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Archive for June, 2005

Team Liberation

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I participated in a 4 day Team Liberation training this month. It was a terrific experience. I learned about how to facilitate human relations workshops.

Padma and I co-facilitated a workshop called the “Coming Out Star.” This workshop illustrates the harmful effects of homophobia. People create paper stars which represent their hopes, dreams, family members, things they love, etc. Due to the destructive effects of homophobia, people end up folding their stars (to illustrate negative emotions) and sometimes they have to rip off star points which have the name of a loved one on them. Some participants tore off all of their points and throw their star onto the floor. They have just committed suicide. This part of the exercise was extremely emotional for me. I have been part of a heterosexist, homophobic culture and I have come to terms with my guilt, but it still made me very sad to watch people who I care about get so upset when they destroyed their stars. This workshop is almost as hard to facilitate as it is to participate in.


What is Team Liberation?

Team Liberation is a group of facilitators (mostly students) of human relations workshops. These workshops include issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, ableism, religious intolerance, communication and community & leadership development in an interactive and inclusive way. Team Liberation facilitators have received over forty hours of intensive training, followed by additional peer mentoring in facilitation with diverse groups on campus and in the community.

Why “Liberation”?

Liberation is “a movement seeking equal rights and status for a group”. It is also a state of being. We as facilitators are seeking to help people liberate themselves from the thought-patterns and actions of social systems of oppression in which they have been immersed. We seek to manifest the change that we seek in the world—that everyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, age, or ability, has an equal opportunity to grow, thrive and live with dignity and respect.

What We Do

Team Liberation facilitates experiential exercises and process learning methods to provide the following:

  • Communication and Relationship Building
    An initial goal of human relations facilitations is to create a safe and supportive environment conducive to open and honest dialogue.
  • Raising Awareness
    With the proper atmosphere created, a facilitation or workshop can encourage participants to expand their awareness of the impact of different social circumstances on individuals and groups.
  • Education and Training
    Workshops can also challenge participants’ assumptions about individuals and groups. It also provides opportunities to develop new strategies for care in daily interactions.
  • Consensus/Buy-In and Community Development
    Finally, group facilitation works to aid group members in recognizing and actively valuing each others’ contributions to the shared environment. This layer can include development of group goals and action plans.

Each workshop is custom designed for the participant group to match the group’s needs and goals, based upon interviews with the group organizer and using the knowledge and experience of the facilitators involved.

Written by Eric Stoller

June 19th, 2005 at 2:21 pm

Web pages that I have “touched”

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Written by Eric Stoller

June 13th, 2005 at 9:07 pm

Careening towards graduation

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Today marks a new direction for the blog. I am now going to use this space as a true online journal aka blog. Stay tuned for posts and various what not. ~EDS

Written by Eric Stoller

June 9th, 2005 at 11:25 pm

A Blog Emergency!

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The blog lost 2 posts this evening. Fortunately, I was able to use Google to search for the cached version of the site. The content has been updated and order has been restored to the galaxy!

Written by Eric Stoller

June 9th, 2005 at 11:18 pm

Hardware-o-rama

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Digital
Camera Buying Guide
at Cnet.com

Digital Camera
Guide
from Steve’s DigiCams

USB Flash
Drive review
from Ars Technica

Digital Audio Player Reviews
- A great source for information about the latest, greatest MP3
Players/Accessories.

How to burn a
CD-R in Windows XP
– Instructions by Sean Pease

CD-R FAQ – All you ever wanted to know
about CD-R’s and “burning”

Written by Eric Stoller

June 9th, 2005 at 11:16 pm

Google-mania 2005!

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  • Advanced Google
    Search
  • Google
    Suggest
    – Google suggests possible search terms while you type!
  • Google Scholar - search scholarly
    literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints,
    abstracts and technical reports. Find articles from a wide variety of academic
    publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as
    well as scholarly articles available across the web.
  • Google Compute
    “Put your computer to work advancing scientific knowledge when it’s not
    helping you.”
  • Google Sets - “Automatically
    create sets of items from a few examples”
  • Google Maps/Satellite -Mapquest on
    steroids!
  • Google Video -Google Video searches
    the closed captioning text of all the programs in Googles archive for relevant
    results.
  • Google Desktop Search Tool -
    “With Google Desktop Search, you can search the full text of your email,
    files, viewed web pages, and chats. Specifically, you can search:
    Email
    from Outlook 2000+, Outlook Express 5+, Netscape Mail 7.1+, Mozilla Mail 1.4+
    and Thunderbird
    All the files on your computer, including text, Word,
    Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, MP3, image, audio, and video files. You can even
    search your media files by meta-tag: for instance, by artist name and song
    title, not just the file name.
    Web pages you’ve viewed using Internet
    Explorer 5+, Netscape 7.1+, Mozilla 1.4+ and Firefox.
    Chats from AOL 7+ and
    AOL Instant Messenger 5+ ”
  • Google Alerts - “Google Alerts
    are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for
    your search terms. We currently offer three types of alerts: ‘News,’ ‘Web,’
    and ‘News & Web.’ ”
  • Google Local - “Google Local is a
    Google search service that helps you locate businesses in a specific
    geographic location. With Google, you can search the worldwide web; with
    Google Local, you can find an auto parts store within walking distance.”
  • Use
    Google for Definitions
    - Search for define –blank–
  • Google’s “My Search
    History”
    – “My Search History allows you to easily access and manage your
    Google web search history from any computer. You can search and browse through
    your search history over time and even check your level of activity on Google
    for any given day.”
  • Google Ride Finder - “With
    Google Ride Finder, you can search for taxis, limousines and shuttles and make
    better decisions by seeing the exact location of vehicles in your area. Just
    enter a zip code, the name of a city or even a specific address. You will get
    a map showing the companies and where their vehicles are located”
  • Gmail by Google – “Gmail is a free,
    search-based webmail service that includes more than 2,000 megabytes (two
    gigabytes) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search
    engine that quickly finds any message an account owner has ever sent or
    received. That means there’s no need to file messages in order to find them
    again.”
  • Google Answers - “Google
    Answers is a way to get that help from Researchers with expertise in online
    searching. When you post a question to Google Answers, you specify how much
    you’re willing to pay for an answer. A Researcher will search for the
    information you want. When they find it, they will post it to Google Answers,
    and you will be notified via email. You will only be charged for your question
    if and when an answer is posted to it. ”
  • Froogle by Google - “Froogle is a
    new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products
    for sale online.”
  • Google Image Search
    - Find images from all over the world.
  • Google Web Search
    Features
    - “In addition to providing easy access to more than 8 billion
    web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what
    you’re looking for.”
  • Google Language Tool -
    Translate words, sentences, web sites and more!
  • Google Picasa
    2
    – “Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all
    the pictures on your PC.”

Written by Eric Stoller

June 9th, 2005 at 11:14 pm