Phronesis

Is the worm turning and the importance of an empty space

I'm at a new desk. I've transformed one of my rooms into a new office - come guest room. The desk is tall and looks like a bar and you sit on bar stools (with lower back support). My idea is to have a space where I can work with people round the same table. We can talk and work and it's easy to slip in and out of the space.

I'm paying attention at the moment to the way my work with online tools is making me more conscious of offline spaces. I find myself worrying at  the way people are reaching for online tools as panaceas. Mastering the tool becomes a pathway to  a promised land.

I'm co-responsible for those expectations. And I increasingly doubt them. Spaces as places to be together and alone. How do we design for those spaces and places?

In her (as always) fantastic Nobel Lecture on Not Winning the Nobel Prize Doris Lessing says

"Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.      

        If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn."

I'm struck by how "writers" could be a metaphor for people as creators of meaning. Do we need an empty space to surround us as we design meanings for our lives? Where are the empty spaces for listening and paying attention to words and inspiration?  How meaningful is what we are doing, if we can't find that space? How many poems and stories of learning and change may be stillborn, if we  grab the instruments and ignore the spaces?

Writing as a social event

I'm in Porto - that place you're bound to get lost if you're driving  - where we are going to do a two day writing session at a workshop we called CIBlend. What a treat! Ten of us from Australia, UK, Portugal, who have never written together before and our plan is to write an article(s) for the Community Informatics journal.

Real collaborative writing is an intimate act and also with a lot of tensions. I'm intrigued to see how this goes.

What can I say to make you understand?

I think this book is very important.

I read it at a time when Web2.0 conversations were starting to bug me -  because they seem to look at what's happening now as if there was no past beyond (before) Web1.0. As if Web2.0 was in isolation from history, future, philosophy and context.

I was making sure that my reading went beyond those conversations.

The book "Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide" is a testimony and photography from Rwandas survivors. "What can I say to make you understand?" comes from one of the génocidaires interviewed about his actions and motives.

The author/photographer writes:

“I believe that ... I am responsible for portraying people without emphasizing my own preconceptions. I want something of each person to come through in the image, to be experienced emotionally and retinally… by closing the space between ourselves and the ‘other’, we can perhaps begin to ask more critical questions ..."

As the author says, by  reducing people to the "other" it  conveniently absolves us of complicity in or responsibility for their actions.

It's a long stretch putting Web2.0 and the Rwandan Genocide in the same blog post, but I have shadows of thoughts that tell me they are connected. And I'm reminded of Shit happens:

Web2.0 is talked about as if it were one big social, collaborative, networking family. But perhaps it's really about providing a space for all "others" who are, actually, not connected.

I am sometimes overwhelmed by the complexity and the seriousness of it all.  And distanced when the conversation is reduced to "Web2.0". There are lives, a future, and changing contexts at stake. And now, more than ever, it seems important to get it right.

Lust for learning - an alchemy of human flourishing

The other day I was happy to talk to someone who is Greek-Portuguese and who understood the name of my company, Eudaimonia. We agreed that the best translation to English is "human flourishing" - although we didn't come to any conclusion about how to say it in Portuguese.

Eudaimonia was again in my conversation with Luís, who I hope is going to help me improve the design of my webpage. I was looking for images and metaphors for the design and sent him some info-bytes about Eudaimonia from wikipedia:

Eudaimonia is constituted, according to Aristotle, not by honor, or wealth, or power, but by rational activity in accordance with virtue over a complete life. Such activity manifests the virtues of character, including courage, honesty, pride, friendliness, and wittiness; the intellectual virtues, such as rationality in judgment; and non-sacrificial (i.e. mutually beneficial) friendships and scientific knowledge (knowledge of things that are fundamental and/or unchanging is the best)."

"Phronesis" the name of my blog - is the Greek name for the knowledge you need in order to achieve Eudaimonia)

Then, today, a friend (Filipa) sent me of a quotation by Goethe, which also captures an idea of human flourishing. I was reminded - again - of the greatness of some people (like Aristotle and Goethe) in whose discourse and designs we still live and (re)create meaning for our own lives. All the things we talk about now, from ethics to pattern theory to communities to colour and beyond, are revisiting and regenerating conversations they already had.

Anyway, here's Goethe's quote, which for me contains the essence of human flourishing:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

Informal Learning - Etienne Wenger

I've put up my notes on Wenger's session at the eLearning conference in Lisbon on the conference blog.

Etienne talks about learning as a question of who we are in the world. Who we are as learners is not a technique it as an experience of being alive and of being in the world.

This seems so key and so fundamental to all the work that I do. A social perspective on learning is a perspective of learning to become a person who has a certain experience of the world. This perspective is integral to my designs for learning. People ask me for techniques, methods, tools, recipes, activities, communities of practice. And I can earn an income from selling them those.

But really all I have to offer is something of my own trajectory and my own being in the world.

My being in the world is increasingly complex and covers many domains. I engage in many different domains, personal, public, professional, academic - and what's more, my domains cross languages and cultures. The question facing me and other people is: how do I manage myself in a meaningful way at the intersection of my involvement in  these different domains?

Death by Moodle

I'm hearing horror stories of Moodle training for teachers and lecturers in secondary schools in Setúbal and the Business School where I worked.

This is how it works: you sit there for THREE HOURS while someone explains how to use every function in Moodle to you. Never, at any stage in the training do you get in there and try anything for yourself.

But by the end of the training you get a certificate - or points - to say you did a Moodle course. And you are therefore more qualified to do eLearning.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Beginner's guide to going online

The other day I felt like I was trailing. One of the reasons, I confess, is that I read Beth Kanter's blog where she gives these kinds of lists about how Twitter might be used. How should I translate that list into a language my own constituents would speak?

Then I watched this video. It's wonderful and I laughed so hard. This is where I see many people and the video reassured about my own quest. What are the bridges between a hundred ways to use twitter and navigating round the tool? And what shifts someone from the tool to dreaming about what you could use it for?

Finding MY way

I made sense of something yesterday.

It started when I phoned my friend and neighbour to check if I was in the right place for the cabeleireira she had suggested to me.  (I was going for a hair-cut.) From her directions I had the option of two streets in front of me - and I wanted to know which one to take.

- This is where I am, I said (describing my location).

- OK, she said. Imagine you are leaving our prédio (block of appartments) and you go .... turn right, then first left ...

- But I'm here, I said. I want to know where I go from here. Just tell me - do I take the right or the left?

- Imagine you are going to the restaurant at the end of the street, she said ...

- But I don't want to go to the restaurant, I said. I want to know if I go right or left, from here.

And that's what started me fully appreciating Google maps and directions.

For those of us who are spatially-challenged (see different learning styles) Google maps has text with a sequence of directions that successfully take me from here to there. Google maps understands that my concern is where I am and not where I'm going. Nor where other things and places are. Just me and my next step. Linearly.

Google maps is also for visually smart people. They can also get your directions from a Google map.

That got me thinking about how it will be when I get a geotracking navigation system with audio instructions. Then my identity will be transformed into a person who easily finds their way and not as this ignoramus whose eyes glaze when they see a map.

I never did find the hair-dresser with my neighbour's instructions - but I did feel overwhelmed at how these new and free tools can open up our trajectories of being, how they can change our identity - and how many opportunities are arising from that.

Shit happens

"Shit happens, we're all different, our civilization or businesses are fragile but having an effective platform on which to carry out the endless working things out that is necessary is something precious and worth advocating and protecting."

That comes from Working things out by Euan Semple a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, shit happens and the ongoing process of working it out is precious. (In fact working things out between our paradoxically fragile and resilient selves is a pretty good definition of learning for me.) But I wonder what Euan had in mind about the "effective platform". I think he might have been referring to blogs as the platform.

I wish I could remember where I read someone say that the difference between Web1.0 and Web2.0 is that in Web2.0  the community is the platform, not the tool or the technology. Ignore the references to Web1.0 and Web2.0, it's the metaphor of the platform I'm talking about.

The community is the platform and tools like blogs (can) give voice(s) to different people in that precious process of working things out.

I think that's a really important focus to bring up over and over and over again. The community is the platform not the tools or technology.

What gym classes can teach you about web2.0

I was at a gym class. Lots of us were waiting for the rather gorgeous gym teacher to start the class. She was late and went to turn on the music. It didn't start. Flustered she tried again. Nothing.

Can anyone help?

Lunch-time class, many people on lunch work-break... no-one volunteered and the atmosphere clicked up a notch.

Bev, who doesn't know how to work her video machine or a stereo, goes over to the apparatus. For the first time in her life - in relation to a piece of musical equipment - she thinks both logically and plays illogically with what can or can't be working.

Tension mounting, butch men watching, and gym instructor phones macho husband for help.

In the meantime Bev discovers a button that turns the sound up.

Gorgeous gym teacher phones macho husband that it's been resolved. Room atmosphere changes as quick response to problem has been found.

Now where did I learn to have the confidence to experiment, to make mistakes, to think through, and to be sure that I would eventually find a solution?

And what's the connection with that and thinking that all I did was to find the volume control?