How do I create digital work that honours connection, creativity, and my own mental health?
This week sucked.
I had a really emotional week 2 in this course and the paralysis that came from that meant I got behind.
On top of that, my husband's uncle (and godfather) got very sick very quickly, and ended up in palliative care by the end of the week. It is a hard thing to be far from family as a loved one passes, but it's even harder when you live remotely and are 5 flights, 2 days and 3571 km away.
Through these struggles and the grieving process, I got behind. Like really behind.
2.5 weeks behind.
As a full time grad student with 3 courses, this would have been stressful for anybody. Throw in my processing delays and autistic challenges with communication (which make me much slower than most to begin with), and it was a lot. Thankfully my professors and colleagues were incredibly accommodating and supportive.
How to catch up, without giving up?
Once I regained emotional capacity and started trying to strategize how to get through the mountain of work I had to catch up on, I knew I wanted to do this in a way that honoured the topic for each week in each class, but that also:
connected the work together for different courses/across weeks this is very important to me as a proponent of holistic thinking and scholarship
let me develop new digital skills/learn new programs especially incorporating technologies that my kids currently use, or that I could see as meshing with their interests. This is a commitment I made in my Digital Citizenship course
was far outside of my comfort zone in terms of creativity and innovation this is a commitment I made for my Sustainability & Entrepreneurship course. To me, this means pushing myself to explore being "artsy" or vulnerable in any sort of way. Both of those things feel scary AF to me.
comes from a perspective of: my identity, my community, Inuit Qaijimajatuqangit considering always praxis/intersectionality/reciprocity
In thinking about how I wanted to do this, I knew I had to find a way that let me expand on whichever weekly discussion topics I most enjoyed from each of my classes, as I found myself overwhelmed by the number of individual tasks I had to catch up on, and I tend to go way overboard with research/connection making generally (#autism).
My mental health was also on shaky ground, so I felt like I needed to find a way to let myself follow the interests/connections coming from the course material, more-so than just trying to check things off a "to-do" list of work. I wanted to try and do things in a way that helped me feel "alive" again, if that makes sense?
So, I decided that instead of making so many different things (i.e. individual assignments/postings), I would try find a way to mish-mash things together, and honour the way my brain was trying to synthesize the learning that came out of this catch-up period for me.
This week, I would like to share the following:
*References can be found in the description on YouTube, and are also incorporated below.
I also decided to try and learn 2 new pieces of technology that I have been curious about for months, but never felt like I had the time to explore.
To build on one of my 5131 forum postings for this week, I created a lesson about cyberbullying and used Canva to make it look pretty:
I also started learning Flipgrid (which I used to make the video reflections for 2 of my courses this week), and explored different ways of sharing these videos. Above, I have embedded what I wanted to share this week as a YouTube video. Below, you can check out what I submitted this week for 5131 on Flipgrid itself using this QR code:
*References can be found in the description on Flipgrid, also incorporated below
References
Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
Couros, G. (2015). The innovator’s mindset: empower learning, unleash talent, and lead a culture of creativity. Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.
Government of Nunavut. (n.d.). Inuit Qaijimajatuqangit [Brochure]. Government of Nunavut.
Haidt, J. (2021, November 21). The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/
Haidt, J., & Twenge, J. (2021). Social media use and mental health: A review. Unpublished manuscript, New York University. Accessed at tinyurl.com/SocialMediaMentalHealthReview
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2019). The coddling of the American mind : how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Penguin Books.
National Harm Reduction Coalition. (2019). Principles of Harm Reduction - Harm Reduction Coalition. Harmreduction.org. https://harmreduction.org/about-us/principles-of-harm-reduction/
Price, D. (2021). Laziness does not exist : a defense of the exhausted, exploited, and overworked. Atria Books, An Imprint Of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2016). Creative schools: revolutionizing education from the ground up. Penguin Books.
Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Corwin.
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