordinating group, so it has been renamed to GA Coordinating Group. specific issues related to the 12th, preconf workshops and the 16th etc can be tackled by using threads.

Secondly, to go with "supporting dialogues between the participants in the participatory workshops" as a new thread for discussion about that specific issue. Lonnie has just set that up.

To that end Lonnie has initiated a vote on a specific proposal in that thread around using a loomio sub-group for workshop participants to be able to dialog. The vote closes in 48 hours. This is an actual decision for a proposal, but it is also for us to get practice on making proposals and voting. So have fun with this!

Thirdly, there was the suggestion that "focusing some of our discussion on the nature of knowledges" might be better in the subgroup Open Conversations on Knowledge Democracy, as this is not a nuts and bolts organising issue bit a thematic one. @jackwhitehead what do you think? Do you think you would be able to facilitate these discussions in a subgroup?

@wrayirwin and @janelseeley I agree that we need to start a thread on the actual organising / design of the 16th june. Can we wait until the vote that Lonnie put up is decided (48 hours), and after this then put up a thread on the 16th june? Wray I defer to you what you think the name of this thread should be. you said "happy to kick off a thread as I think it is appropriate to begin to harvest the discussions to understand how the small groups feed in to the 16th but also how we frame the provocation", so yes please do but lets wait 48 hours so this first vote can happen?

There are of course more issues, but that is a good start on specific aspects of GAKD for now I hope.

Jose

Thanks for this helpful summary, Jose. Let's all give this a try and get it moving forward. As most of you saw through email a short while ago, @godwinkodituwakku, our colleague in Sri Lanka, has invited 30+ teachers engaged in practitioner-research to join in the conversation. We also will be inviting everyone connected with the participatory workshops. What I think is likely is that by early next week we will have more than 100 folks engaged with various conversation threads. This is an excellent way to keep the dialogue going in the final phase of Global Assembly preparations.

Hi everyone,

One more thing, here is a link to a video that describes the various decision making tools we can use in loomio.

https://youtu.be/CiaWpYV2n6o

loomio used to only have one tool, which was a simple vote.

but they are experimenting with new features, and agreed to let us use these new features (these are not available to most users).

this includes:

• count
  
• poll
• dot vote
• meeting schedule

have a look at the video for a good explanation for how these work.

jose

I just watched the video. I think the voting process will be quite quick and easy once we all give it a try.

Lonnie

. . . and a final thought for now: With the activation of the new conversation threads and Jose's reconfiguration of the parent and sub-groups we are using, I think we will be ready to end this particular conversation ("First steps i.e. ") by next Monday. We will continue the work in two sub-groups, that is, the Global Assembly Coordinating Group and Open Conversations on Knowledge Democracy. The GAKD Communications Group is now responsible for managing our loomio space. I think this configuration will address the requests for greater simplicity. Thanks to all for you patience.

Hi everyone

A reminder, please vote on the proposal Lonnie put forward.

There are only a few hours left before the voting ends.

Thanks

Jose

What's the suggested format for the dialogues between the participants in the participatory workshops?

The suggested format for now is that we use the conversation thread "Dialogues across participatory workshops" in the "Open Conversations on Knowledge Democracy" sub-group as the space to share comments, ask questions, pose challenges, etc. as members of this group read notes and reports shared from the participatory workshops. At present we have very good materials shared by Jack Whitehead and Lesley Wood. As the conversation evolves I do hope we begin to think about how best to "organize" the themes that have surfaced into what I would tentatively call "Reports to the 1st Global Assembly." My further hope is that these reports will then be used as a part of the Global Assembly's deliberations/work together on June 16. In addition, my hope is that all June 12 Workshop facilitators will carefully review these "reports" in time to use them in some way as a part of each workshop.

my hope is that all June 12 Workshop facilitators will carefully review these "reports" in time to use them in some way as a part of each workshop.

I like this idea Lonnie and will do it for the June 12th workshop I'm leading.

Question: does it seem to others that some of the comments included in this thread should be copied and shared with the sub-group "Open Conversations on Knowledge Democracy?" Alternatively, the comments could be copies and pasted into a document that can be attached in both the sub-group and the conversation thread "Dialogue across participatory workshops." Thoughts on this?

Thanks.

HI Lonnie
I think it is all getting a bit confusing with the different threads. I suggest that anything to do with the participatory workshop discussions should be open to all and under the one link of JOIN THE DIALOGUE on GAKD which links to the Loomio in any case. Otherwise we have discussions all over on the same topic - Knowledge Democracy.
If we need to begin thematically analysing the workshop contributions to prepare for June 12, then the organizers of our network workshop should do this and share with us on this discussion? Or should Mary and I do this and send to the organizers of all the workshops? The problem is that I am away the whole of May and Mary would have to take the lead on this ...