Did anybody ever get an Email Certificate Or…
Did anybody ever get an Email? Certificate? Or any other sort of acknowledgement that you actually completed the PBR course?
Updates from Vanessa Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Vanessa
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Vanessa
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Vanessa
NH Rebellion LIVE!
0.55 miles down!
total today 10.2 miles
Canterbury NH to Concord NH
Vanessa, Merriam, Izzy & Caitlyn during Mile 1 of NH Rebellion Canterbury to Concord walk!
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Vanessa
Hello World 2.0 We’ve reinstalled WP 3.8 @…
Hello World 2.0
We’ve reinstalled WP 3.8 @ .Re/act
hopefully the comments under wrong post biz is now behind us-
Mike
While I don’t know the cause of these problems, a lot of WP issues these days, especially regarding themes, are emanating from JavaScript.
Automattic is developing a “next generation p2” theme which is actually going to be a plugin.
http://www.slideshare.net/beaulebens/o2-wcsf2013
http://wptavern.com/o2-wordpress-plugin-expected-to-be-available-in-early-2014-
Vanessa
Hey Mike, thanks for reaching out. The problem with our P2 Child install of WooThemes Houston seemed to be, well IDK exactly, but something corrupt in the install or database. I tracked it as far as not being about any specific theme or plugin. I read that changing permalinks helped so I messed with that for a while. Then I tried reinstalling 3.8 on top of itself with no results. In the end I deleted the site and did a fresh install which works fine for the time being. (3.8 actually did initially break P2 and all child themes, but Automattic put out an update within a couple weeks)
Yes, the next gen P2, “O2″. At Beau’s talk at WCSF’13 in mid-July he said it’d be out in a month. That was over half a year ago. I guess they’ve been working on other things. He also sort of said .org first and .com later. A month or so ago they sent out a questionnaire asking who’d be interested in beta testing O2, but that it’d be on .com initially and .org down the road. I eagerly filled the questionnaire out, but it’s already been over a month since then.
Meanwhile, I think most P2 themes are a little bit visually clunky. As in not-so-aesthetically pleasing, but also sort of as in visually chaotic and harder to visualize distinct posts. Woo has really done a nice job making Houston both more pleasing and correspondingly more, I believe, functional
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Vanessa
ART + TECHNOLOGY LAB Hey all I just…
ART + TECHNOLOGY LAB
Hey all! I just discovered an exciting new project, and request for artist proposals, at Michael’s neighbor LACMA!-
Christa Forster
Van, I’m interested. Here are the bullet points that I feel most resonate with “us”:
Connection and explorations of portable identities and pseudo-identities
• Distributed experience and storytelling through multi-dimensional user
experience design
• Crowd-sourced information production and human-based computation
knowledgeAnd here are the questions that I think “we” can best answer.
Is the project artist-led and does it have artistic merit? YES
• Does it produce an interactive experience that can be presented in the
public space of the museum (which may include virtual/online space)? YES
• Does the project suggest models, methods, and/or data that may be of
interest to other artists and technologists? YES
• Does the process proposed by the artist include opportunities to present
demos, prototypes or collaborative opportunities for the public during the
development period? YESThe directions are pretty straight forward. With whoever is interested, we can split up the sections and answer them, or we — whoever is interested — could each write responses, and then we could massage the responses into a single app.
Hello! LOIS WEAVER–> 🙂
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Vanessa
OMG the lovely delightful and generous @xtaforster has…
OMG, the lovely, delightful, and generous @xtaforster has donated a dollar a mile to my virtual NHRebellion.org walk tomorrow!
Thank you so much!
BTW, we’ll be walking in SL from 9-2 EZT if you want to drop by and say hi. We’ll have extra treadmills out!
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Vanessa
New EZT time zone Now that we…
New “EZT” time zone!
Now that we aren’t enrolled in a course at Stanford anymore, we might as well stop calling “California Time” “Stanford Time.” But it’s still as good a time zone as any since a couple of us are there and the EZTV April 12 event is there. Also SL, based out of SF, runs on that time zone also, aka “SLT.” So I propose we use “EZTV Time” and to keep with the style of PST, EST, GMT, CET, etc, why don’t we just call it “EZT” -
Vanessa
OPEN ART COOKBOOK Why are so many artists…
OPEN ART COOKBOOK
Why are so many artists complicit in the capitalist model of scarcity as the driving factor in cultural production? Culture should flow like water. At the Open Art Cookbook you can find free & open recipes for art & culture. You are also encouraged to contribute recipes. Please give a shout if you’ve got a .Re/cipe!
http://practicebased.re/cipes/ -
Vanessa
On Monday 20 Jan Merriam Galaxy and I…
On Monday 20 Jan, Merriam Galaxy and I will be virtually joining the New Hampshire Rebellion walk from Canterbury, NH to Concord NH. Further details to come. You can visit our pages (and even donate to our walks!) here:
• NHRebellion.org / Merriam Galaxy
• NHRebellion.org / Vanessa Blaylock -
Vanessa
Portraits of Avatar Dancers http irez me…
Linkspam!
Portraits of Avatar Dancers!
http://irez.me/category/diaspora/365-dancers/ -
Vanessa
Interviews with Avatars on iRez http irez…
Linkspam!
Interviews with Avatars on iRez!
http://irez.me/tag/interview/ -
Vanessa
Vanessa’s side of 13 Jan Hangout
Christa asked me to post my side of todays’ Google Hangout as a sort of rough notes on the conversation.
Here it is!
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xtaforster
Thank you for posting this, Vanessa. Interesting idea: the virtual world as an “identity factory.”
Stay tuned, everyone, for the 1850 Twitter Chat Invitation.
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Mike are discussing. 
Vanessa
Wouldn’t it be great if there were 1…
Wouldn’t it be great if there were 1 place to go to see 83 selfies all of Vanessa? Now there is!
http://selfie.vanessablaylock.com
Vanessa
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xtaforster
That was so much fun, Vanessa! It’s been great working with you and learning something totally new at the same time. As I mentioned during our chat, I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration for the monologues that I’m creating from working on this project with you. Thank you, thank you.
Vanessa
FACEBOOK AS BODY LANGUAGE You know that always…
FACEBOOK AS BODY LANGUAGE?
You know that always depressing stat that something like 70% of communication is non-verbal? As in what the hell you’re actually saying doesn’t really matter much? I’ve always wondered if the type of content mattered in that percentage? So “flirting” would be almost ALL body language, your actual “content” would be very minimal. But I can’t imagine that 2 astrophysicists talking at a white board is mostly body language! That must be mostly content, right?
So… a lot of Facebook discussion is “You’re cool,” “That’s great,” “I agree!” This builds connections and community, but it doesn’t really TELL us anything content wise. Could it be that Facebook is a sort of Virtual Body Language? Low on “content” but higher on feeling and connection?
Vanessa
Xta I just learned that Oceania Planetary Park…
Xta! I just learned that Oceania Planetary Park CLOSES on 1 January 2014! I’m fine either way on this, so if you want to get something done there in a week, we can, or if it’s too much rush we can skip it.
With either choice on the physical site… I know you’ve written / recorded some voice on that. We can still do something with that. Where is that BTW? I saw/heard it from a PBR post and meant to comment on it but never had the chance.
LMK what your pleasure is.
Ho ho ho, Merry Christ[a]mas!
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xtaforster
Well! The nerve. I haven’t even gone in there yet. Gotta get in there. I wanna get something done in there — YES!
Here’s the link to the ccmixster snippet. There’s been one remix! So cool.
http://ccmixter.org/people/xtaforsterHugh McElveen mentioned that he might wanna remix it, so I will reach out to him to see if he’s still interested.
I’m with my family right now in CA, but I could probably get in on the 27th or the 29th or the 31st. Around 7:30 PST. Any of those dates work for you?
xo,
xta-
Vanessa
Great Xta! All 3 can probably work, but 7:30 PST… AM or PM?
On the audio: so cool that you got remixed!
Your recording has a lot of “plosives” in it, which is your breath hitting directly on the microphone diaphragm. On a tiny speaker you might not even hear this, but on speakers with any low end, it tends to be very loud and moves a lot of air mass. The first person to remix it seems to have cleaned that out a little bit, but I think a different mixer could do better…
Perhaps you’d be up for trying another recording. Without the plosives we might inspire another remix or two. There are a few ways to cut the plosives out. Some microphones have a “low cut” switch which helps. Also, if you aim your breath to go OVER the microphone, and not AT it, that can help a lot. A tool that works great is a “pop filter” which is a hoop with fabric over it. This blocks the big air mass of your plosives, but lets the frequencies of your speech through. You can buy one at most music shops. You can also make one by stretching sheer tights (stockings, pantyhose) over an embroidery hoop and putting that between your mouth and the microphone. You can also try to control how you let your breath out generally and on consonants like “H” and “P”.
Even though you’d like to eliminate plosives, you still want to be as close to the microphone as you can be. If you back off the mic, you’ll get more and more room tone (it will sound like you’re speaking in a trash can) And a more “dead” room is better. So lots of furniture, sofas, books, fabric, etc will make you sound clearer. A room with lots of hard surfaces, bare walls, etc, will make you sound worse.
A clean, flat voice track is a gift to a remixer who then has the maximum creative options for their mix. Yay!
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xtaforster
All good ideas. I totally know what you mean by the plosives. It’s a miracle anything got up there at all. That was built for deadline, baby! I’m probably not going to get it rerecorded before the 1st (I can try, but I don’t have a mic out here in California, which is where I am until the 28). So how about we try to meet in SL tomorrow? Let’s shoot for 7:30 a.m. if that works for you.
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Rebecca
What a great topic to be discussing! Never having been much of an online girl, the power and opportunities available through the online medium is something I have come to realize more and more within the past couple years. In realizing this I have attempted to make more of an effort to be present online and connect via the web but I have personally found it very difficult to feel connected when only communicating online, and struggle to get myself committed to such mediums when I find myself more drawn to the physical world in front of me–and I’m of the younger generation.
I would argue some of it is because, as you both spoke to, many communication sites on the internet can seem so surface level with nothing that enriching coming out of them. But as you both speak about other websites with more intellectual and substantial material I am left to think it is not that the web itself is that banal but the sites that are most known, most frequented and for this reason tend to be the sites people (including myself) gravitate towards unconsciously and easily when online–making people intern want to delete their FB as they don’t want to gravitate towards these cites. The internet has such a wide array of possibilities, and people use it for mindless past-time as well as a way to develop their ideas but it’s all a matter of choice.
But perhaps one of the benefits, and also the disadvantages, is when online you have the choice of what “watering holes” you will enter. Depending on what you read and where you voice your opinions you are choosing the people you most influence and are influenced by. This can be beneficial because you can be selective to what your needs or desires are, but can’t it also be somewhat dangerous by turning a blind eye to other parts of society that you may not identify with, but are still very much present. Of course this can be done in real life as well but when facing what’s directly in front of you, you don’t have as much of a choice for what comes at you or what “sites”, opinions, or visual imagery you get. The online world seems like a good reactionary and processing place to the real world for me. But I still find it somewhat limited on what you can really learn here and think perhaps your less likely to be surprised as you would in real life experiences. I think. Like you mentioned Michael, people need to be reached off-line as well as online but I think it extends beyond the friends who find such social media websites boring. The thing that makes me, perhaps the best word here is, nervous about this online movement is the amount that it has moved people away from direct contact and interaction. Which I think takes away a lot of little things to be learned, experienced, etc.
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Vanessa
Great Rebecca! On the Physical::Virtual mix, I think that varies a lot by personal taste. I think the wide distribution of preferences on what that mix is, is great. One way that people try to do both, is with Mobile Apps and Augmented Reality. Like an AR app to hold up your phone and see Yelp ratings superimposed on all the food places down the street. That’s definitely useful, but in a way also banal for me. With something like SnapChat, it likely isn’t high-value intellectual content, but it is a personal connection. In a way the radical idea of SnapChat is that it’s a lot about being an “old fashioned” phone conversation.
I think you’re right about where to go for whatever part of your time you’re going to spend gazing into a flat-screen. Be that a little or a lot of time. Facebook does serve a purpose, but I think a lot of us seem to feel the less FB the better. My real hope is that we can interact here on .Re/act, .Re/search, etc, and build a Conversational Community. I think having a self-selected group who read/react to each other in a space like this can be the best. Our feedback will sometimes be insightful, but even if it isn’t, we’re getting go know a “place” and a group of people and I hope over time that can come to be substantive.
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Vanessa
Hey Molly did you see Adelina’s post She…
Hey Molly, did you see Adelina’s post? She also took both PBR & Site Dance!
http://practicebased.re/search/hello-adelina/
Vanessa
Ciara, and -
Christa Forster
congrats, Van! 🙂
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Vanessa
of course we do it for love & knowledge, not virtual papyrus, but if you’re into such extrinsic motivators, one nice thing about the Coursera papyrus is that they’re connected to LinkedIn, so you can add them to your LI Profile.
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Ciara
Lovely! Congratulations, Vanessa!
Vanessa
.Re/ad? (virtual book club)
Christa mentioned Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried in today’s hangout because of his use of Metafiction, or a blend of fact & fiction that promises to be more real than real. Of course you could argue that great fiction has always been a blend of fact & fiction… and perhaps that’s true of “non-fiction” as well. Poor James Frey could have avoided such a scandal if his publisher had just called his memoir A Million Little Pieces, “metafiction.”
The idea of an online book club was floated briefly and a few heads nodded. If we did one, would we want it to be like an F2F book club: go read for a month and then meetup in a Hangout and discuss the book? Or use the asynchronous web to have a .Re/ad site like this .Re/act site where peeps could chime in and interact as they read along. Any preferences?
And do we want to read The Things They Carried? Or any other nominations?
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xtaforster
I would prefer F2F if possible. Depending on the size of the group reading the book, we could make it work in a variety of ways.
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xtaforster
Here are a couple other books that I’ll throw into the suggestion: The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry, by Harold Bloom (inspired by Vanessa’s comments on Michael’s “Chain Reaction” post in Practicebased.Re/search); it was published in 1973.
Pirates and Farmers, Dave Hickey’s new book. I’ve read parts of it, and it’s quintessential Hickey, parts unreadable and parts brilliant. So far, I’ve loved the essay on So Cal artists, “Coping with Paradise” the best, but the essay on biennales is pretty funny and good, too.
Vanessa
I’ve just done a quick browse of Udacity…
I’ve just done a quick browse of Udacity, Iversity, NovoED, and Coursera, and Coursera definitely seems to be the Arts MOOC leader. Or perhaps they’re just the biggest and have the most of everything…
https://www.coursera.org/courses?orderby=upcoming&cats=arts
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Vanessa
They all sound pretty cool, but 5 weeks of Warhol starting 21 April has to be the winner for me. Which one would you take?
https://www.coursera.org/course/warhol
Vanessa
Hangout with Molly!
Molly and I did a Google Hangout today! We talked about each other’s cool PBR projects, realized that Avatars and Puppets have something in common, and solved all the issues in MOOCs which will be much better after today. Not bad for an hour’s work.
Vanessa
MOOC Data
HCI MOOC Stats / Scott Klemmer / UC San Diego / Coursera
Molly and I were wondering how many people enrolled in our PBR MOOC and other stats we haven’t heard about. I don’t think Site Dance shared numbers either. I do know that the Future of Storytelling MOOC from Postdam / Iversity has 83,000 peeps “enrolled” yet only 120 submitted “Creative Task of the Week #4” (More …)
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Molly Ross
That is so great to see! Obviously for his content (human computer interaction) he’s interested in how many humans are interacting. I wonder why the other courses or platforms don’t just automatically include this information? Is there a reason for it?
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Vanessa
My guess is that it’s simply who bothers to share the numbers. Scott Klemmer shared his Coursera stats, but Steve Koplowitz didn’t (that I know of) share his Coursera stats. Our PBR team hasn’t shared our NovoED stats (that I know of) but Christina Maria Schollerer has shared the numbers I posted above for her Iversity “Future of Storytelling” MOOC.
Overall though, I’m with you. Why don’t the platforms themselves just share data all over the place, just as you see “72 Facebook likes” on a blog post. Or as the forums DO show the Post / Comment / Read counts.
Open Data. Open Web. Open Knowledge. It’s all about Open!
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Vanessa
Hangout w/ Xta!
In the weekly Blueberry Google Hangout this week I met up with Christa Forster. We had a great chat about our Practice Based Research MOOC, making the most of the resources, continuing the conversation after it wraps up, etc. And we also talked about her participation in The Planets virtual dance for camera project I launched for both the PBR & Site Dance MOOCs. She’s creating a poem / monologue that she’ll record and put up on CCMixter / SoundCloud and see who uses it in a music track, and then we’ll take that work and use it as the score for her Mars “dance.”
Vanessa
Surprisingly I found the Site Dance Final Projects…
Surprisingly, I found the Site Dance Final Projects a bit less exciting to read (peer review) than the Project 2 “Designing & Structuring Your Work” projects. I found the P2’s especially compelling! Maybe just the luck of the draw, IDK.
Vanessa
I’ve never heard how many students enrolled in…
I’ve never heard how many students enrolled in Practice Based Research in the Arts or Creating Site Specific Dance & Performance Works, but The Future of Storytelling from Potsdam / Iversity is now up to 80,000. I’m sure PBR & Site Dance are vastly smaller, still in all cases it’s thousands at least.
(More …)
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Vanessa
Also, only NovoED even has the feature of messaging classmates. On both Coursera & Iversity your only hope of communicating with colleagues outside of the closed, soon to be shut down, forums, is if you can find them out on the web. Some students put URLs in their profiles, but shockingly many do not.
Again, in a “massive” course, of course you can’t expect 1-to-1 contact with faculty or TA’s, so it is very much peers & colleagues that we need to form relationships with. Otherwise a MOOC is just a lecture class, and that’s a lot less.
- We need student-2-student messaging
- We need profiles that prompt (optionally) for your website
- We need groups & group messaging
- We need Peer Review with the option to not be anonymous
- We need Peer Review structured like Coursera so it’s easy, fast, fun, and useful. Not like the peer reviewing a whole transcript of discussion on NovoED that requires aspirin just to get through doing a lousy job that will help no one anyway.
Vanessa
Amazing statement from one of the Spatula &…
Amazing statement from one of the Spatula & Barcode relational projects I peer reviewed:
I decided that for my part of our group relational art project I would buy some nice chocolates to offer to other passengers on the train. When I got on the train, there were two women seated near me and I offered them chocolate. One declined, but the other took a chocolate and remarked that it was the first time in 7 years of riding the train that anyone had offered her anything.
Vanessa
Hangout with Katrina
As part of this week’s Gretchen Schiller activity Katrina and I did a Google Hangout today. We had a really great conversation. Like last week’s Spatula & Barcode activity, Gretchen’s activity was so wonderfully engaging and inclusive. More on it later, but I wanted to drop a quick note. Yay! We decided our team should do these every week!
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Ciara
This is delightful 🙂 Katrina looks both charmed and bemused – the image certainly supports the idea that you are sharing a great conversation!
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Vanessa
Totally! One topic was Street Art / Youth Culture / Culture Studies — we have a cool classmate, Adelina Ong, who’s doing interesting work there. Here’s my mini-profile:
http://blog.virtualpublicart.com/post/68002078650/adelina-ong
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kschaag
yay, ’twas so fun! 🙂
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Vanessa
Yay! BTW, one of the nicest experiences you can have online is filling out Katrina’s “contact” form! Everyone should go try it!
http://katrinaschaag.wordpress.com/contact/
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Vanessa
Coursera from CrunchBase Mountain View based online education…
Coursera – from CrunchBase
Mountain View-based online education startup Coursera has added another $20 million to its previously $43 million Series B round, adding three unnamed university partners as well as additional funding from GSV Capital and Learn Capital. Coursera aims to provide an Ivy League-caliber education online for free and currently serves 5.5 million students enrolled in classes from 100 institutions. Founded in 2012, Coursera has raised $85 million in funding to date.
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themollyross
FROM NEW YORK TIMES
Online Courses Attract Degree Holders, Survey Finds
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: November 20, 2013About 80 percent of people who enrolled in a massive open online course, or MOOC, from the University of Pennsylvania had already earned a bachelor’s degree, according to a survey of 34,000 students who had at least started one of the 24 courses the university offered on the Coursera platform. Although Coursera’s founders have presented their MOOCs as a way to democratize higher education by making it available online, free, to anyone in the world, the Penn survey found that in the United States and developing countries alike, most Coursera students were well educated, employed, young and male. Penn’s courses account for 20 percent of Coursera’s enrollment.
Vanessa
NovoED wants us to write a SIX paragraph…
NovoED wants us to write a SIX paragraph review of our classmates ONE paragraph submission on Hickson & Goulish? Gawd!
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Ciara
Cometh…THE GRID!!! Argh!!! I think it was supposed to make the process easier for us but I fear it is rather counterproductive…
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Molly Ross
I appreciated The Grid’s attempt to add structure to an otherwise vague guide line for reviews on NovoEd. Constructive feedback is one of the challenges in both online and offline critiques. More work needs to be done in MOOCs and hybrid learning to explore better options for feedback for artwork. Good, Fair, Excellent are not constructive feedback.
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Vanessa
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Vanessa
Hi, just testing comment notification. TY!
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Molly Ross 13:39 on 25/01/2014 Permalink |
No. PBR just sort of faded away.
Vanessa Blaylock 16:18 on 07/02/2014 Permalink |
There’s a discussion thread on the Facebook PBR Student Group. Apparently some people have contacted our faculty about certificates and gotten the response that we should prove that we were ever promised certificates!? The classmates appear to be in touch with someone at NovoED other than the course faculty who is “working on it.”