I can understand the reluctance to change the name of something like that park. The unscientific, but still relevant, Globe and Mail poll has people rejecting the idea 6 to 1.

Vancouver, Washington is thinking of changing its name to Fort Vancouver to re-assert its own identity. That kind of branding exercise is difficult and highly controversial.

But when it comes to other re-branding in our region, it hasn’t been so controversial. Eradicating “Queen Charlotte Islands” for Haida Gwaii and changing the names of the water around here to Salish Sea are less controversial because of relatively less impact of those name changes compared to Stanley Park.

But we also saw a sad and not so ironic example on Canada Day of a sickly outpouring of racism, bigotry and stereotypes during the Stanley Park name change debate. I wasn’t surprised, but I was disgusted.

So the article below suggests some politicians favour going with an informal name change, and I tend to agree.

In the 1980s, I recall people starting to talk about Haida Gwaii and being corrected, but then defending their use of the term with a description of some significant, but generally disregarded BC history. Ultimately, we got some good education and debate about an important issue. Now we happen to have a political name change as well.

Lately, I’ve been corrected by some as I’ve been refusing to acknowledge Myanmar as the new name for Burma because I don’t recognize the junta that changed its name. I was told at various times that I am in no position to confer that status. Nonsense. I am a citizen of the world. I don’t have to be a nation to make that judgement, nor does anyone else.

So as I watched a quarter century of “Haida Gwaii” usage lead to political change, I would like to see some similar political consciousness-raising around the nature of Lord Stanley’s park, and along the way, we can separate the emotional relationships we have with Stanley Cup from the debate.

So I’m going with Xwayxway, pronounced “kwhy-kway” to see if a quarter century from now the kind of Canada Day bigotry we heard last week can evaporate and we can all understand a little bit more about how 96% of BC exists as unceded First Nations land.

At the opening of an aboriginal-themed village site in Stanley Park last month, a native elder suggested renaming the park Xwayxway – pronounced kwhy-kway – which was the name of a native village at the current site of Lumberman’s Arch in the northeastern part of the park.

The concept garnered some support, with some politicians suggesting the park could be known by both names. Ian Campbell, a hereditary chief and councillor with the Squamish First Nation, said he would pursue a formal proposal. And tourism groups said it would be possible to build marketing plans around the new name.

The idea also gained support as a way of acknowledging aboriginal culture and history. In B.C., residents could look to the example of Haida Gwaii, formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. And the Salish Sea is now used as a name of waters also known as the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the Juan de Fuca Strait.

via No name change for Stanley Park: Stockwell Day – The Globe and Mail.

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Three Mohawks from Quebec travelled to Cochabamba for April’s climate summit. They left on the Haudenosaunee Passport since they accept neither Canadian nor American citizenship. They were easily allowed out of Canada with those credentials.

But then Canada wouldn’t let them in unless they signed a Canadian document. Their story is moving and inspiring. There are allies and enemies to their desire to travel internationally under their own flag. And it shames me to say that most of the enemies were Canadian officials and our policies.

“The Haudenosaunee Passport is a non-violent expression of our distinct identity as a sovereign people,” Deer concluded. “While both Canada and the United States claim us as their citizens, the Haudenosaunee Passport is a constant reminder that our people have never acquiesced our citizenship as Haudenosaunee people. It also provides our people an alternative to acquiring Canadian or U.S. documentation.”

via Prevents Mohawks from Returning from Bolivia with Haudenosaunee Passports

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So should I be seeing if anyone wants to contribute here beyond me?

The first question is whether it’s worth seeing if anyone has pieces to contribute to this site. It’s not like anyone can’t already set up a blog at WordPress in less than 2 minutes. So people would have to see value in contributing “here”. And there’s nothing to preclude someone from contributing here AND wherever else they live online and off the interwebs.

Then the question is who should be contributing?

6 years ago when I started this site, I asked friends who lived on various spots on the political spectrum to contribute ideas with the idea of creating some comment dialogue among contributors, like a virtual salon. It never took off. Maybe because it was 6 years ago and not now. Or maybe it was because I don’t believe in the effectiveness of a left-right political spectrum and instead prefer a 2D or 3D spectrum like at PoliticalCompass.org so a left-right paradigm may have been doomed to fail.

I don’t have a richly developed sense of what “kind” of people ought to contribute to this site beyond a few things: not crazy people, not racists or bigots, not folks who would get the RCMP visiting me in my home to discuss what contributions I approve. I certainly don’t think that only people I agree with should be contributors. That’s just not worth anyone’s time.

I put it out to the community of you folks.

So if you are inclined to contribute more than just comments to this site, think about it. Toss your ideas into a comment in this post about creating a contributor community here. Send me emails. Tweet me. Figure it out to whatever extent you wish. I don’t have all the answers, or any answers necessarily, though I do have inclinations.

Let’s see what the crucible burns for us!

• June 29, 2010 -- Campaign Stops Corporate Voting in BC Municipalities, Probably (0)
• May 18, 2010 -- Pettiness: the Defining Quality of Politicians? (3)
• June 21, 2009 -- Ignore My Copyrights (0)
• April 27, 2009 -- No More Strategic Voting: Thanks STV! (0)

Jessalynn Keller once interned with that magazine and studies gender, empowerment and inequalities. Read her master’s thesis abstract here and her  commentary on Jaime Keiles’ experiment here. Here’s an excerpt:

She seems to recognize teen magazines as rather complex cultural texts that are certainly problematic, yet worthy of our analysis and recognition as an integral part of American teen culture.

via - BRAZEN BEAUTIES – Living Life… Seventeen Style.

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via xkcd: Infrastructures.

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This blog is a fine companion to the official Diaspora development team blog. There are grounds to be optimistic about an alternative to the Facebook privacy ghouls.

Below is just a first point of principles of Diaspora. They get better as you read on!

Don’t just destroy your Facebook account… get rid of Flickr and Yahoo, too! Nobody needs someone else to “own” their data. Your information should stay yours, and if you can get your friends to agree to switch to an open network like Diaspora, you won’t need to use those services for anything.

via Avery’s Diaspora News » The latest updates about the emerging Facebook alternative.

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Now give them money to fund their junk food summer. It’ll be the best investment you’ll ever make in a liberating social media interweb.

Thanks, Matt, for the evangelism!

What is the project about?

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub.

via Decentralize the web with Diaspora — Kickstarter.

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Let’s start by talking about BuddyPress. It started as a WordPress plugin designed to add social media elements [like Facebook features and Twitter] to people’s WordPress sites. Then BuddyPress grew into its own WordPress paradigm.

If I were Nokia or Boston University running a WordPress platform, I could install BuddyPress to manage social media elements for my thousands of “members” just like Facebook.

When I knew almost nothing about BuddyPress, I had high hopes for what it could be. But now that I get it more [assuming I actually do], BuddyPress seems to still be a ghettoized environment. I could create a social media installation on my site, but people would have to login and use it just like Facebook. That means way too many logins for people on too many different sites.

UnionBook is a great social media website for trade unionists, but with less than 4,000 users right now, it’s hasn’t hit its hundredth monkey yet.

So here’s what I wished BuddyPress were…and it [or something similar] still can be that.

1. It should have all the social media elements it currently has plus the new cool ones when they are invented.
2. It should be open source.
3. It should be non-proprietary, just like the culture of the internet in the early days, or even the 1980s, despite DARPA’s involvement, which was hands-off by then anyway.
4. It should be non-profit [notice 2, 3, and 4 in here are already the opposite of Facebook].
5. It should be non-corporate.
6. It should be decentralized, like the paradigm of the internet itself, so it can promote democracy, transparency and commitment.
7. Most importantly, it should be distributed. This means, for me right now anyway, that if BuddyPress were what I think of now as a solid alternative to the corporate Facebook, every site on the net running either the BuddyPress suite of WordPress plugins or the BuddyPress paradigm would be integrated, interactive and networked…like a web. People could flit among them almost as if Facebook were a jigsaw puzzle or an iceflow that is broken up and we just float around on pieces carrying our social media with us. Sickeningly, that’s what Facebook is doing now. We just take our Facebook with us around the web and share things with others through Facebook, thereby spreading the Facebook corporate cancer to everything we touch.

OpenID is a model I had in mind. I like that I could login to various sites with an ID that travels with me, not like logging into Facebook and doing my community there, in its corporate ghetto/prison. But now that I see who is part of the OpenID foundation, I don’t want to have anything to do with that. But the model is still good.

So maybe some day BuddyPress will evolve into the kind of distributed structure I’m looking for. Maybe it won’t and something else will. Or maybe nothing will, but I doubt that. It’s too good an idea not to happen, and not because I thought of it, but because the internet was built on that model and it works well. It worked really well until the corporations took over. But we can get that sense of distributed community back.

Open source, distributed social media can be a catalyst for that. And if you doubt that, check out Firefox’s market share. :)

OK, now onto removing my self from Facebook!

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So I’ll be extracting myself from Facebook over the next few days. Community and social media are supposed to contribute to humanity with new means of connecting, but when the price of that contact is sacrificing my privacy and autonomy as a citizen, we get a paradox.

Facebook has us hooked like the crack dealer who gets new clients by giving away product to create an addiction. 400 million have now become dependent to various degrees on Facebook as a core means of social communication. Getting off the drug is hard. Our community interactions are now being held hostage. We must pay with compromises to our privacy.

The increasing restrictions on my ability to determine what I share with others, combined with expanding defaults of openness that subject the millions of Facebook users to abuse. Certainly the majority of users, I believe, are not being as vigilant as they should be at protecting their identities from unobserved, and not so secret data mining.

Try this game.

Click on one of your Facebook friends. Then click on one of their friends who you don’t know. Click on their profile picture. Does it open into their whole folder of profile pictures? If so, they probably haven’t navigated the ever changing maze of Facebook privacy settings, or they don’t care who sees what, which is their prerogative. Then repeat this game 10 times going from profile to profile, seeing how many people likely neglect vigilance.

What are the threats? Two high profile ones are the Facebook data mining corporation itself and the app designers who get monstrously wide access to your identity data and activities in social media.

Years ago, people flocked out of AOL onto the internet in part because they didn’t want one corporation being aware of all their online activities.

It’s like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that it is not Orwell’s 1984 that we should fear but Huxley’s Brave New World because its model is totalitarianism by friendly hugs and not Orwellian jackboots.

Facebook is a system of subservience that we actually embrace. It has time-wasting games, ways of keeping up with friends’ Friday nights out, but within the context of disturbing increasingly anti-autonomy privacy policies. Explore these critiques of the latest imposition of Facebook into my autonomy, like this one. And despite some wonky logic in parts of this one, there are many thoughtful ideas that challenge the Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking.

At least in Twitter what we say we say, what we don’t say we don’t say. That’s it. Spammers are entering, but the anarchic community blocks them out quickly.

That’s also why the prominence of open source communication models like WordPress is growing because we don’t want “The Man” to be tracking our data/identity/existence.

So what am I going to do?

I’m going to stop compromising my autonomy and privacy for the sake of a communication/community platform.

There are new open source social media sites going live sporadically. We should be exploring these, supporting them and promoting them. In time we can get an open source, anarchic social media platform that functions better than the buggy Facebook and doesn’t compromise our freedom as a rule, something of that the freedom/anarchy of the original internet culture.

In the end, I just can’t handle the paradox that in order to partake of the access to connections in Facebook we have to give up core values of community: independence, equality, citizenship, interdependent responsibility. Developing community in the Facebook model is more than slightly like The Truman Show, where there is no benign master providing us the platform.

So my plan is to eradicate my personal profile from Facebook over the next few days. Politics, Re-Spun will still have a presence on Facebook, but primarily to drive human interaction to my website where what I post is not entirely owned by Facebook by virtue of it merely being there.

In the end, there is no real community in Facebook if the price of admission is accepting their claim of ownership over all community activities and where they set the rules for how we interact.

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I’m having trouble getting this song out of my life.

Vancouver is a fine town, but aside from a nice mention in Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” there’s not much we could do to make a civic anthem like this song.

It feels like lots of things:

• Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”
• Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”
• Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane”
• and even George Gershwin’s “American in Paris”

There’s a grand story. There’s power. There are epic themes. There is a soul in the song. There is a sense of pilgrimage. And there’s a solid story behind the song.

I’m still in that foggy place of mild speechlessness. My conclusions haven’t formed yet. It’s a place of mild anxiety, waiting for me to figure out the point. But really, it’s about enjoying not having to “know” yet the grand conclusions!!! :)

So for now, I won’t fight getting it out of my mind.

And it’s nice.

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Write Club: NaPoWriMo is a Facebook group I joined yesterday. I’ll let them explain themselves: “April is National Poetry Writer’s Month, or NaPoWriMo for short. In 2003, Maureen Thorson invented the NaPoWriMo 30/30 Challenge. As such, all are invited to participate in NaPoWriMo by writing a poem a day for April (30 in 30), and sharing their contributions on this group-page, and by checking out the work of their peers.”

I haven’t written many poems since the early part of the decade. I’ve written hundreds in the last 20-15 years. Some of the not awful ones [and some of the awful ones] are here.

So I think I’ll be going after the 30/30 goal, with each day’s poem as a comment to this post.

While I can’t guarantee any or all of them will be “political”, they’ll be what they are. Enjoy. Or don’t enjoy. :)

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Two core problems increasingly vex the system and deeply concern me as I ponder the future of the education system and my relationship with it:

1. The carnage of social dynamics maims children’s self-concept to a degree that as adults they need to unlearn all the human trauma dumped on them. While there are positive socialization elements in schools, kids can also get that from outside schools.
2. The institutionalized nature of packing students into classrooms and teaching to the average destroy innate curiosity with increasingly canned, lock-step curriculum and standardized exams that test a small subset of what ought to be available for learning. So students need to learn how to really learn once they leave high school. They are often stuck in jobs that require only their obedience and ability to follow simple steps or flounder in higher learning where an essay assignment without an assigned topic can cause an anxiety attack.

In reading about EduPunks, it is clear that there are increasing do-it-yourself options to create a more meaningful learning experience for people. The trick is to design it as much as possible within a publicly funded school system to avoid helping the neoliberal agenda of privatizing the whole system: individuation within a collective system is the goal.

The Tyee’s piece today on EduPunks helps define a new vibe. Here are a few teasers before you read the whole thing:

Not only are new technologies becoming part of how we learn, they are changing the way we communicate information. He sees the invention of hypertexts, Google and social media as turning points in the way we organize information.

In fact, Frank doesn’t see EduPunk as a movement that’s on the cutting edge. He sees it as the reinvention of an older method of learning…..At some point everything we take for granted as part of a standardized education was invented by someone.

The Wright brothers didn’t have a pilot license.

via The Tyee — EduPunks Say School Yourself!.

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The men’s hockey team just played a lame 1st period against the Americans. We’re losing 2-1 so far. Passing seems to no longer be a Canadian virtue. Players carry the puck past the blue line then try to score themselves. Where is the team mentality? Where did this notion of individualized super-stardom come from?

I thought “Own the Podium” meant doing well in medals. It turns out it means we will get more medals than anyone. Even against countries with 10-30 times more citizens and insanely large training budgets. And CTV seems to be invested in the mythology of patriotic excellence or die.

Kady O’Malley wrote in Twitter today about the horrible mobius loop of anticipation, disappointment, and recrimination. Today someone won a silver medal in skating. The CTV presenter announced that medal with bland boredom, then quickly moved to a programming announcement.

Earlier today, a Canadian athlete who earned 5th in an event, sat at a press conference basically apologizing to the country for letting us all down.

Who are we? What is our national self-identity? Do we really believe we are capable of getting gold in everything, and if our athletes let us down, we are less of a nation and they are less as people?

Fifth and Second in the world of almost 7 billion people is great.

Why are we, as a nation, unable to acknowledge that kind of excellence?

Perhaps something lame on the Own The Podium website is indicative of how clueless this emerging national sentiment is: they still have an 18 day countdown to the beginning of the Vancouver Olympics.

All I know is that if someone wants to turn Canada into a place where we shame people who “only” come in 2nd or 5th in the world, our nation will turn into a place to be ashamed of.

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With convention starting tomorrow, we are on the eve of defining a new culture of the BC NDP. Or not.

Lots of people think everything is fine in the party, that people calling for reform are navel gazers who don’t understand that the real enemy is the Liberal party.

Working against the Liberals and improving the synergy within the NDP are not mutually exclusive.

Losing two elections is a reasonable trigger for some useful introspection for the party. I’ve written about many of the crux issues for the party over the last week. Today I want to talk about who we ought to feel like as the NDP in BC.

Let’s use the party’s words, even…the convention tagline and a core campaign slogan:

Communicate. Inspire. Build.

Because everyone matters.

Communication

All conventions are about communication. The communication that must happen this weekend will give space to delegates to express all range of emotions and attitudes about the state of the party. Our core identity is in disarray to a degree. If convention is going to stimulate improvement, we need to get our ideas out on the table. We need to speak our truths to each other.

Inspiration

Inspiration is critical. When organizations are in flux, there are generally two leadership options: entrenching conservatism and expansive reinvigoration. Ever since 8:35pm on May 12, 2009, when I began talking to people about what went wrong in the election, everyone walked down one of those two paths, or alternated depending on their moods.

All through convention there will be crux moments: times when ideas will gel. I used to watch basketball games when I was at SFU. Each game was a series of scoring or defensive streaks. Whichever team could build enough momentum for enough runs would win the game.

At convention, these crux moments will compile over the weekend to define the starting point of the culture and tone of the BC NDP for the next 2 or more likely, many years.

I implore delegates to ignore the timidity inherent in conservatism and embrace the boldness of hope and vision and belief in our capacity to be an organization that lives in integrity. The party can be the electoral wing of the progressive social movement that already exists in BC.

Build

Suitably inspired, we need to leave convention with a goal of building a party that operates in integrity. All the catharsis, debate and re-envisioning that needs to happen cannot happen by the end of the weekend. The first thing to build coming out of convention is a process to continue the dialogue. Several hundred delegates represent all members for constitutional purposes, but they represent only themselves when it comes to rebuilding a party culture that will reverse the tide of alienation that showed up in members defunding the party, not volunteering on the election campaign and in a disturbingly large number of cases not even showing up to vote.

Once we build a process for de-alienation, we need to build some other things:

• a historic policy database on the party website for members and the whole world to see so they know what we stand for and so that we are willing to be held accountable to our policies
• an open communication network with all the people and groups that make up the progressive social movement in BC that is desperate for an electoral wing that sees value in working alongside allied groups
• a new economic vision supporting progressive businesses and business models that makes the economy serve people rather than people serving corporate shareholder wealth, all within the context of averting climate breakdown
• a series of other projects that will require member engagement for them to succeed, see Think Forward BC NDP goals.

Because Everyone Matters

I used to teach high school English. “Kids matter. Teachers care.” This BCTF message always carried weight for me. It’s all about what matters.

The BC NDP positions itself as the party that makes everyone matter. It didn’t quite succeed in that message in the last election because various things happened to alienate its own membership.

The future of the BC NDP hinges on making sure everyone in the party matters. Everyone needs to be included, informed, heard, involved and a part of solutions: from addressing the debt to policy formation, to coalition building on community and province-wide levels, to simply imagining what kind of BC we want our grandchildren to inherit.

Everything that everyone says and does at convention needs to be judged in the context of whether it will enable the party to ensure that every member matters during convention time and starting on November 30 when the party has to take the lessons from convention and rebuild itself.

A political party cannot exist if it alienates its members. For cyincal, neoliberal parties, corporations and the rich are the key constituents. For progressive parties, the constituents are members and supporters.

Our members need to see events at convention as reasons to re-commit to the party because it is worth engaging in.

Our supporters who aren’t members need to see a reason to join.

These will be the tests of the success of convention. If we do it right, we will start a process of defining ourselves as a party that can flourish in the 21st century. When people belong, they will fund the party. They will not financially support an organization that alienates them.

And that is why I will be running hard for Vice-President. All weekend. And if I get elected, I will be pursuing the goals and visions I’ve been writing about for the last week.

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But when it comes to my Charter rights, I don’t believe I need to be a lawyer to understand that former Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell doesn’t have the right to suspend my Charter rights, even if I gave him permission, which I would never do.

While the Charter includes right at the top a limiting statement making my rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” I don’t believe the intellectual and political sanitation of communication to appease the International Olympic Committee is a reasonable limit or a part of a free and democratic society.

So as I’m following the dance of lawyers and cops around what kind of free speech zones I’ll be able to express myself in, I found David Eby’s piece today interesting, particularly in that it informed me of the [sadly not isolated] grand act of hubris of Larry Campbell in pledging to the IOC that I don’t need all my Charter rights at all times in all places during the Olympics:

the 2003 contract signed by Larry Campbell waiving Charter rights in Vancouver for the Games, and the bylaws passed recently by Vancouver city council giving that contract effect.

via A tale of two papers: Olympic bylaw coverage | David Eby.

Check out Section 47 at the bottom of page 23 of the Vancouver-IOC Host City Agreement to review such limitations. And read Eby’s piece on Section 47 here.

I simply don’t accept this.

Free speech violations as part of a sanitization campaign for global PR is not an acceptable limitation of my Charter rights.

This is why I am asserting that I am a free speech zone. And I’m proud that as I read David Eby’s piece today, I also received today my order form for the “I am a Free Speech Zone” t-shirt and underwear from COPE.

So it’s time now to order your shirt and undergear to remind yourself and others that you won’t tolerate the Olympics Sanitation Machine to come to my country and tell me I can’t express myself when the world is watching.

And our test over the next 6 months is to wear these t-shirts to events where the thought police would have some interest in controlling expression: places where the premier or prime minister may skulk around, Olympic venue opening parties, you get the picture. It’s time to see if our Charter still means anything now that the IOC ghoul is haunting our communities.

So buy your t-shirts and underwear. And wear them proudly because the phrase is part of the creative commons, something the IOC would never understand.

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They “say” that it’s because of the evolving newspaper industry. The truth is that they’re fast going broke. They first announced a plan to “temporarily” stop publishing the National Post on Mondays. Soon after they announced a permanent Mondaylessness for the T-C.

The firm skipped a loan payment last month. And while I too hastily predicted they’d close the Vancouver Sun or The Province after the provincial election, they are still clearly on the edge of an existential event.

I thought for a while to buy 100 shares in CanWest at its close of $0.38 today [down from its 5-year high of $15], only to then sell them for $0.09 each to hopefully creating a downward run on the stock to push it into the abyss. Alas, stock manipulation takes far more effort than that.

All we’re left with, then, is to simply keep repeating the demand for quality journalism. Whenever we ask for it, CanWest/Global won’t deliver. In time, they’ll pass on.

Dear Times Colonist subscriber:

The newspaper industry is evolving, and as a result of the many changes in the media environment, we will be making a major revision to our publishing schedule and subsequent deliveries, effective June 22, 2009.

As of that date, we will no longer be producing a Times Colonist on Mondays.

<snip>

The decision to cease publishing a Monday newspaper was not made lightly. We are proud of our 151-year history in the community, and we remain committed to being the No. 1 source of news in the region. We appreciate your understanding as we adjust to these challenging times. And in the end, you’ll take what we give you, without questioning it.

via Your Times Colonist is online today; sign up for breaking news alerts.

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The short list of what I wrote before:

• constrain funding to lose Hockey Night in Canada
• lose the rights to the HNIC theme song
• kill the CBC orchestra

And now: “the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. plans to cut up to 800 jobs as part of its strategy to make up for a $171 million shortfall in 2009-10.”

Defunding through manufactured crises is a core element of the neoliberal toolkit. Today’s 800 layoffs are not the first assault–it’s been going on for years under Conservative and Liberal governments. Corporate media and Canada’s neoliberal parties are cozy. A state-run media portal is unfair competition in a “free” market. It has to go, but quietly.

So the weak, unbelievable argument from Igg holds little credibility: “Even the private broadcasters understand the importance of a public broadcaster, so the question is what is the government prepared to do now to ensure that this national institution survives this recession?” Clearly, nothing. The recession is another bludgeoning tool for socialized media.

Another great neoliberal toolkit is selling assets to rent back, thereby providing an eternal revenue stream for anyone wealthy enough to buy a government asset…a revenue stream funded by tax dollars in a pretty straightforward corporate welfare scheme: “The public broadcaster will consider selling and leasing back some of its real estate assets to raise extra cash.”

If the government really believed this was a good idea, they’d be advising all Canadians to sell their homes and rent them back for a quick influx of cash and the privilege of renting for the rest of our lives.

So what to do?

In a world where megacorporations are floundering, they are even more desperate for public broadcasters to get out of the way and slide their assets over to the private sector.

It’s basically theft.

Taxes are how we buy things together. Our ancestors paid for the CBC. In a nation of concentrated corporate ownership of private media, public broadcasting offers some of the last best examples of a vibrant free press keeping leaders accountable in a democracy. It’s no wonder our right wing governments are dismantling it.

Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals are interested in keeping it. A coalition government with the NDP in significant power or a better representative government mix in a new electoral system is pretty much a minimum for saving the last pounds of flesh from being scraped from MotherCorp’s tortured body.

Leaving the knife-wielders in power leads to the obvious conclusion.

via CBC to cut up to 800 jobs, sell assets.

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So when I read this piece today about the activities at the BCTF AGM, I just started nodding. I used to enjoy attending AGMs over spring break to discuss the state of the profession and ways of improving the public education system. It’s nice to see that is still happening.

I remember distinctly the last few semesters I taught. With changes in evaluation [I won't even go into how much I hate the FSAs and other standardized tests], we ended up in a no-win situation.

School districts had to meet arbitrary, “objective” accountability contracts for improvement. This led to students being discouraged from taking skill-appropriate courses, struggling students encouraged to not take provincial final exams to keep the scores up, that sort of thing.

We were suddenly not allowed to give zeros for incomplete assignments or deduct late marks. This idea I actually agreed with. The process meant that students had a chance to complete assignments sincerely with integrity. That was the idea. The problem was how to help students know the importance of time management and meeting deadlines. But those were non-content skills that should not be reflected in the evaluation of students’ work.

So many schools used the GSN system for evaluating work habits: good, satisfactory and needs improvement. I embraced no late marks, but I let my students know that good work habits meant actually handing in all but maybe 1 or 2 assignments. Missing more assignments than that was satisfactory and after missing a significant number of assignments, they’d get an N. This made great sense because poor time management and deadline meeting skills were work habits issues, after all.

I’d send home assignment reports to parents indicating missing assignments with a reasonable, extended period [with a deadline] to hand in outstanding work. After setting such a deadline, I was entitled to not accept outstanding assignments. Only then would the assignment get a zero.

The blowback came from several fronts. GSN evaluations had real consequences. Often athletes wouldn’t be allowed to play with Ns. Honour roll rules required no Ns; this also had implications for post-secondary admissions and scholarships. Parents would complain that their students were missing extra-curricular opportunities. Coaches complained that key players were benched. Administrators were complaint departments putting out blowback fires and began to hassle teachers who followed the new grading regime and used work habits marks as intended.

So we had a new grading system, but the institution did not display the integrity to follow it through by supporting its own work habits evaluation system.

Enter the standardized testing [non-] solution for a problem manufactured to halt the flow of an education system.

This kind of professional hypocrisy was one of the things that I didn’t miss when I finally resigned.

Since I left teaching, my profession has championed profound social and political causes: draconian labour relations from the government, to confronting “that’s so gay” hate rhetoric.

Every March when I read about the BCTF AGM, I nod, thinking of how proud I am to have been a teacher, a member of a profession with such integrity in the face of assaults from a neoLiberal government and misanthropes pretending to be educational leaders.

Principals ‘dumbing down’ B.C. schools, teachers say

Complain they’ve been ordered to allow rewrites, never give zeros, accept late work

By Janet Steffenhagen, Canwest News Service March 15, 2009

VANCOUVER — B.C. teachers complained Sunday that school principals are ordering them to never give zeros when marking class assignments, to accept late work and to allow students to rewrite tests as many times as it takes for them to get good marks.

Such orders are being delivered in many schools around the province by principals who have embraced a program called Assessment for Learning, and it’s undermining teachers’ professional autonomy in the classroom, delegates said at the annual meeting of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation in Vancouver.

“When principals say you have to retest over and over and over again, that is a violation of professional autonomy,” Burnaby teacher James Sanyshin told the three-day meeting.

It’s as though B.C. principals recently attended a “can’t-give-a-kid-a-zero conference,” another delegate added.

Some warned the imposition of top-down assessment practices is “dumbing down” public education and will ultimately result in more families turning to private schools.

Burnaby delegates were particularly incensed, saying teachers are in the best position to evaluate student performance and they should decide what assessment tools they will use. The BCTF says principals are using Assessment for Learning to boost student performance and graduation rates in their schools.

It’s being presented as a cure-all and a best practice, Burnaby teacher Frank Bonvino said, adding: “It’s good that these new theories are being discussed … but it’s got to be up to the individual teacher to decide how or if or when they’re going to implement these things in their classroom.

“Sometimes when I hear administrators talk about best practices, I think … that’s just a buzzword they use for ‘teachers’ autonomy is going to get screwed,’ ” he said. “At the end of the day, you have to have control and you have to be comfortable with what you’re going to teach in the classroom.”

Union vice-president Susan Lambert said student assessment has become a political issue in schools because of standardized tests and a requirement for schools to show continual improvement in student achievement. “There’s huge pressure on [principals],” she said. “You set a goal for your school and if you don’t meet that goal, you’re seen as a failing principal.”

Delegates also approved plans for an aggressive, year-round media campaign to promote public education over private education and to increase pressure for more public-school funding.

But creative action must be the priority leading up to the May 12 provincial election if teachers hope to make education a vote-determining issue, union president Irene Lanzinger told delegates. That’s because the government’s so-called “gag law” restricts advertising by the BCTF and all other third parties.

“We need to make news, use new technologies and engage our members like never before,” said Lanzinger, who is unopposed in her bid for a third one-year term as president. “We all need to make sure the public and our members know how important this election is.”

Delegates plan to protest today in downtown Vancouver.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

via Principals ‘dumbing down’ B.C. schools, teachers say.

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In a world where the deregulated global market capitalist regime is imploding, there is wide open space to re-frame the local, national and global economy in a socially and economically just way.

An off-shoot of this progressive agenda is the celebration of authentic community where people/consumers/citizens can get out of their cocooned homes and participate in the cultures of community.

What better way to do it than in this event?

Details:

SATURDAY MARCH 21. rhizome cafe, 317 e. broadway

* 6:30 – 7:30 pm: artists of colour showcase. please bring $ and support their creations! (tshirts, crafts, prints, posters, art and more) Free food served during artists showcase (on us and Rhizome)
* WITH: Louis Cruz, Tania Willard, Afuwa Granger, Riadh Hashim, Angela Sterritt, Gord Hill, Kat Norris, People’s History of Kanada posters, Café Ramona and products made by Zapatista Mayan women, and more.

* 7:30 – 9:30 pm: wicked performances and inspiring words includes spoken word, storytelling, children’s songs, hip hop, comedy, musical performances, and talks! Enjoy dinner and drinks from Rhizome’s delicious menu
* WITH: George Ciccariello-Maher from OAKLAND!, Kat Norris, Aysha and Sahara, Carnegie Community Action Project Choir, Hari Alluri, Reem Alnuweiri, Ros Salvador, Sinag Bayan Filipino Cultural Collective, Priscillia Mays, Gupreet Kambo, Alaaeldin Abdalla, and Lindsay Bomberry.

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• June 21, 2009 -- Ignore My Copyrights (0)