Amazing Salamanca !!

Salamanca is one of the oldest university towns in Europe. Salamanca is in Spain, midway between Madrid and Santander.
I was there in late July 2009 and was impressed by the many fine churches and cathedrals. But the Plazamayor was amazing: not for its grandeur, but its democracy as a space.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I arrived there with two friends Harry and Mike. The tables were out. Large numbers of people were there sitting having a drink or a snack doing their favourite thing: watching other people and talking amongst themselves. There was a buzz in the air. People were happy. Yet there were no centralising figure like a conductor of music, or a singer of songs or a politician giving a speech.
The sheer democracy of the arrangement of the square was something to behold. The buildings around the plaza were interesting, but seeing it full of people enjoying themselves talking and drinking forcibly reminded me no one person was in charge of these democratic conversational exchanges. It was a Self-Organising phenomenon, pure and simple.
It is a pity I lost my digital camera. A video clip would have conveyed the essence of the amazing atmosphere generated in this large yet enclosed space.

Correspondence Course - an intriguing beginning.

Yesterday I took an examination in Theology. (It was my second exam in fact.) It was a correspondence course from Moody College, Sydney, Australia. It has a good reputation for well managed Correspondence Courses in Theology via its External Relations department.

But for years I was always against Correspondence courses: there was no live human element. There was no other person to talk to about the topics given. Yet for a Self-organised Learner it should be a natural thing to do. Just take up the challenge. So I signed up and received their study book (left).

The idea is to complete the ten study units at the rate of one a week, then spend a fortnight revising, then take a two-and-a-half hour examination. It is all very well structured.

Furthermore the writing in the taught materials is very clear indeed: concise and focused. The examination paper is structured well, too. There are a few multiple choice questions, then four line answer questions, then half-page essays (five in all) and finally a single long essay question.

All the motivation came from inside me. Ichose to do the course - and that is a key point. The course was not imposed on me. I can defer taking the exam to another term. Just a seventy page study book and me. Remarkable.

Rapid Cognition or Intuition?

This post has been prompted by Malcolm Gladwell's recent short book "Blink". He argues there is such a thing as Rapid Cognition, and differentiates it from Intuition.

We see rapid cognition most often in competitive sport. In football a striker does not have long to ponder on a shot, in fact he must act within a second and dupe those around him who are seeking to crowd out his space. We see it in conversation when someone from nowhere makes a very telling and witty remark, thereby crushing a whole line of argument. In a crowded world, where things are often seen fleetingly, it is important to recognise the value of "rapid cognition". In fact recognition is another word for rapid cognition. When we recognise something we imply we have thought about what it is. We display our knowledge of a thing by first recognisising and identifying it.

The three biological terms of fight, freeze and flight are manifested behaviours of threatened animals. They are decisions taken rapidly and need to be right!

Trapped an animal has no option but to fight. However, aware it is in a dangerous situation an animal will freeze. It will do nothing to reveal its position. Finally, it might come to a conclusion that its best chance of survival is to get away quickly, to flee, and live for another day.

So we see recognition of danger and rapid cognition as to what action to take are both heightened, and come to fruition within a moment. In a blink, in fact.

Just doing something - a meta post.

It can be difficult collecting your thoughts, especially when the ground seems to move from under your feet. After a long time lag I felt I needed to make a post to check all was well on "briansblogonstuffthathappens". But were there changes!!

Every once in a while you look at your blog and no ideas are flowing. Yet for some unfathomable and intuitive reason one feels the need to make a change - and adjustment - to check the blog is still functioning.
So, just to change my picture (the new picture is shown left), I find the whole blog technology has moved on. But it is access to my account via Google email addresses that has been the problem. An emergent centralising tendency by Google, the new owners of Blogger.

Blogger has been bought by Google, I can only access my blog by a google account, png is the new favoured graphic file format for pics on the web and I have other blogs accessed via a different gmail account!!

At what point does steady change become turbulence on the web?

Who moved my cheese?

"Who moved my cheese?" (WMMC) is a slim book - 94 pages - by Spencer JOHNSON on the management of change. Its four characters are two mice "Sniff" and "Scurry" (students?) and two Littlepeople "Hem" and "Haw" (lecturers?).

It is a parable of profound truths which apply to any person's world.

It would make a marvelous study for any examination of the issues of self-organised learning and change that is self managed. The mice simply react to change in an instinctual fashion, whereas the Littlepeople want to have solid reasons for changing. So much so that they hold on to their existing tethered assumptions assumptions far too tightly and become amusingly reactionary.

The Cheese here - what is it? It is anything you deem important. For students it might be "getting lots of good grades" - for lecturers it might mean "enjoying the pleasant collegiate atmosphere of a University and writing papes for gentle discussion at colloquia".

Pushing the parallel between the two Littlepeople, Hem and Haw (two lecturers?), we read on page 34 their reaction to not finding any cheeses at Cheese Station C:

Finding Cheese wasn't easy, and it meant a great deal more to the Littlepeople than just having enough of it to eat every day.
Finding Cheese was the little people's way of getting what they thought they needed to be happy. They had ideas of what Cheese meant to them, depending on their taste.

For some, finding Cheese was having material things. For others it was enjoying good health or developing a spritual sense of well-being.
For Haw, Cheese just meant feeling safe, having a loving family someday and living in a cozy cottage on Cheddar Lane.
To Hem, Cheese was becoming a a Big Cheese in charge of others and owning a big house atop Camembert Hill

Because Cheese was important to them, the two Littlepeople spent a long time trying to decide what to do. All they could think of was to keep looking around Cheeseless Station C to see if the cheese was really gone.

While Sniff and Scurry had quickly moved on, Hem and Haw continued to hem and haw.

They ranted at the injustice of it all. Hawstarted to get depressed. What would happen if the Cheese wasn't there tomorrow? He had made future plans based on this Cheese.

The Little people couldn't believe it How could this have happened? No one had warned them. It wasn't right. It was not the way things were supposed to be."

Times change and we must change with them. Hem and Haw were holding too tightly to their beliefs about the changing world around them. They saw it as a static unchanging world. It was understood. They knew how things were meant to be. But something had happened that was unexpected, cosy comfortable collegiality had changed into a world of seeking money, writing papers and building esteem (Yes - I am talking the Research Assessment Exercise here.)

In SOL terms thety were unaware. In Heideggar's terms they simply had undifferentiated everyday-ness. They had stopped caring for their environment and took it for granted. "It will always be here," they thought. The absence of Cheese became an awakening event.

Who said allegory was dead?

And what is the lesson? Johnson's answer:

• Anticipate change.
• Adapt to change quickly
• Enjoy change.
• Be ready to change quickly, again and again.

All thoughtful stuff.

Giorgi's Qualitative Research approach

I have been working with an ex-student Cara Ivers on transcribing a one hour debrief in July 2006 on a 'ba' learning session held during the academic year 2005-06. It is a time consuming business. We have not got to the four steps yet! But it is a way forward, a way of digging deeper into what the students felt, and said, about their group learning and their personal learning.
I was struck by how vividly Cara seems to remember some of the small details in what we did in our weekly Learning Coach sessions.
Cara described feeling sorry for many final year students, for they had few positive memories of their project work in the final year of an undergraduate programme.
It is also the case so few students have been inspired to create a new business and new jobs. It sems there is an unexamined assumption working here: a job is something "you go out and get" rather than "create". I wished I had explored that theme in the 'ba' sessions.
In the last seven years I have probably seen 700 final year students pass through my hands on BSc Multimedia, yet only three out of 700 have created jobs.
There is just one seemingly successful example, Mediatonic, which seems to be doing well. If there is one number the UK Government should require in its returns from Universities it is this one: "State the number of jobs created by your ex-students in the last seven years and thereby identify the secret of job creation by your students and relate it to your approaches as an institution to innovation and enterprise.
The results of such a trawl of universities of their ex-students in creating jobs would be a fascinating read. No doubt they would be a strong attractor, too, to potential students. I would suggest as an initial hypothesis high numbers of jobs created would be associated with a strong culture of Self-Organised Learning (SOL). Which is something very few UK Universities have.

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Csikszentmihaly's point on Creativity

In his book Creativity (1996) Csikszentmihaly argues that creativity is very hard to define. But if pushed he would say this:

Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word whay makes thir personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes - instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." Like the colour white that includes all hues of the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy becaue we think that one pole or the other is "good," whereas the other extreme is "bad."

... creative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict.

Csikszentmihaly then goes on to illustrate this point by reference to ten pairs of opposing traits that are often present in such individuals and integrated with each other in tension. He says:

Creative individuals are both / and:

• energetic / yet like rest and quiet
• clever / yet also naive
• playful / yet disciplined
• imaginative and fantastical / yet are rooted in reality
• extrovert / yet introvert
• humble / yet proud
• masculine /yet feminine
• traditional / yet rebellious
• passionate / yet objective
• suffer /yet enjoy

The intested will have to read pages 51-76 to see how Csikszebtmihalyi (1996) teases out these dichotomies.