Carols for this #Christmas Eve...Mr Magoo's & a #college version

...with thanks to +George Station for the seasonally appropriate and timely reminder about Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol. You'll be back to regular schedules all too soon. I cannot say the same for myself despite (or due to) Janus posts due on multiple blogs. Until then, I and my sundry personae will be out and about on social media and re-blogging elsewhere. The college version Carol from the archives, covers routine topical posting and is as timely now as it was in 2012. If you need more post-season caroling about the state of education, check out Ken Previti's 2014 Christmas Carol post on Reclaim Education, another Education Blogger Network blog. [Ed note: opening paragraph edited/updated 1/2/2015]

...from the archives, Saturday, December 29, 2012: A College Christmas Carol

Crowdsourcing: Taylorism, tech, online temp work, #adjunct labor

Not all of the many email newsletters hitting my inbox are about education, ed-tech, higher ed, academic casuals or activism. This week, Baffler featured a salvo against the scams and schemes of the tech world, Jacob Silverman's essay "The Crowdsourcing Scam." (with more excellent illustrations by ©Lisa Haney, example below). 

The article refers to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Uber and Yelp ~ among others, not adjuncts, but could apply just as well to the employment and workplace management practices in adjunct-dependent for-profit and non-profit institutions. The editors refer to the article as "another fiery salvo." I want to read the others too.  In a similar vein, read Deb Baker's ❝On being 'discontinued'❞ (via +George Station on G+, also re-blogged on As the Adjunctiverse Turns)

In today's fractured economy, where tasks are increasingly farmed out to low-wage and temp workers, "the result is an extreme form of Taylorism: in boom conditions, workers have more tiny tasks than they can say yes to, but they acquire no skills...they have no contact with other workers, and they have no chance to advance or unionize," Silverman writes. "Imagine a factory in which each employee wears blinders and can see only the thing in front of him on the conveyor belt."

Caveat: as someone who tries to keep up with and uses ed-tech and information technology, I'd qualify the article's network criticism as applying to disconnected networks (an oxymoron in Social Network Analysis, aka SNA) that isolate users, further divided into content/service providers and consumers, instead of connecting them.

#HumanRights Day, Dec 10, 2014—#Rights365

I missed the Thunderclap (small print on the UN High Commission page) and only just now noticed the Storify. In Chicago, +lydsnow got a jump on everybody with an +Amnesty International Write for Rights (#adjunctrights are #humanrights) campaign on the NEIU campus ~ with a Facebook Event page here and blogged here. There are Vines and more than one Storify, but as far as I know, this was the only adjunct action for Human Rights Day 2014 but maybe someone will check in and add more. It's never too late to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights again ~ good sections on labor and education. Or right letter, sign petitions, speak out.

The other take away is in the tag: #Rights365 = every day is a human rights day. Missed today? You've got 364 days to get cracking. Our work is cut out for us with Ayotzinapa, Ferguson, child refugees seeking asylum and more on the table and in the streets while public education, social justice and even the concept of a public good is under assault ~ along with other human rights. Those include freedom of speech (second sentence of Preamble, check it out) and the right to organize (Article 23).

ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation) Statement: 

@NatM4Equity endorses #NAWD…gets FB page—@MMStrikesback writes @NEIU BoT—#WeAreNNMC petitions

…"again" on letter writing (here) and petitioning about NNMC (here and here). National Mobilization for Equity (NME) already has a page plus blog, recently added Twitter, even more recently endorsed National Adjunct Walkout Day and is now on Facebook. Still, a whole post in a title that will still fit in a tweet with characters left over for a link should qualify as a social media sub-genre or at least a hat trick So what do I do for the rest of the post?...besides make it a short one. With pictures. PS be sure to catch and sign the petitions as you scroll down...all the way down

Cover and profile photos for National Mobilization for Equity on Facebook

Here's the endorsement from the NME Action page:

#Ayotzinapa #Ferguson…#FueElEstado—intense & innovative online experience

Ustream logged 1,536 views of the Ayotzinapa conference, which  I'm not embedding because the archive is not up yet. When it is, I'll post it separately. With any luck, commentary links and perhaps even a Storify will be available to accompany it. It was intense and powerful, No reading list or having followed the news, however attentively, could prepare anyone for the experience of watching and listening to survivors, students and family, talk about their experience, let alone the powerful alchemy of Ferguson and Ayotzapa participants meeting and sharing.

I'm still processing the experience and can only imagine how alternately drained and exhilarated actual participants must feel, and especially the  #YaNosCansamos Solidarity Network that put it together, +Ana Maria Fores Tamayo, +Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes (who get mentioned because they are the ones I know) and others from across the U.S. and Mexico ~ 22 on the group email. The story of the network is surely worth telling too. For now, check out the Facebook Event page, catch up on Ayotzinapa news and back story and watch the invitation video to see how many states, cities, universities in the U/S. and Mexico participated.