Our Fireside Guests –
Shelly Rodrigo
Possible founder of the CyberSalon, certainly one of the founders, Shelly is the Director of the Writing Program at University of Arizona. She has been giving presentations around teaching, learning and technology for years.
Alisa Cooper
Alisa is a faculty of 27 years at Glendale Community College in Arizona and just came off a four-year stint as the Director of the Teaching & Learning Center there. You can find her thinking around teaching & learning here.
Alan Levine
Alan has an amazing history at the crossroads of education and technology. You can find out a bit about him here. Generally, and with passion, Alan Levine barks about and plays with stuff here.
OUR NOTES FROM AN EPIPHANY
Sarita
What stood out to me from Alisa, Shelley, and Alan’s work was the sense of community that they created. This community centered learning in an environment that was not mandated or required by anyone. I appreciated the quote that Alan shared from the book ‘Desert Solitaire’ –”growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” The big idea from this quote that I think directly applies to building communities has to do with authenticity. The work of building communities means building relationships and being thoughtful about scaling things after conscientious consideration to the reasons for doing so.
Something else that stood out to me was about the way that the Cyber Salon gathered. They did not hold meetings on campus, nor was there a mandate to produce an outcome, and they did not have a defined number of meetings imposed externally. This actually freed members to set their own rules, work at their own pace, and engage in shared leadership. The notion of shared leadership where each member takes turns to organize the group stood out to me. This is such a refreshing idea! No single person is in charge while each member also takes on responsibility to steer the group at different times.
I often wonder about creating class communities that are joyful, engaged, caring, and inviting spaces much like Alisa, Shelley, and Alan created in their Cyber Salon. I have been thinking a lot about shared leadership since this session and how it can show up in class communities that I strive to create with students.
Becca
What a community.
Today we met with three of the founding members of the Phoenix Cyber Salon, including the person who started it all, Shelley Rodrigo. Her inspiration was to extend the idea of a writing group to be a group that talked about ed..it’s an approach that reminds me a little of the wonderful support group that Ellen Daniell describes in Every Other Thursday. Alisa iterated the value of folks getting together because they want to learn together–doing it for their own enrichment, without compensation, thriving in community with each other. The Cyber Salon was one of those magical communities that formed at exactly the right time, when many of the folks were launching their careers–and I mean that literally in the case of Sian Proctor, who launched her career right into space. The folks in the Cyber Salon recognized the emerging fields of ed tech–as Shelley said, “We have this new technology. What might we do with it?” In some ways, it served the purpose of a Center for Teaching and Learning before those became common at colleges and universities.
I am impressed with the genuine affection that Shelley, Alisa, Alan, and Todd share for each other. I think it speaks to the shared vision folks developed in the Cyber Salon, and the model of shared leadership that emerged. Folks would take turns hosting through the Phoenix Basin. Each month’s organizer needed to find a venue, and ensure that they had space, enough outlets, and wifi (not a guarantee in those days!). They talked about how members of the Salon became lifelong colleagues and friends. Alan observed that communities are messy, and that messiness binds the folks together. All agree that this was a place to play, try, and fail–a combination of processes critical to learning. They celebrated their failures together.
Todd
I remember when our little open-web learning community would sit in the “teaching classroom” on the second floor of the library and we would have some digital something-or-other on the screen. We would point at it at times and wonder what it did, or could do. We would laugh and sit there with our colleagues eating or drinking. It was like a nice small class. We would give a hug or two to people as they came in, or as they left and let them know how wonderful it was to see them.
Then came a pandemic.
Then came Zoom.
I was happy to see and hear the voices of Shelly, Alisa, and Alan. To watch them laugh. To listen to some old stories. Those days in the Phoenix area bars surrounded by music, clinking glasses, laughter, and the smell of food! I miss all that.
I hope we can find some space, some time in our learning community to bring back some other senses to our meetings. Sure, seeing and hearing are nice. But I miss the taste of the food, the feel of the old seat, the smell of the bar… I like the richer experience with more active senses. Life is more like that. I’d like my professional development and friendships to have a richness to them. So I think I will plot to discover how we might bring that option to the community without losing the amazingness of what can be done with Zoom.