User:Philbartle/My Profile

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Phil Bartle

Mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled - Plutarch

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My profile
My name is Phil Bartle. My students and staff call me Dr. Phil but I have no relation to that guy on Oprah. Please call me Phil, and I will call you by your first name. (No initials or titles, please).

I live in the City of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia in Western Canada, on Vancouver Island. Just to confuse us, the City of Vancouver is not on Vancouver island, it is on the mainland (and Victoria Island is in the Arctic).

Although I am called a "user" on this site, I do not use recreational drugs (except caffeine) and I do not use people. I like to use my brain and encourage others to do so, also. I know that common sense is not all that common, but I appreciate logical thinking and acting.

I am retired now, and disabled. Most of my adult life I spent in Africa and Asia, as I moved back and forth between Academia as a professor of sociology, and as an aid worker with a focus on community participation. I prefer the kind of aid that leads to self reliance and sustained development, not charity for emergency response.

I spend most of my time working on a web site for training community workers how to strengthen low income communities, and with the NGO I founded, Community Empowerment Collective (CEC). CEC consists mainly of online volunteers who translate the training material into many languages for world wide access. It is a non commercial site and our NGO has an annual budget of zero. There are over five thousand web pages on the site, and we get about half a million page views per month.

You are welcome to come and take a look at it, and I would be very happy if you made suggestions on how to integrate it with WikiEducator.

More about me

My interests
I'm interested in:

Sustainable community empowerment
Since health prevents me from traveling any more, I live vicariously through the CEC (Community Empowerment Collective), in daily contact with volunteers and users (readers) from all over the world. Our organization, CEC, has several hundred volunteers, most of whom translate. I spend much time in massaging incoming translations to upload them to the site, encouraging the coordinators who guide and support the volunteers, edit and update the material, and do what I can to help the team develop,

Community Empowerment



Kwawu culture and society
The Kwawu are an Akan group in West Africa, related to the Asante (Ashanti). Their traditional social organization is based on matrilineal descent, but they are very much in the modern world with one of the highest literacy and education rates in Africa. They are resident and engage in communication and travel all over the world, especially Europe and North America. Ghana is very peaceful and Ghanaians pride themselves on arbitrating and settling disputes without resort to violence. The country now has many refugees from nearby countries torn by strife and civil war. My second language is Twi (Akan) and I married a woman from Ghana and brought her to Canada.

Akan Studies



Sociology
Within the discipline, I am most interested in (1) Introductory Sociology made simple for community workers with middle school education, (2) the Sociology of Communities, and (3) Applied Sociology, with a focus on community empowerment. I have taught many other courses: Epistemology, Family, Community, Research Methods, Traditional African Societies, Modern African Societies, Institutions, Marxist Sociology, Introductory Social and Cultural Anthropology, Social Change, Culture Change, and Economics, and I remain interested in all those topics. From time to time I add new documents to the site.

Sociology for the Beginner



Developing WikiEd training material
I took the course on making Wiki pages (L4C), twice, and I am developing an Introductory course on Community Empowerment.

So far I have been getting all the help I ask for, and am also having fun finding things out for myself.

I have called for and started designing an on line conference on Non Formal Education (within which my focus is on Functional Literacy). I am not well versed on launching such a conference, so it has stalled for now.

Meanwhile, I have started designing two sociology courses on WikiEd: Introductory Sociology, and the Sociology of Community and Family, and have been considering several other courses in community empowerment.

OER

Personal interests

 * ♥  My children: Greg, Beatrice, Amanda
 * My dog: Java (Golden Retriever & Heinz)
 * Fish and chips: with tartar sauce and malt vinegar
 * Email correspondence: CEC volunteers, family, friends
 * Radio: Good documentaries, Canadian country and folk music

and a few peeves:
 * Religious and ideological bigotry and intolerance
 * Chat shorthand and other bad English
 * Unexplained acronyms
 * Corporate culture
 * boiled carrots
 * email spam





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Today is: 2024 August  28, Wednesday The time is, Zulu (ie. at Greenwich)

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Notes from my Wikineighbours
Please put your comments in the Discussion page; Hit the discussion tab at the top of the page. --Phil Bartle 21:37, 20 April 2009 (UTC)