An unofficial AU advocate at large, Jason never misses a chance to recount the merits of an Athabasca education. Jason’s studies began alone in front of a rustic rural fireplace in December of 2003 and carried on through various brick and mortar college classrooms yet always with Athabasca as part of his journey. In 2014 he completed his BA in Sociology and in 2022 graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies. To this end, his columns seek to explore edifying moments of learning how to learn within the challenging ideological terrain of that great bugaboo facing students everywhere: the real world!
Pondering the joys of deep fried prawns and the possibility of subsisting for several days in a row on the same meal, a menacing concern began to gnaw at my entrails: what if variety isn’t the spice of life at all? Maybe when we have a good thing, such as a favourite academic discipline, we… Read more »
In a timeless instant, simultaneous and thereby immeasurable, a Queen passed away and a King occupies the throne. This instant transfer in power serves as a reminder that, lest we forget the centuries of history that have culminated in our clickbait culture, aversion to even a moment’s pause weighs heavily on many institutions. Ambiguity breeds… Read more »
Intellects ablaze with school smarts, we might ask how we might expand the appeal of our newfound learning. Perhaps an expanded sense of humor would help, but what kind of jokes are safe and what sagely wisdom might we impart if we’re restricted to predictable puns? John Cleese, notable for the counter-culture opus, Monty Python,… Read more »
I’m writing this with my feet dunked into a cooler of ice-cold hose water. So that’s what you hoser can mean! Musing at my breathtaking lack of creativity in dealing with heat in past summers, I start to wonder how helpful schooling really is to daily life. Isn’t higher education supposed to aid us in… Read more »
The meaning of life is a topic salubrious to spicy conversations at a shady beach, the sort of anyone-may-apply-for genius-status topic that renders we would-be AU academics illiterate or pedantic or both. Why ask about life’s meaning, a stern scientist might answer, when such a question is naturally relative to one’s personal opinion and worldview?… Read more »
Who is the you that makes your choices yours? AU lets us put our option muscles to work in a big way; these decisions embody our personal agency. We exercise agency each time we prioritize our individual studies over calls for attention in our private and work lives. To have agency is to have a… Read more »
Meaning in life need not be religious, but when life feels worthwhile that feeling can carry an almost mystical quality. As our AU journey unfolds, we evolve into a new version of our self. No matter how many facts, theories, and concepts we absorb the holistic benefit of our education surpasses the details. Inspiration guides… Read more »
To learn is to know, or so the theory goes. We add information to our minds and develop processes to accentuate our knowledge acquisition skills. Yet, the internet provides multiple answers to many of the same questions; you need only decide your point of view in advance and have it confirmed if you want to… Read more »
Protean possibilities, boundless as one’s imagination, begin with raw facts. Think of how you feel in any given moment of whimsy, dipping salted French fries into a milkshake for instance, and it’s clear that the stuff of reality is also the mean of reality’s transcendence. The present tense, seemingly immutable and certain and stolid, is… Read more »
Here in 2022 at AU, where computers and the internet are irrevocably crucial to our learning, we might not even realize that our current educational experience is part of a historical industrial revolution of our minds where attention to the chalkboard and teacher were replaced, physically, by attention to a computer as programmed arbiter of… Read more »