Padlet and Networked Knowledge About Afrofuturism.

I’ve been using padlet to collect items on the internet about topics I teach and study. the first one I made was on the topic of Afrofuturism. I was nervous to begin at first, despite the first six weeks of my summer being dedicated to reading Black sci-fi. Had I stuck to my plans this first padlet would have been a YouTube playlist of songs. I have been struggling with a familiar insecurity of sharing what I’ve just recently started to learn in a course I took for credit, one I designed and will appear on my transcript. You know what I mean, the wave of doubt that washes over you as a student in formal Higher Education settings causing you to question the worthiness of your voice and the knowledge stored in its sounding. To weigh the risks of showing what you comprehend, and how you got there. The impressions and assumptions others make about the path you took to get a specific point in your knowledge with all its gaps and self-consciousness. It’s a vulnerable process to engage in demonstrating your comprehension of something especially on the internet, social media no less. Once I got started those volatile thoughts gnawing at my confidence grew quiet, they were silent while I was entranced in building the board. 

I usually work to music. I felt so relaxed I forgot register the sounds I was making–typing and clicking on my keyboard, reading aloud and thumping my foot against the chair’s leg. My breath slowed in my selection of each article, video, photograph. The playlist’s songs faded one after the other and the other. Time felt like it stopped. I remembered many things at once this artist’s Afrofuturist offering from that one time;  that article about AF someone sent me yesterday; those new photos an artist I admire posted on IG; and such and such journalist’s take on a far out 70s lecture are all added to my padlet. So I’m sharing it with you now.