Rebecca’s Lifelong Learning Journey

This semester, I've decided to dedicate more time to providing synchronous learning experiences for my students… Another challenge I'm facing is figuring out the different activities that I can enact in a synchronous setting, and determining when the different activities are appropriate.

Last week I attended the eLearning Guild‘s DevLearn conference. This is the best conference I’ve been to for professional development for Instructional Designers that focus on areas outside of academia. The primary audience of the conference are those involved in the creation of eLearning materials or infrastructure for the corporate sector. There are several folks […]

I have felt the need to do some professional development around my work as a Lecturer in instructional design. After my last leave, I am feeling especially disconnected from the industry – so I decided that I should attend the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference. I had been planning to attend back in 2014 before I […]

I miss blogging. More, I miss having deeply reflective conversations with other bloggers. I miss the collegiality of the conversations. Since I started seriously focusing on my dissertation, I stopped following a lot of blogs. I’ve been in this in-between world. When I my friend Autumm decided to start a contemplative blog practice, I figured […]

I have been reflecting on the alternative CV activity in the Equity Unbound course for over a week now. I tried to do something visual, but that just wasn’t working for me. I found myself asking, what are my values? Or, what am I most proud of? Right now that answer is that I was […]

The classes I teach started today. I wanted to make a welcoming statement, as I recall friends telling me that it mattered when professors said to them that they would be welcome in the class (regardless of sexuality). I wanted to make sure my statement felt inclusive, but wasn’t too long or a long list of […]

In reading today’s post by Carolyn Thomas at Heart Sisters, she talks about a show on CBC Radio (Michael Enright’s Sunday Edition), and how the interviewer highlighted that illness narratives were not just about the facts of the illness, but also addressed bigger life questions. That got me thinking about what my illness narrative is […]

It has been a long time since I’ve posted to this blog. In April or May, we put my PhD on hold for 8 months so that I can care for my mother, who at the time was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer. I lived with her most of the time, with a couple […]

I’m currently reading Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human by James Paul Gee (2017). In it, he talks about two types of identity (at least to the point that I’ve read so far). First is activity-based identity. These are the identities we have based about activities that we choose. […]

I shared the other day the idea the for the privileged equity feels like oppression. It occurred to me that this is in part why I am scared at the idea of moving back to Canada and relying on the Canadian healthcare system. The Canadian system is a good one. It is mostly equitable. It suffers […]

In early January, I joined Christopher at Just Talking for a podcast. One of the topics that came up during the podcast was the role of social media (and in my case Facebook groups) as patient support when going through illness. I spoke of my experience with Facebook groups relating to my choices are breast […]

“The former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed.” (Freire, 2000*, p.57) I have found myself thinking about this a lot lately – I think because of what is happening in the US with politics and populism. There are many quotes within the book “Pedagogy of the […]

I recently read an article on health literacy by Uta Papen: Papen, U. (2009). Literacy, Learning and Health–A social practices view of health literacy. Literacy and Numeracy Studies: An international journal in the education and training of adults, 16(2-1), 19-34. Retrieved from https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/lnj/article/download/1275/1326. The dominant view is that health literacy is an ability possessed by individuals […]

I’m finding myself in a bit of a challenging position right now. I don’t know if it is a funk – or just kind of stuck. Typically, when this happens I go for a nice long hike and sort it out while I walk and commune with nature. However, after recent toe surgery (which is […]

I teach in a M.Ed. in Instructional Design program, where my students are generally mid-career professionals. They are all in the program because they want to gain skills that will help them make the career transition to instructional design – or enhance their abilities in the current careers. Either way, they come to class motivated. […]

One of the challenges I find with health science is that it assumes that health and the human body is something that is complicated, but not something that is complex. What I mean by this is a concept that is explained by Davis and Sumara (1997), where they describe how “complexity theory draw a distinction […]

At the BCC annual conference yesterday, one of the speakers, Dr. David Spiegel, mentioned that patients have much less anxiety if they take time at the beginning to make informed treatment decisions. One of the challenges that we run into when we are told we have cancer is the desire / fear / need to do […]

I was asked to choose between ACT chemotherapy and TC chemotherapy. Both were shown to be as effective, so the decision was mine. In making the decision, I looked at the potential side effects of each, as well as what the standard of care would be in Canada. Further, I looked at the literature and […]

Thanks to Marie’s weekly round-up, I was lead to a post on Critical Health Literacy by the Breast Cancer Consortium. Initially, I really liked that they were tackling the idea of critical health literacy, but then as I read through the post I felt like something was off. I realized that they were defining critical […]

An article on Simplifying patient communication can lead to better health outcomes by Eve Becker, crossed my stream today. I was struck by this statement: “Enter the field of health literacy, which aims to help physicians increase patient communication, speak in plain language and write clear prescriptions with easy-to-understand instructions.” I found myself wondering why […]

Many of my readers know that in a previous life – 9 years ago now – my husband and I took 16-months off and road our bikes around the world. It was this adventure where I started to blog seriously for the first time. It is also where the domain name Going East came from – we […]

Before vacation I attended digital pedagogy lab institute (DPLI) in Fredericksburg Virginia. I haven’t been able to write a summary blog post for the experience. It was not at all what I was expecting. I was thrilled to spend a week with Maha Bali and Kate Bowles, so really, I did not enter with any expectations […]

They say that seeing a partial solar eclipse is nothing like seeing totality. xkcd sums it up nicely in this image: This was the start of our vacation. We had a crazy rush drive north to ensure we made it into the path of totality. We took a few pictures before totality, but when it […]

Validity “means that a work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible, a feeling that what has been represented could be true” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, p.284) “Lie down on the bed, chest down with your breasts in the holes, hands above your head” […]

While I was hiking yesterday I had a thought for a study I’d like to do – or at least research whether anyone else has already done it. Of course, I cannot even think about it until I’m finished with my dissertation research, but I thought I’d write it here so that I don’t forget, but […]

Friends, I’m looking for a few people family with qualitative research coding to do some interrater reliability for my dissertation. What this would involve is coding approximate 30 blog posts (links provided to specific posts) based upon the themes that I have identified, followed by a conversation with me about your rating experience. If you […]

I struggle a little with my choice of words – in part because others are so challenged by it. I’ve talked about the battle metaphor and my challenge it with. Now I find myself reflecting on the words Survivor and Journey. I chose to identify as a breast cancer survivor. I use the term survivor for […]

I have been thinking a lot lately about perspectives – struggling really – trying to figure out where my thoughts and ideas fit within the systems that I’m studying. One challenge that I kept running into was that I am reading (literature reviewing) a lot of information provided from a care perspective – that is […]

Recently, I read a book chapter by Arthur Frank (2009) titled “The necessity and dangers of illness narratives, especially at the end of life”. It got me thinking. One of the pet peeves among many cancer bloggers as well as those with metastatic breast cancer is cancer as a war metaphor – that is, the […]

I am finding a contradiction between my feedback about Ed Tech and my feedback about Med Tech. In the Ed Tech space, I find that the experts in education are often missing. Too often, people feel like that because they have been students, they understand the problems of education – and therefore, they are qualified […]

The other day I had the opportunity to have a conversation with the lovely Bonni Stachowiak for her podcast Teaching in Higher Ed. In the podcast, I talk about my experience with the intersectional identity of educational researcher, blogger, and breast cancer patient. You can download and listen to the podcast from this link: http://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/giving-voice-face-illness-experience/.

I apologies to those who read all my blogs, as I am cross posting this. I’d love to hear answers from the various readers of my different blogs. I want to connect two ideas: the idea of remission society as described by Arthur Frank (1995), and the concept of the fantasy future that I learned while […]

I find it odd/annoying when I’m asked to participate in a research study about open practice, then the consent form for the study says that all identifying information will be removed and my contribution will be anonymous. To me this is a huge contradiction. The study is looking at practices that I do in the open, […]

For a long time now I’ve debated how to license my blog. Originally, I don’t say anything, which means it was copyrighted. Then I made the copyright explicit. At one point, and article that I co-authored was included in a compilation book after it had been published in a journal. We asked the journal about it, and […]

I find myself looking at all my past experience, and making connections between what I know as an educator, and PhD student, to what I have experienced as a patient with critical/chronic illness. Leading off from Autumm Caines’ post about Virtually Connecting focus groups, I want to chat a little more about the paradox of patient empowerment […]

The last couple of days I’ve been attending the Health Humanities Consortium conference in Houston Texas. The experience has been rather mixed for me, causing me to reflect on so many different things. One of the themes of the conferences was that of intersectionality. The idea that we all carry a variety of identities, and […]

I’m currently reading Arthur Frank’s At the will of the body: Reflections on illness (1991). In it he recounts his experience as someone who has experienced a serious medical incident (heart attack caused by virus) and then a critical illness (cancer). He differentiates the experience based upon the idea of an intense but temporary interaction with […]

I have decided to brush off the domain I had originally setup for my dissertation. I have much better sense of where the project is going – so I’m using that blog as a way to share my writing as I write, and my field notes and ideas as they occur to me. It is […]

As part of the PhD process, I’ve been reading through my blog from the beginning. I wrote it, but I have never actually read it – at least not in this way. I am immediately struck by how my memory of the time doesn’t completely align with what I wrote. I know that what I […]

As I delve into my research, I am reading through my cancer blog (http://bcbecky.com) from the beginning. It occurred to me that although I wrote the blog, I had never actually read it. One of the things that jumps out at me as I read is how my memories of things don’t necessarily align with […]

In a post-truth world, I find it rather ironic that I’m studying the lack of a single narrative relating to the patient experience of breast cancer. We think of science has having a single truth – big t Truth. The laws of the universe behave in a particular way. However, the human body is complex […]

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So far, I’ve only managed the first chapter (as well as all the front matter). The first chapter has been a bit of a challenge – but I did find that after a while the ideas and concepts were repeating themselves, […]

Maha Bali’s latest blog post on Unpacking terms around equity, power and privilege has got me thinking (actually, I was thinking about it just yesterday, but her post has prompted me to write more about it!). I’m slowly making my way through Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “But their perception of themselves as oppressed is […]

In Arthur Frank’s (1995) seminal book The Wounded Storyteller, he cautions “On rare occasions when I have taught this book, students’ biggest initial difficulty is to stop reframing everything ill people say into a question of how some health-care worker might respond.” (Location 115) I often find myself falling into that trap. I find myself […]

I’ve previously talked about researchers using blogs as data sources in their research. I have argued that since blogs are self-publication, then bloggers should be cited appropriately in research reports. When data is collected specifically for research purposes, we talk about primary data collection. When data is collected for a different purpose, but then later […]

Digital Literacy – Read, Write, Participate (e.g. https://learning.mozilla.org/en-US/web-literacy) Digital Health Literacy – “the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem” (Norman & Skinner, 2008, para. 6). Critical Digital Health Literacy – the ability to seek, find, understand, and […]

This summer I’ll be teaching a new course on Leadership of Learning in the Digital Age. I’m designing the course as a combination of leadership skills (emotional intelligence) and digital literacy skills. One key aspect of the course will be to have students work on defining and expanding their personal learning network (PLN). In leadership […]

In my literature review for my research I came across a great article (Keating & Rains, 2015) on the social support health (illness) bloggers receive. The article does a good job looking at social support of bloggers over a three year period. One of the things that came clear in the article is the use […]

This post is a follow up on my post The ethical use of twitter and blogs in research as well as the series of blogs posts on the ways in which breast cancer blogs are being used in research. Today I want to talk about a specific example of what I see as a problematic use of […]

A conversation happened on twitter today that began with the question: Do you have ethical concerns about researchers analysing your Tweets w/o your permission? (I ask as Chair of Research Ethics C'ttee) — Celia Kitzinger (@KitzingerCelia) November 20, 2016 I actually have the same questions when it comes to using blogs in research. The current […]

One of my first thoughts when I heard that Trump was elected was that it meant much fewer opportunities to hear diverse voices at international conferences held within the US. I attend a lot of conferences – many of them have international audiences. One thing that American’s don’t often realize is just how difficult it […]

One of the first steps (I don’t have a linear process so there isn’t really one first step) in my research is to tag all my blog posts. I didn’t really use the tagging feature when I wrote the original posts. So now, I’m re-reading and tagging highlighting which posts provide insight into my experience […]

In the spirit of open dissertations, I figured I’d write a little more about where I’m headed with my dissertation. My last two weeks were spent up in Ottawa for the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies annual conference and a committee meeting followed by the Open Ed conference in Richmond Virginia. I have to say my […]

I know, this might be blasphemy, but I really hate it when policies are pushed down that require that all aspects of online learning are made accessible. I honestly think that these policies actually make online learning less accessible because they are written or enacted in ways that convenience easy measurement of compliance rather than actually looking at […]

Yesterday, I presented at the AIS 2016 Annual Conference. It was the first time I have presented using an autoethnography of a blog – so it was more of a performance of a blog than a paper presentation. Doing the presentation really helped me think about how I want to present the blog chapters in […]

Once I started blogging, I found myself becoming more aware of bloggable moments. I saw blog posts in the things that I do every day. I still ‘see’ blog posts, I just don’t always have the time to write them up! Now that I’m reading a lot about autoethnography and starting to write my dissertation, […]

I stepped on the stage with a little wobble. My stomach was churning. The audience of over 200 people sat there waiting for me to start my reading. The words start, but I can feel the mechanicalness of the words as they come out of my mouth … “I wrote this story …” After the […]

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at about 7:30pm Pacific I’ll be reading my chapter, titled “Window Shopping” for the launch of the latest Bay Area Young Survivors (BAYS) anthology titled: Agony and Absurdity: Adventures in Cancerland: An Anthology. I hope to have my reading periscoped – and if we manage that I’ll put the link in here. If you […]