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UCLA GSE&IS Web Forums
The UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS) once hosted GSE&IS web forums, where participants logged into a particular course to post exchanges relevant to topics taken up in the lectures and course materials. The discussion forums were also used by faculty and students to inform one another about events and matters occurring outside the classrooms, and posts followed out of these as well. These forums were open to students and registered guests.
I registered as a guest to participate in the web forum for course Education 229, "Critical Theory: Power, Politics, and Liberation," taught by Peter McLaren. I expected that the facts of my termination from UCLA's GSE&IS would spark some interest among GSE&IS students (and a faculty member) who were in this course (and web forum) to discuss radical changes to education and its institutions.
My first post to this "Power, Politics, and Liberation" discussion forum was titled: Silence is golden.
I then regularly logged into this forum to find out what other participants might have to say about this post. I received no replies to this post.
Some days later, I put up my second post to this discussion forum: A few questions to prompt discussion? I received no replies to this post either.
My third post, Fact checking cannot be expected, went up several days after the second post.
Shortly thereafter, upon logging into this forum I found that my three posts no longer appeared. And this disappearance was odd because the forum's posts stayed up indefinitely. There was, however, a new post telling students that they would soon be receiving instructions via email about future posting in this discussion forum.
I was then able to determine the instructions emailed to the students when I tried to log into this forum again and found that it had been name and password locked.
Now locked out of McLaren's discussion forum on "Power, Politics, and Liberation," I logged into a disused discussion forum from a prior quarter, IS 289-4, "Critical Issues" (Professor Chu) and put up the three posts that had been disappeared from McLaren's forum. (This forced change in venue explains the "IS 289 (Chu)" found in the subheading on these documents.) In this new forum, I also added this post: An interesting situation... .
I came back to this "Critical Issues" forum a few months later to up this post, and returned several months later to put up another post, and thereby end my attempts to use these two GSE&IS Discussion forums to interest students and faculty in my termination from UCLA's GSE&IS.
Perhaps a year or more later, I registered and logged into another GSEIS Discussion Forum. This course was taught by GSE&IS faculty member, Douglas Kellner, and I recall the course title as something having to do with the philosophy of education and the works of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I made more than a few posts to this forum, but I have since been able to find only this post. By this time I expected no replies from these UCLA GSE&IS Discussion Forums. As expected, no replies.
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