PROmotion

It’s official:  I’m a co-founder of Global Spark, a nonprofit based in Seattle, WA.  While the formal launch is still a month away, here’s a glimpse:

Global Spark’s mission is to advance community development with a focus on education, social equity and the environment. As an educational partner and charity, we provide low-resource communities, public agencies, and other groups with holistic and sustainable tools such as:

It’s official:  I am now the Global Civic Education and Leadership Fellow for the Center for Legislative Studies at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.As a research fellow, I work to improve civic leadership outcomes tied to the Global Civic Education Leadership Program. I do this by helping guide:

– Curricular,
– Research,
– Service,
– Networking,
– Resource and grant building, and
– Publication projects tied to the Center.

Awesome new job, yes?  Yes!  I am honored to return to BSU (I used to teach in the Communication Studies Department) and this new realm of projects.  If you’d like to collaborate on any projects — especially anything relating to equity, education, and the environment — please let me know!

Bill McKibbon and others in the Twitterverse are trading readings, which includes this great NYT report on the dangers of permafrost.

“Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.”

Curious?  Check out this intro piece and GREAT video!  I’ve been looking for a quick, simple look at Search Engine Optimization and here’s a good piece from the GovLoop folks.  Good stuff about SEO and marketing!

That pesky “evaluation” piece is part of every good project; that is, what makes continuing work valuable if it can’t be measured for success/engagement?  So, does it matter that a gazillion people have watched Charlie bite his brother’s finger?  Or that President Obama just joined Foursquare?  Here’s a great social media marketing infographic to visualize how clicks and likes may or may not show momentum.

The blogosphere is abuzz about murky truth in nonfiction, aka the Greg Mortenson scandal.   Whether you think he’s a bonafide liar or celebrated humanitarian, the incident summons up ghosts of previous fallacies, ranging from the Oprah/James Frey debacle or the world’s response to Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography about her life as An Indian Woman in Guatemala.  I’ve known of Menchu’s work for years and thus think of it more as a symbolic; that is, what I first read as a suspicious story of family and heritage is now more a global symbol of oppression and philosophy. 

The book elevated Menchu to near-celebrity status when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage.  On one hand, she publicizes many of the indigenous traditions that she so desperately seeks to keep alive while also wishing to keep them secret for fear that others might steal her culture.  On the other hand, the autobiography seeks to speak for an entire people as Menchu announces, “This is my testimony.  I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone.  I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life.  It’s also the testimony of my people…My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.” In speaking for all poor Guatemalans, Menchu also lays out how one individual might turn toward a life of collective revolution in the hope of turning back a cycle of oppression and poverty.  She told her story, I believe, to remind the world that such struggles “know no boundaries or limits” in a quest to deal with modernization and continuing colonialism. 

So, Menchu spoke for others.  And she spoke with much help, given that anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos-Debray interviewed and edited the book, later declaring, “Rigoberta has chosen words as her weapon and I have tried to give her words the permanency of print.”  But it’s not the last time:  Just as critics ripped Menchu’s truthfulness, Mortenson is now being trounced for possibly embellishing the truth to lift our eyes to horizons similarly lined with despair.  We thus continue a cycle in recognizing readings that depict the dialogue between historical constructions of identity – that was actually built and experienced by several cultures – and the self-representation of those who now hope to seize the power of words, ink, and collective history.

The Doctor is dead –Long live the Doctor!  I’m loving all the leaks for “The Impossible Astronaut”, this season’s opener of Dr. Who.  Watch this BBC series and all will be much will be clearer, even Nixon’s paranoia; turns out, the President was crank-called about aliens.  And they’re creepy spacemen, the monsters you forget as soon as you look away.  I love this show because time can be rewritten and solutions are nearly always found – the kind of optimism we naively carried forth during that Watergate era when everybody realized The President of the United States can be as flawed as Everyman.  And that sudden sameness lit a fuse of power:  Simply, we could change the world.  We just needed to trust each other, listen and talk to each other, and climb from awareness to action.  As the Spring 2011 fall semester ends, I look at the students of Presidio Graduate School through Dr. Who’s eyes, shaking things up for a sustainable future, perhaps with a regeneration or two.   As you go through the “timey-wimey” bend on this planet, I hope you look directly at everybody and rely on each other to raise the bar.  And stay in touch!