We need to prepare students for the future not catch up to the past.
Reminded of Otto Scharmer and The Presencing Institute and how we need to stop leading from the past. You can't change the past. What we need is a new way of conjuring future as it wants to emerge now. Scharmer's book Theory U is an ethereal manual on how to do just that.
focusing
Focus--now there's a magic metaphor. Part of me loves legible illusions like the map and chart and the infographic. Insofar as they are of use but only just another filter for meaning I am OK with it, but the institutional demands of schooling always make them something more.<br> I think that part of the problem is in that magic word focus. If you want to extend the metaphor a bit to the biological realm, as I understand it our brains actually put together more information about visual "reality" from the peripheral. Plus, there is a huge paradox in focusing: our high def , sharp vision occupies 1% of the retinal area but preoccupies 50% of the visual cortex. The paradox being that the fovea is a blindspot because of its acuity. We see yet we do not. Our minds are half occupied with seeing the grand 1% of the sensorium (yeah, I can appreciate the analogy to modern economic life here) Small wonder that the Latin word fovea originally translates as "pit or pitfall". Focus is a pitfall, there for a specific adaptive purpose--to survive on some savannah or woodland or veldt somewhere. But we live in a very different environment now. We need the periphery. Metaphor controls, it is the default until we reprogram it. I think we need to reprogram the 'focus' metaphor.
guiding student to discover
I think so too, but also part of me is so wary of trying to know what is best for someone else.
part of my life
Mine, too. Partly internalized, partly a space to revisit, partly a piece to fit into the large and borderless 4d puzzle that is living.
What do you think the above image is?
the would be two sets of frog eyes at night in a muddy pool.
Here’s what I wrote to her:
I don’t think the change is largely in the medium. I think the change is in the stance. Most of what people are calling remediation, most of what I am doing in fact, is just a mapping over from one medium to another. Unless the parallax occurs like Sousanis talks about in Unflattening, I don’t think there is a remediation. It’s not the medium it’s the messenger.
I am trying to find some balance for the word even as I work with the concept.
I am trying to hold two or three defs in my head here. Context is all. Language can be terribly tribal. Or in this case a guild language like so much academic jargon, intended to off-put the uninitiated and to make sure that those with the correct handshake and ring can play.
a desire to honor my responsibility to the community.
You are following through and I am up early this morning trying to honor your intention--reciprocation, to me the most powerful social reason of all. Only my humble opinion.
I realized that I was feeling pressure - self-generated, I'm sure - to "lead" since the inquiry strand is "my thing"; and I was feeling that I needed to produce something in order to "lead."
I was feeling similar pressures from farm work and the miserable heat and humidity. I am getting up at 4 am now to get some decent head work in before I have to do the farm stuff. Don't cry for me, Argentina.
We do not want to leave the school system behind. We need to keep driving toward where we want everyone to be versus waiting until everyone is ready. The end goal will involve the Internet, and there needs to be a framework for it.
But we do want to leave it behind--the words we use--"school system" tell us exactly what is at the center--schools. What we learn are learn systems where learning is at the center which implies tacit-wise that the learner is at the center.
Using Wikipedia’s “Wikipedians” as a general compass, only .01 — .02 % of their audience creates (contributes) to their community. Everyone else, statistically including yourself, is just a leech of the system.
"Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence."
I get the click of recognition with this particular quote. The world isn't so much flat as that Pharisee Friedman asserts as it has been leveled like the top of a mountain, all the energy goodies ripped out and the overburden midden gravity fed below, holler fill.
animated gif in a zeega Terry Elliott did
Here is the link: http://zeega.com/170893
they noticed that my whole article was really about that
I have just the book for you: Sentipensante Pedagogy
but our real need is to feel loved ok, that’s a bit extreme, but you know
No, this is not extreme at all. Love has so many forms and all are worthy.
watch this and push back against the criticism of our profession
Also, watch this and be aware of what drives folks to say and think horrible thinks about the very folk they claim to trust with their kid's brains.
This is a great idea, WMWP. Real service for your community.
Maybe that is where this argument goes. I believe that the The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. Audre Lorde.
continue caring.
Ancillary question: care about what?
those that care and those that don’t care
The problem for me is that this is a continuum of caring. They are oftentimes both. They define caring from each-their-own perspective. In other words the strategic students show how they care by honoring the system that assigns points to work and the intrinsic learners show they care by honoring their own inner compass. These 'definings' and 'honorings' are quite different from the way teachers and mentors define caring which are in turn quite variable.
she made the mistake
Reminds me of Taylor Mali: What Teachers Make. Or you can just listen to the relevant snippet here: Let's Be Honest
“do they care?”.
Simon Ensor and I have been having 'picnic' conversations on this over the last couple of months. I have even had Hangouts of One (yes, I am a lonely dude) that are in part about this. In our picnics the question has taken another form: is it fun?
Are you pro- or anti-emoji?
I am anti-communication. Just like the patent office said in 1865 about no new patents and what Bill Gates said about memory (yes, he really did say it-- [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/]) we don't really need new vintages do we?
There’s a strain of Jewish humor that hinges on which word is stressed in speech, which corresponds to which word is in italics in writing.
Well...this borrowing from voice to speech is not exclusive to any culture. He just wanted an excuse to tell a joke.
It’s not that good writers have chosen to flout a rule; it’s that the rule is not a rule in the first place. What Heller and many writers before him have never asked is: What makes a rule a rule? Who decides? Where does it come from?
This is exactly the same thinking I discuss with students when I introduce citation to them. I get the inevitable question: why do I have to do it this way? I respond with three words: tribal, logical, conventional. Not in any particular order. Linguists are descriptive, grammar marms are prescriptive. Guess who is way more interesting.
you’d sound like a pompous jackass.
Holy, leaping jehosaphats of hyperbole, Batman. He's so hyperbolic he's asymptotic. Yeah. I said it.
I tend not to be a pedant about Latin plurals. I like “the media are,” but I’m in a fussy minority here.
Using the connotative and negative tone of pedant shows exactly how he feels.
Trying to embed something in here from the atlantic article
<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="<a href=" http:="" <a="" href="http://www.theatlantic.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.theatlantic.com="" video="" iframe="" 384088="" "="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/384088/"></iframe> OK, that didn't work. How about a YouTube vid? <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//<a href=" http:="" <a="" href="http://www.youtube.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.youtube.com="" embed="" VX07m-wahOg"="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.youtube.com/embed/VX07m-wahOg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> OK, not embeds work so far. Not even images. Inserting images using the image url just gives you a link. Was hoping for the actual image.
astonished at how difficult they were to interpret.
similar to a telephone interview--transcripts are valuable to the visually impaired but they represent a throttling of the gestalt, the whole of voice and vision that make up the full monty that is F2F conversation.
his grammar feud
Yeah, grammar marmism is rampant in our worlds. Some people mistake language for a machine when it is really a joshua tree or a redwood or some kind of fungus. The only disease that would kill language would be the evolution of telepathy and I don't think that would do it. To adapt Johnny Paycheck: take your rules Mr. Heller and shove 'em.
the author and Harvard professor
Interesting choice of word order here: author and professor instead of professor and author.