Dr Brian and His Thoughts

Amazing Salamanca !!

2009-07-30T18:15:00.004Z

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.

2009-07-10T07:37:00.004Z

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?

2007-12-30T07:44:00.000Z

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.

2007-12-24T06:04:00.000Z

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?

2007-06-05T07:54:00.001Z

"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

2007-05-22T06:46:00.000Z

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.

.

Csikszentmihaly's point on Creativity

2006-12-29T18:42:00.000Z

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.

The Konrad Connection

2006-12-06T10:31:00.000Z

An ex-student contacted me about his reading on eBusiness. I tracked books on my shelves that seemed relevant and came up ith this response below. Does anyone out there have suggestions for further texts or papers that they feel should be added?

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: rsponse to the student ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Dear Konrad,
Re: Post at www.brunelphd.blogspot.com dated Tuesday 24 October 2006 entitled Monopolies in the Digital Age.

This is a most interesting post. It makes some interesting points, but sadly, without any reference to the literature. Since this is an interesting area it is important that you read around it in a fairly full fashion. Below I give four Google/Web books, and then five Business books. These are all very readable, in my view. They should widen your awareness in this area.

Google/Web books
Vise, David (2005) The Google Story, Macmillan, London, 2005
Batelle, John (2005) The Search, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, 2005
Anderson, Chris (2006) The Long Tail, Random House, London, 2006
Goldsmith, Jack and Wu, Tim (2006) Who Controls the Internet? Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.

Business books
Kelly, Kevin (1998) New Rules for the New Economy, Viking Penguin, London, 1998
Surowiecki, James (2005) The Wisdom of Crowds, Abacus Books, London, 2005
Handy, Charles (1996) Beyond Certainty, Arrow Books, London, 1996 [ Particularly Chapter 4 “What is a company for?”. This was reproduced in the Harvard Business Review – check it out with Google scholar – and is an answer that supports in a more gentle way Bakus thesis as expressed in “The Corporation” It introduces and supports the idea of “stakeholders” in a company, as well as shareholders.]
Handy, Charles (1988) Understanding Organisations (3rd edn.), Penguin, London, 1988
Rahn, Richard (1999) The End of Money, Discovery Institute, Seattle, WA. [This text is situated in the digital age yet refers to famous economists and politicians in the past.]

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Dr Brian Morris
27 November 2006

The Lanuage of business and iT

2006-11-27T21:18:00.000Z

Mozilla Firefox Start Page

Creativity Leads Learners

2006-11-24T13:08:00.000Z

In the Daily Telegraph (Thursday, November 23, 2006, page 4) there is a review of School performances under the Ofsted regime. [This is a full formal inspection of every school in the UK and happens every three years. The reports are published on the web at *] One head teacher, Elizabeth Ward of Colchester County High, maintains creativity is the key to excellence. Let her speak for herself:

This is not a traditional grammar school. It is not regimented or restricted or restricting. ... Creativity and "thinking outside the box" are important. ... I never say we will help the girls reach their potential because we don't know what their potential is and nor do they. We urge them to try things out and take as many opportunities as possible to find out what they like and how far they can go.

It seems this head teacher espouses an emergent strategy for promoting excellence, rather than a prescriptive strategy. Ward seems prepared to let her pupils experiment (be personal scientists?) in her phrase "we urge them to try out things", to tap into their intrinsic motivation by finding out "what they like" and recognises the mystery of human potential as in "we don't know their potential and nor do they".

A prescriptive strategy would involve blue prints, plans, coercion and would demand dutiful compliance at all times. You must do this... (the pupil, wanting to be free and unconstrained, might want to do that) has all the overtones of Other-Organised Learning (OOL). This head teacher is confident her pupils will find their way for ward to their future and make themselves attain their potential.

This does fly in the face of teaching subjects and being subjected to them. Creativity works best when there is an infrastructure of basic resources (i.e. reliable) working under the inquiry of the creative mind and its uncertain processes (i.e. no result guaranteed).

Uncertain processes are a nightmare for the stereotypical administrator. They like oder and predictability. Nobody controls the English Language, yet it evolves with new words added from time to time by those that speak the language. Nobody is in charge of the English Language, or any other living language for that matter.

Similarly, no company set up the World Wide Web - it came into being because a volunteer force of programmers and enthusiasts committed to the uncertain processes of collaboration and creativity. There is the World wide Web Consortium that has to ensure technical standards are adhered to and changes to the Web are agreed. This is a modicum of control needed because of the technological component this communication medium. But the web has been allowed to evolve in a seemingly boundary free way. [For an objection to this read Who Contols the Internet? Goldsmith and Wu, Oxford Press, 2006]

The felt need to control a process flies in the face of the fact that many processes are not amenable to control. The administrative cast of mind wants total control of a process. Yet a learner working on his own ideas soon gets into a state of "flow" and controls his own processes. No administrator or administrative mind-set is required, except for issueing qualification certificates.

So I think Elizabeth Ward is onto something, for she believes creativity leads learrners to control their own learning-processes, and these learners often persist in those processes to see how far they can go. This is an important human reality.

Our organisations should recognise this human reality as such, and adapt themselvers accordingly, to harvest the benefits that arise from its adoption. They should not be happy to accept crrent non-inspirational eLearning practices which "having a form of learning but denying its power "( to paraphrase 2 Timothy 3:5) attenuate the creative and inspirational impulse.

What did Teresa Amabile say in her 1998 Harvard Business review paper How to Kill Creativity? If you want to destroy creativity, carry on doing what you are doing at the moment. The woory is that too many are doing that and too few, like Elizabeth Ward, are embracing creativity and its powerful emergent processes in personal learning.

OFSTED Outstanding Head espouses creativity

2006-11-24T12:54:00.000Z

In the UK schools are formally inspected every three years and the resulting reports are published online. The Daily Telegraph, a UK daily newspaper, had this to say about the Headteacher's approach to getting the best out of her pupils:

This is not a traditional grammar school. It's not regimented or restricted or restricting. ... I never say that we will help the girls reach their potential because we don't know what their potential is and nor do they. We urge them to try things out and take as many opportunities as possible to find out what they like and how far they can go.

The phrase "we don't know what their potential is and nor do they" leapt out at me. So much intake to educational institutions is based on the quality and intelligence level of the intake that a phrase like "we don't know their potential" seems absurd. Yet this is a highly rated school, with students impressing government inspectors.

When Corporations Rule the World (Korten)

2006-08-08T13:16:00.000Z

I have taught eCommerce for many years and a number of books have struck me as significant. Two are The Digital Economy (Tapscott, 1995) and The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005,2006).

The first suggests pervasive change will arise through digitizisation. The second suggests pervasive change in human communication will arise through democratisation.

But an even more profound change is taking place simultaneously since the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9th November 1989. (Notice the irony: not 9/11 but 11/9). It is the rise of the multinational corporation that knows no national boundaries. The implications of this state of affairs is brilliantly analysed in When Corporations Rule the World (2nd edn)(Korten, 2001). The outlook is not pleasant for the change arising through a removal of checks and balances in the global economy will lead to a pervasive tyranny.

Let Korten speak:

Through deregulation and the removal of national economic borders we have created a global economy more powerful than any national government - and it is flying on autopilot right into the face of a great mountain.

His target are the recently created World Trade Organisation and its preoccupation with greed. Korten prefers to talk about the movement that has arisen to oppose this crushing Globalization as The Movement With No Name.

The movement has been referred to by many labels, including the Fair Trade Movement, the anti-Globalization Movement, the pro-Democracy Movement, and the Living Democracy Movement. Given that the movement's clearest underlying themes are life and democracy, I've chose for the purposes of this book to use the name "global movement for a living democracy" or "living democracy movement," which is the name of India's Living Democracy Movement. It remains to be seen what the global movement will choose to call itself, which is why I express the name in lower case letters rather than capitalising it in the normal convention for proper names.

In the USA they Can Spam

2006-06-21T23:43:00.000Z

In giving the EE3106:eCommerce course in May 2006, I came across an amazing set of statistics relating to spam - that is the abundance of unsolicited emails that clog our Inbox. It seems only a tiny fraction of the messages circulating on the internet are "meaningful communications" as in from one sentient being to another. The remaing messages are viruses and, mainly, spam.

America has passed its CAN-SPAM Act. But when I go to my university email account I have to brace myself for all the nonsense spewed out by the 24/7 bots working away endlessly and aimlessly. It is unbelievably tedious deleting the unwanted messages.

It seems like sin entering cyberspace. Simple communication has been corrupted, and replaced by a form of grey noise: of messages having a form of power, but denying the power thereof. Just why cannot we reply/forward the spam and send it back where it came from?? W3C designers please take note.

Wise Words

2006-04-23T08:08:00.000Z

Margaret Mead wrote:

" Never underestimate the power of a few committed individuals to change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

They are very wise words indeed. Jesus and his friends comes to mind.

CV Update

2006-04-20T08:59:00.000Z

What a strange situation to be in. I have been forced to take voluntary retirement, yet have three years work in me till I am sixty-five and a half. I have taken my lump sum, yet find I am thinking about work as an academic more than before. I have come to realise all that an academic can be, and am now captivated by three jobs advertised at Brunel for lecturers who are "Creative Multimedia specialists." So I am going to apply. An ex-student, F, begged me to apply and several others have made encouraging noises.

What is going on? Ageism is supposed to be rife, but I see this as a chance to create the MSc in Multimedia, Animation and Creativity. So I have turned to my CV to update it and make it relevant. And what a surprise that was! As I added this and that, and put in some of the esteem things I have done in the past decade, the CK took shape. My wife said "it looks strong" and she does not normally concern herself with these things.

So why the surprise? Having helped the BSc MMTD course at Brunel since 1999 I assumed people knew my strengths. But now (April 2006) I have come to see it has taken the Engineering staff some six years to get a proper handle on their new flagship course. But the recent reorganisation lead by Schwartz and Jenks has given many staff cause to pause. "What ARE we doing? Where ARE we going?" questions are abuzz. Dr Ian Dear said to me earlier in 2006 "This is the only course where the staff are passionate about what they are doing!"

It has always been clear to me that a fully functioning multimedia area needs lots of technology resources. That is what we have. But we also have a lot of Engineers of the electrical systems side, hard problems and mathematical solutions. People that do not work with students and their creativity, do not align them in the directions they might go. Their espoused "Technical Rationality" does not lead them to passion and fervour in their teaching.

Perhaps the time has come for change, and perhaps the times are changing. The students need an MSc course to move on to. That will be my goal. I have seen sufficient creative work by the students to believe they can do it. Even in the second year the eGames and eMarketing assignment revealed some interesting stuff (but perhaps not at the level of Jenova CHEN and his game of "flOw" at the University of Southern California. ) The School of Engineering & Design has advertised for Creative Multimedia staff. It is so amazing! "The BIT Lab gathers dust" (to quote R Dreyer) and the student experience is poor - particularly the way they are treated (as numbers not by name, as 03756629, not John) - yet Phoenix like this opportunity has arisen.

So to the CV. It really was a case of my knowing more than I had written (to paraphrase Polanyi). As I added my small achievements over the past five to ten years, I began to see how action fed on previous actions. A snowball effect was taking place in my mind, and on paper. Dr Tony Cockett said of my first multimedia paper, written in SED during the six months Aug - Dec in 2005, titled "Blogs, ba and Care: Virtue in a virtual world", the following:

"That was a very good paper. It was the first paper the team has written that rings true about multimedia education. It describes you moving on from straight computing to creative approaches in Multimedia. You do not regard multimedia as a bolt-on but as a revolutionary change. You have really been thinking about a multimedia world."

So, when updating the CV, I had the strange sense that I was revealing myself to myself! I was encouraging myself to apply! The deadline is in a week's time!

Surprised by Flow from an unexpected quarter

2006-04-01T18:55:00.000Z

The result of two hours exploring: look at it! A ghastly sea creature.

Coming across the eGame "flOw" (go to http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ ) I was surprised to see Csikszentmihalyi mentioned. His typical challenge-ability axes were shown, with anxiety above the challenge-ability match (challenge too difficult) and boredom below the challenge-ability match (challenge too easy).

I dabbled at the game and, after an immersive two hours. I created a creature from a basic amoeba. By working out how to get my amoeba to eat plankton it grew healthily, with many segments to its body. The creature is shown above.

The wonderful realisation is: I was choosing to organise myself, to deal with the amiguity of no rules in a game with no objective (other than my need to construct my own meaning), and slipping into a state of flow.

In an inchoate way I was pathfinding and generating heuristics to make sense of my explorations.

This is something the student Cara found with her project work. She chased up a comment I made a year ago, for she recognised the state she was in (i.e. flow) from what I said. Not playing a game - rather, working on a project, Cara still entered a state of flow. She was alive to what she was doing and was insensitive to time. She had become absorbed in her work. As I had become in feeding my amoeba to become the monster shown in the diagram above.

This idea of flow has implications for creative work and how it is managed. Creativity needs long stretches of time. It cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Current timetabling systems follow the "tap model". What did Amabile say in her HBR paper "How to kill creativity?" She said "Carry on doing what you are doing now."

A second post on 'Playing at being an assessor'

2006-03-18T08:19:00.000Z

Further to Pritesh's post on "Playing at being an assessor" Cara, too, has made a similar and very full ccount of her thoughts on that hands-on episode. (My thoughts follow the Second line of "equals" signs, i.e. after the post)

Cara's account is an accurate description of what took place, coupled with some insightful observations:
=======================================================
Here is what Cara had to say:-

Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Wednesday meeting

Todays meeting was extremely useful and took place in 2 locations! The first I will cover the usual sit-down room meeting which takes place every Wednesday.

Two documents were handed to a very small group of us
1) Dr Morris' carefully selected notes on writing our Report
2) A guide by John Aanonson on writing dissertations and Theses

Let us focus on the first document.
It now seems inevitable to follow (as it is now referred to) the 'Leon approach' in writing our reports. In fact we should even refer directly to this approach in our report.
There are originally 7 steps to this approach and Dr Morris has added an introduction at the front and a conclusion at the end.

We listened while Dr Morris took us through the steps and I learnt exactly what to put into the conclusion part of the report.
The conclusion is subtle and should focus on the whole learning process.
For instance we may write about how we came up with the ideas for our project and the MARSING process that took place before the project even started.

References popped up - it was made clear that it is vitally important that you refer to any references you have in your report. It gives your work validity.

I think that Dr Morris' suggestion that you write a bit everyday on your report was useful - Personally I think that would work very well for me - it is different than the blog of course, but just focusing your mind everyday will help to chip away at the task rather than leaving it to the end. The fibre of the document will be more 'real' if you are tackling things on a day to day basis.

I'm waffling a bit now so I shall move swiftly on to the second part of today's meeting.

We were able to look at 4 separate Final Year Project (FYPs) from last years group.
Seeing first hand how other people tackled firstly their overall presentation of their work, from an assessors point of view.
We took it in turns to 'present' our findings and thoughts on each project as if we were assessors (the learning dialogue).

We particularly looked at how each student had presented their aims and objectives and if the research question had been addressed.

We saw examples of how some excellent work had been let down by being hidden or buried within an interface; on how annoying it is for anyone assessing your work when work is not easily accessible.

I took on board a lot of things from today's meeting, this is important stuff- sorry for the others who missed out.

posted by Cara at 17:17 | 1 comments
============================================

Four points here are:
(a) involvement and having to do something and the inconvenience of getting to some work,
(b) purpose, objectives and research questions (c)excellent work buried deep down within an interface,
(c) how others may feel about your work and
(d) a sense of appreciation and deep value - the student took a lot from the experience.

Taking these four in turn:

(a)Involvement and having to do something; and the inconvenience of getting to some work

It is such a simple question "What was your project about?" The students simply turn to the computer, put the CD in the drive and click, thereby expecting all to be revealed. Some are confronted with an array of files, maybe fifty, and they have to sort things out. They are doing work, just when they did not expect to!

(b) purpose, objectives and research questions.
I asked students to say what the project was about and what it was focussing on.
They start looking for a pithy statement somewhere near the beginning of the report. Eventually their summary is couched in slightly sarcastic tones. "Well, I think it is about Myths and Boats. There was some text - actually, I think it was about a monster called Cyclops? and some stuff on nimation I could not get to work. It was not very clear. I suppose it might just pass.

They are frustrated by all the mini-technological barriers. They are in a position to realise that a piece of written communication needs to be concise in the beginning in order tosituate the reader in a meaningful context.

(c) how others may feel about your work.
Students found it very easy to reflect on someone else's work. Yet I have noticed they do not find it so easy to reflect on their own work. A defensive routine sets in almost immediately. Students seem rooted in their viewpoint as creator or maker of their own work. But they do find it much easier to criticise the work of others. An interesting point, which may explain lot.

(d) a sense of appreciation and deep value - the student took a lot from the experience.
I wonder why? Perhaps it was relevant.
Was it the timeliness of the exercise? At just under two months before the hand-in date for their own work, students would be engaged in precisely this writing process.
Why the feeling of sorrow for the others? Perhaps there is a residue of care in most of us, of not wanting friends and coleagues to miss out.
What did the student mean by "this is important stuff"? I think through this process she came to see the high importance of the "Referents Dialogue" and putting yourself in your assessor's shoes. The importance of having someone else you respect, and is a peer, partner and criticise your work via the blog. In fact Cara went on to make that point "You should require students to have at least one partner from the group. They will give each other feedback and take some of the work off your shoulders."

Subsequent follow-up conversation

1.
Link with Laxmi, another Project student.
This was to collaborate on the Organic development of a study strand common to both projects. "We should write our blogs in pairs, to both create and critique"

2.
Student has perceived a change in her writing style.
At first I would charge in and say "Hiya Blog, I washed my hair today!" or somesuch. But now I write carefully, realising I might be able to use this writing somewhere in my dissertation "as is" without doing lots of rewriting.

Play at being an assessor

2006-02-28T06:52:00.000Z

Halfway through February 2006 I showed six of my project students some of last years CDs containing ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) style reports, and asked students to assess them.

They simply had to say what the project was about, what you had to do to use the disc, and comment on what they found. Finally they had to make some form of assessment of the piece. My aim was to get students to realise the importance of a readme.txt file on the CD. Without that information an assessor is up a gum tree.

"What do I do now?" was precisely the unsettling experience I wanted students to feel.

And through that discomfort, realise that care and attention must be paid to this unseen person - the assessor. Giving your assessor a little bit of help would pay dividends.

It was an interesting session and a great time was had by all. But it was not until I read Pritesh Mistry's blog on the event that I realised how deep the lesson had gone.

Nor had I realised how much students had got from the incidental comments and asides. This was apprentice style learning.

Having to articulate their assessment on the piece of work they were looking at was very revealing to both us and the assessing student herself.

Two weeks in France

2006-01-23T06:27:00.000Z

To day I am back from France after spending a fortnight with an ex-student Nick Wilcock and his wife and children Jack, Alec and twins Laura and Kia. They run a French Villa in Prades, South France in the Pyrenees-Oriental.

While there I was able to use his WiFi enabled computer to check emails and send them too. Yet this was a poor region of France. I was surprised at how uickly WiFi had penetrated the area. As far as Nick was concerned WiFi enabled all rooms to access their emails and communicate with the world. We seem to get used to ideas at an increasingly rapid rate. Indeed, Nick said he could not run his business without email, the website and text messaging. There is internet banking too. Digitisation did not stop there either. He has many incredible pictures taken with a digital camera - a memorable one is of a frozen waterfall up in the heights of Mount Canigou.

The more I see of our new digitised world, the more I think of Tapscott (1995) and his twelve themes that charaterise this digital revolution taking place in our lives.

WiFi is here

2005-12-27T23:57:00.000Z

This post represents milestone for me: it is the first post made by a wireless connection to the Internet.

A shared cable modem to the trad 3G, and a link to a router (D-Link) and from there via Airport to this G5Mac. No wires or tower. All rather smart.

Blogs, 'ba' and care: Coaching for Shalom

2005-12-23T23:34:00.000Z

So why am I taking the Learning Coach role so seriously?

One reason is that it should give students "peace of mind" (i.e. Shalom). (Perhaps I need to check that out by a short online questionnaire to them.)

A second reason is that talent should be nurtured: we can no longer afford to develop a "sink or swim" attitude. In fact on the Multimedia MPhil it has all been about sinking. Nobody has gained the qualification since it started with Spiros in 2002-03. Students doing this MPhil have not been nurtured, and there have been three a year - and most have had a first! So it is not as if they were incapable...

I am struck by the comment Professor Pat Rice made to me about a research student, who was working brilliantly on a study of working class life. Pat said "People like that need to be protected from interference by government bureaucracies. We will have to fill these forms in for him." (Ealing restaurant, c. 2003)

A third reason is that once a person can become self-organising and have learned how to learn, they no longer need a Learning Coach. They are more independent, and will know where to go to get help. They are no longer dependent and helpless. And they will shorten Howard Gardner's conjecture that original researchers will need TEN Years support before their standing in the field is acclaimed.

Being and Requisite Variety

2005-12-22T17:35:00.000Z

Robert DILLES has written (quoted in Cesarani, J. (2003)) on the logical levels of influence for "being":

Spirit: Silence
Identity: You can't do that here.
Belief: You can't do that here.
Capability: You can't do that here.
Behaviour: You can't do that here.
Environment: You can't do that here.

Cesarani (2003) gives his version of the Law of Requisite Variety:
1. As environments and context change our actions will not always produce the same results. A minimum of flexibility is required.

2. The amount of flexibility will depend on the flexibility and uncertainty in the system. As the system becomes more complex, more flexibility is required.

3. People with the most flexibility have the most chance of success. The part of the system that has has the greatest variety of possible responses will be the controlling element.

4. If what you are doing is not getting the result you want, then keep varying your own behaviour until you do.

On Quality

2005-12-22T07:02:00.000Z

In their book "The End of Management" Cloke and Goldsmith (2002) say this:

Aristotle wrote that "quality is not an act, it is a habit." More than this, it is a state of mind. It is an act of consideration and respect for those who will eventually use the product or service ... At its highest level, quality is an application of the Golden Rule to work, a recognition that the producer or provider is the the consumer; client and citizen; that every product and service is a work of art to be created with pride, polished with love, and received with gratitude. The strongest motivation to produce high-quality goods and services is the sheer pleasure of doing so. .... For this reason, quality is an expression of respect for oneself as a creator.

Quality cannot be successfully managed, though it can be facilitted, inspired, and led. The desire to always do better and continuously improve - not only the product but the process of creating it, the relationships involved in producing it, and the level of satisfaction derived from producing it well - cannot be controlled or directed from the outside. Quality means meeting one's own high standards, along with consumers and co-workers. It means discovering what it is possible for human beings to achieve.
(End of extended quote ibid: p. 62)

The words in bold (my emphases) motivation, oneself as creator, desire to do better, cannot be controlled from the outside, are all linked to the Golden Rule: (1) Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and (2) Love others as you love yourself.

In short, be open to your environment and be live.

Dr Brian and His Thoughts

2005-12-21T01:54:00.000Z

My twelve MMTD supervisees have "survived the interim" on 13-14 December 2005. Some did not enjoy their assessors talking over them, at all! They were assessed on their own by two assessors. The words intimidating and viva voce come to mind. Some actually enjoyed it.

But not as many posted comments to their blog as I would have hoped. It is a pity we have not been able to meet to debrief ourselves of the interim event

I notice the ENG Interim students were present in their hour slot: four present during an hour and they presented in turn. Tus they observed for 75% of the ytime, and performed for 25% of the time. They were given their grade at the end, but not much else. Which is better than the MMTD approach of centralising everything through Stuart Currie the Interim Coordinator.

Posting rate.

2005-11-16T17:19:00.000Z

This is 16 November and there have been eight weeks since the begining of term. Next week is the last week of lectures. After that all students work towards the Project Interinm for 10% of the marks.

Today we had a group project meeting, and students were animated by the Project Reports (old style) I brought in.

They tended to look at three projects in succession. Thy picked up on all manner of points. It was a profitable time.

Secondly, the number of comments I have been able to make in response to posts fell to two, from 3, on average.

Finally, I am becoming aware that those students the horror o f war has come out.

Brian

RIDER and its value

2005-10-29T12:51:00.000Z

Howkins (2001) proposes his RIDER process. This has five perspectives, some of which point in different directions. These are:
∑ REVIEW
∑ INCUBATION
∑ DREAMS
∑ EXCITEMENT
∑ REALITY CHECKS.
Howkins (2001:16-17) says of this process:
"My own analysis of the creative process is a five-fold mix of dreams and analysis, intuitive jumps and cold-blooded calculation spelled out in a list I call RIDER.
Some of these points are diametrically opposed (e.g. dreaming and checking). Some operate at different speeds (e.g. incubation and excitement).
The RIDER acronym helps people trying to work towards a solution to their problem choice and ‘premise’, since it recognises the tensions between opposites. The mind jumps about in search of energising eureka moments"
I have put this in here because it is something I am always thinking about (like "marsing" - see previous post) and so I should post it now, if only to review much later.

Marsing.

2005-10-29T11:41:00.000Z

Have just started academic year 2005-06 and all 12 students have their blogs up and running in less than four weeks. They have has a sample of last year's blogs too. This post is to date-stamp this marsing initiative (Harri-Augstein and Webb, 1995). Essentially, I would like students to Monitor a learning event, Analyse it, Record it in their blog, Re-construct it (re-live it), Reflect on it and finally Review the whole event to see to what extent their learning and/or practice has moved on. Then they Spiral on to the next event or activity.

The words Monitor, Analyse, Record, Re-construct, Reflect, Review and Spiral make MARRRRS or in verb terms "marsing". It will be interesting to see how Self-Managed Learners cope with this idea in their project work.

This is this Blog's anniversary

2005-10-03T04:45:00.000Z

Yep, it has been a year since this blog started and 106 days of that I was Internet disabled at home. Admittedly it was during Summer 2005 that access to the internet was not available and holidays were taken! But what do I want to say today?

Perhaps it is time to reflect on five years of encouraging multimedia students to do their best for their final year project in their BSc studies. I can talk about what they have delivered, and the exhibitions they have created. But that would be too instrumental. It seems to me a battle has been raging in my mind between "technical rationality" and "creativity". Which of these two is the higher life form?

A year ago I posted a comment on this very issue. I reproduce it here, Creativity v Technical Rationality, in its four paragraphs:

1.
Ones view on these two is incredibly important. Creativity is open, whereas Technical Rationality is closed.
Creative people are open to experience, they want to 'know' the world. Technical Rationalists work inside a closed domain, they want to make the world more reliable, they want to make the world more predictable.

COMMENT:
It seems to me we have two expectations of the world and its people. The first is RELIABILITY and the second is INTEREST. The first suggests predictability and the second suggests unpredictability. Creativity favours the unpredictable, since new forms are sought. Much creativity is buried in Technical Rationality: the essential idea is there somewhere. It is the quality of the idea that makes 'all things new'.

2.
In the new millenium, education must keep a balance between these two perspectives on the world. But our world in the UK at least, is skewed heavily towards the predicatble world of what is known and what can be managed by hierachies and bureaucracies. New ideas are often not wanted, they interfere with the smooth running of the institution.

COMMENT:
In the last century there has been too much recognition of hierarchic forms that favour a top-down approach, and not enough of Self-Organising forms or organisation. Hence the panopoly of Chief Executive Officers and Ministers and Heads of State. Perhaps we give these instances of the top down form of organisation too much credence. Perhaps we should give bottom-up processes more importance: Self-Organisation will happen anyway - why fight it? Why not go with the flow of Self-Organising systems?

3.
If we say students are free to organise themselves, to be agents in knowledge formation, what do we make of students who choose to move in a safe predictable world grazing on hard facts? Do we recognise they are being 'creative' in making their own choices, or do we feel they are being 'timid' by playing safe? What is our position - do we ask for the design of courses to build in creativity and design, or do we say "this area is known, do you want to know it too?"

COMMENT:
Perhaps if the learners world has been chaotic and unpredictable, it is only natural they will want to seek out any approach that removes this unpredictability. Once a learner feels they have a surfeit of predictability (we say an area of study is exhausted - do we not?) there natural curiosity makes them look for more intesting things to do. It seems we should build in opportunities to be creative at al levels of a course, otherwise we risk making our world ever more predictable and thereby boring ourselves to death.

4.
Should we allow students to learn in a closed system or in an open system? Is it not the case that in the world anything can happen? If so, why allow students the comfort of a safe harbour when in fact the seas are rough and the currents may be strong? Is the philosophy of the neophyte encouraging us to be over-protective of the learning experience?

COMMENT:
We have seas and we have harbours. We are expected to know when we should use them. If the seas are rough make for a harbour if one is at hand. But harbours are protection from rough seas - they are not the reason for sailing. It takes nerve to go out onto the high seas. It is akin to the nerve of the entrepreneur, who tries to make something new, a new business. We can be over-protective and make people risk averse. Our bureaucracies are witness to the craving for predictability and rationality.

Lost OS and withdrawal

2005-09-28T06:37:00.000Z

What a summer! With the OS up in the air, separated and disconnected, I have had NO ACCESS, via my MAC, to the web at home. I could use the university computers, but that was a twenty mile drive there, and there was no guarantee I would be able to get into the rooms in the summer. It was awful! It was inconvenient. Dealing with the shock and working out a plan became essential. What was step one?
Step one: get OS 9 re-installed. Easier said than done. I had thrown away the CD with the OS on it, just to tidy the clutter around the computer.

Step two: OK, so buy another CD. Problem: that OS 9 was no longer sold, the Mac world was moving to OS X. There was talk of using a firewire cable to access the hard drive on my Mac. This was "sledge hammer to crack a nut" time.

Step 3: cadge, beg, borrow or steal a CD with the required OS on it. My research student said "You can boot your computer from a CD by holding down C as you power up." And then the magic words "I believe the technicians have back up copies of the various OS - I am sure they will let you have a copy for a day or two." Before you could say knife, I was there, requesting. All summer they had been wherever technicians go, but now in September the great academic re-gathering was commencing. I was in with a shout and borrowed the disc.

Step 4: Boot from the disc and spend two hours reconfiguring the computer. It is now done and I am able to make this post. Phew!

Remote marking

2005-09-26T14:54:00.000Z

Using student blogs I was able to assess student progress on multimedia projects remotely. Student and assessor did not have to be simultaneously present. Using the student's blog link saved time. I did not have to have a specific document (like an exam script) in front of me. This made a virtue of being in a virtual world. The death of distance worked for me.

This is documented in my recent paper "Blogs, ba and care: virtue in a virtual world."

Blogs, ba and care: virtue in a virtual world

2005-09-26T14:07:00.000Z

Chris, I have had a paper accepted for publication in Ethical Space and in it I tell readers of your blog. Is that OK with you?

'Intellectual safe haven' and ba

2005-06-12T06:47:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts

I have been preoccupied by the Japanese notion of ba or 'safe harbour' as it is sometimes described in the literature on learning, particularly organizational learning. It seemed only the Japanese had picked up on this idea and practice.

So it was something of a shock, albeit a pleasant one, to come across a similar notion under the heading of Discursive Knowing in Piantanida & Garman (1999) The Qualitative Dissertation, page 4.

For some students, joining the study group is like coming home to an intellectual safe haven. Here, in the company of like minded students, they are able to share their nebulous ideas and "talk their way to clarity."

In my professional endeavours to support students, as they progress their Multimedia projects, I have taken the Harri-Augstein (1995) Learning Coach model (linked to the Three Dialogues) to feel my way into becoming, via SOL means, a competent Learning Coach. In this process I have had all students ("supervisees") meet together to do precisely this: talk their way to clarity. The link with Learning Conversations resounds.

Projects are in!

2005-05-19T06:25:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
The projects have come in, been marked and the students are about to leave in May 2005. Some exceptional work. The projects all show students striving to excel.

Topics were (a) interactive 3D model for product development, (b) a virtual highstreet with franchising possibilities and promo video, (c) pop music video with fast cutting, (d) a sophisticated cocktail bar that conveyed an excellent classy mood, (e) a suite of childrens multimedia games using Illustrator to Action Script, (f) an attempt to show the effect of architecture on our posture (using After Effect in a novel way) by transposing the urban to a rural setting, (g) an animated story between modelled electric tootbrushes and (h) an illustrated mythology.

What is obvious to me is the sheer diversity of this list. Students, doing what they really want to do, have come up with this range of projects themselves. It is Self-Organised. I was there as a learning coach, a midwife to their ideas, but I did not control this process. I simply let it emerge. I did not tell the students what to do.

That is not to say I was not challenged. Some students had pushed themselves to the edge and had become unwell or had personal problems or both. However, the key thing is they drove themselves.

The next stage is to do this with elan, poise and a relaxed sense of being in control. "Treat it like an assignment. Do not make too big a deal out of it. Let it simply grow," is what one student said to me before she left for her holidays. I was thankful for the feedback. I thought it ironic I had adopted this approach for the Project documentation rather than the artefact.

By making the chapters in the documentation seem incredibly short students suddenly felt, AFTER having done so much practical work, tthe documentation process was a breeze. How did I do this? By doing arithmetic on e.g. 10,000 words and seven chapters and three points per chapter, I was able to demonstrate that you could "only write a page on a point." That took the mystery out of it all. The throwaway comment "Treat it like an assignment" was taken on board quite naturally.

Academic year 2004-05 is a watershed, since students in Level 3 final year 2005-06 next year will have done a project-like design assignment in the last half of Level 2 in 2004-05. They will already have been exposed to significant project-like activity of some scale. How come it took so long to get to this obvious position? Not being fully in control of what we were trying to do. Some of us hardly knew each other three or four years ago; now we are colleagues, aligned to course goals,and respecting each others strengths. We are a team.

I wonder how the videoed debrief session will go ... (i) Ethics of sharing blogs, (iii) hopes and fears, (iii) meeting as a group, (iv) what next? job, BCS membership? research? never look at a computer again? We will see.... later today.

Multimedia Exhibitionists

2005-03-24T02:33:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
Today (23 March 2005) we had our third Multimedia Exhibition of students' multimedia project work at MMTD, Brunel University. It was remarkable that different constituuencies of interest came together in a coherent and unfussed way.

Staff went around assessing students work, probing exploring examining the offerings presented. Despite the Exhibition seeming chaotic there was an unerlying order - a puposiveness. (Chaordic?)

The Technicians had worked hard to put all the bays on one floor in Tower C, and created tags, badges and allocation maps. They ensured the technology and software was appropriately configured. Steve Gardiner, Chief Technician, went around taking pictures with his digital camera. I must get some of those pictures and post a couple of the better images to this post to give the full flavour of the Exhibition.

The Exhibiting Students had designed their posters and made a range of artefacts and promotional devices to display their work. Creativity abounded. They had thought carefully about what they wanted to do. The Art School Exhibition had infiltrated a traditional Engineering Faculty!!.

Other Students in the "Year Below" came along in the afternoon. They were recipients of feedback from Level 3 to Level 2. In one sense the whole operation was managed. But in another sense the myriad interactions between persons can never be managed. Often it is enough to set up the structural conditions that they MAY occur. For these Level 2 students there was sufficient 'requisite variety' to suggest the show was more than the staff's educational propaganda. It was an exhibition of a reality that they themselves would be part of next year.

Finally, the External Examiner was present as he had been for five years. Now retired, he looked on at the burgeoning exhibition with a benign smile. "The students have moved on and are producing interesting variegated work. They have left the websites behind."

It seems so true: to move on you must leave something behind.

Awareness and a "New Intimacy"

2005-03-09T07:15:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts

Yesterday I assessed some students work with another person. It was Level 2 undergraduate assignment work in marketing communications. The assessment was of student market research and banner ads for the web. It was demonstrated "live" - in person - by student pairs to two academic assessors.

On several occasions, during live assessment, I was aware of an intense interest by the students on what I was saying. I was describing my reaction to their work, how I would react if it had been illustrated fully. I mentioned another Faculty in the University and how they were moving towards requring video to be used as part of assessment of drama students work in performance. This caught the students' interest.

A pair of students were talking about the new "flash drives". I said "You could so easily have shown how easy they are to use with video, you could talk about the new systems which can read small memory cards for by-passing camera download software. But instead you have submitted lots of unremitting text. Do you not think that anything that livens up what you have to say results in improved communication?" Students saw how their notion of media was far too fixed.

I feel we have yet to benefit from the "new intimacy" in communicatiom, which personal video will give us. The students 'intense interest' was an example of this "new intimacy": they could see I was encouraging them to get 'inside the skin' of their research topics. From what I saw, students seemed to think this was an unusual attitude on my part. But nevertheless an interesting one, since the multimedia technology is there to make it happen, and the skill to make it happen is in their hands.

On reflection I was inviting them to be more creative, to express themselves. Strange that people need to be invited to do that. It seems to me to be as natural as breathing.

An experience is more real than a thing

2005-02-28T07:58:00.000Z

CNV00019,
originally uploaded by Dr B.

Here we are three friends (plus one behind the camera) as we are about to go into a French restaurant (Chartiers, Paris). And it was a happy and memorable time. What did we learn - well, it is hard to say. I cannot be specific, but learning did take place. Was it worth while? - yes, we opened up to NEW experiences. The routine became a highly thought out process. We had to become/ we were AWARE of simply living. (Recall SOL and the three levels of awareness...) Because we had the CD of pictures, and there was this sense of having had a good time and wanting to share the images, I find I am learning how to post pictures to a blog -at the picture hosting site http://flickr.com. So that is some learning that has EMERGED from the experience. Immersive experiences are a powerful SPUR to learning.

Chartier is a popular restaurant unchanged from 1895. A living museum - a testimony to the "belle epoque" and "fin de siecle Paris". I am NOW trying to find out why, when you click on the image of the group users get a bigger picture but end up at www.flickr.com !!

best_brian

2005-02-28T07:46:00.000Z

best_brian,
originally uploaded by Dr B.

Life is so experimental! Will this appear on my blog or won't it? Talk about being a personal scientist!
Brian
(from inside www.flickr.com)

Choose and then be locked in.

2005-02-25T00:29:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts

Choose and then be locked in.

Students choose which Universitie they would like to go to and the course they wish to study. All very self-organising.

Then they arrive and find everything is preplanned. "This is what you are going to do," they are told.

Just how do universities manage to switch so suddenly from allowing potential students to be self-organised and then the minute students enter the university the approach becomes VERY other-organised?

Strange.

Bottom up processes

2004-12-18T13:45:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
It was interesting checking out the blog journalists that covered the 2004 USA Presidential Election.

There does seem to be a profound change taking place in the way politicians communicate with electors. Messages are no longer solely prepared in a top-down fashion, rather they bubble up from the grass-roots.

Self-Organising phenomena abound. Thie following is a simple example of a citizen posting a response to the election result in 2004 with a powerful polemic against an alleged political highjack in American politics:

http://blogs.salon.com/0003052/

We are witnessing the end of many top down approaches. Cloke & Goldsmith (2002) have made this point well in "The End of Management." The rise of self-organising systems leads them to posit seven strategies for change:

1. Shape a Context of Values, Ethics and Integrity; (eg. Care and Von Krogh)
2. Form Living, Evolving Webs of Association; (eg. de Geuss and "The Living Company", community)
3. Develop Ubiquitous, Linking Leadership; (e.g. converse with people - interact -
Learning Conversations (Harri-Augstein, 1991)
4. Build Innovative Self-managing Teams; (eg. The Wisdom of Teams (Katzenbach&Smith, 1998) and HBR (1994))
5. Implement Streamlined, Open, Collaborative Processes; (e.g. Dialog (Isaacs(2001)
6. Create Complex, Self-correcting Systems; (eg ecology, cybernetics)
7. Integrate Strategically, and Change the Way We Change (eg John Seeley Brown "Research that reinvents that Corporation - Harvard Business Review)
Sources around which the points (1-7) might group are given as examples in brackets.

In a television programme "Imagine" aired on BBC1 at10.35pm Alan Yentob, a media guru, interviewed Tim Berners-Lee on the origins of the web and, in particular, its foundation philosophy. Yentob seemed to be blinking and uncomprehending at all this emphasis on collaboration and not of ownership; or an emphasis on bottom-up sharing rather than top-down directing.

But in conclusion, after case after case had been given, Yentob had to say "Perhaps the business model of the past 150 years, in which the ownership of the keys to factory was the key to riches, may have to be regarded as a blip in our history.

I suspect he was thinking "That is a shame: broadcasting as a technology and directing as a management style seemed to have a neat fit for me as a Broadcasting Director."
He will have to read some of the texts given above in this post.

The Second Renaissance?

2004-12-10T01:58:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
I came across this intriguing quote in Open Source Democracy by Rushkoff (2003:37)
"Finally, our renaissance's answer to the printing press is the computer and its ability to network. Just as the printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone access to authorship. The first Renaissance took us from the position of passive recipient to active interpreter. Our current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. We are the creators."

Creativity is affirmed and given primacy here. We express ourelves, via authoring blogs, and become increasingly Self-Organising. We are enabled by technology to collaborate at a distance. We eschew Techical Rationality. All very interesting indeed. The move from recipient to creator seems like the shift i emphasis from Other-Organised Learning (OOL) to Self-Organised Learning (SOL).

This links with the previous post on the new lease of life given to Testimony. Each person now has the ability to make their views known, and receive criticism of their views. Technology and communication is becoming a richly enabled area.

Testimony

2004-11-30T17:42:00.000Z

We can interpret testimony and, with the web, we can create testimony.

Students testify to each other: such-and-such is a good book and xyz is a great book. We collaborate with each other as we pass on our titbits of information.

Blogging helps in this way too: we accept others critical comments if they are informed, accurate and sensitive to our needs.

Ecce Homo

2004-11-07T03:21:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
When we learn, we are sometimes very impressed by a person who has a deep understanding of life and its associated issues. In such instances we find we are "beholding" the person who is the embodiment of so much. We try to drink them in. They have an aura of awe. it is our personal "Ecce Homo" or "Behold the Man.".

This 'drinking in' is an attempt to learn. It is more than that, it is an attempt to see everything about them. There is no real time for reflection. They command all of our attention.

Why is that? What does it mean to 'behold'?

The new journalist, through blogs, links with the learning conversations and the learning coach.

2004-11-02T19:24:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
This is written on 2 November 2004, as the votes for a new president in the USA are being counted. I came across this quote on Jay Rosen's website, and it summarises "The New Blog Effect" (e.g. www.bopnews.com, www.moveon.org)

"Blogs are undoing [via blogs] the system for generating authority [through newspaper publication] and therefore credibility of news providers that's been accumulating for well over 100 years. And the reason is that the mass audience is slowly, slowly disappearing. And the one-to-many broadcasting model of communications--where I have the news and I send it out to everybody out there who's just waiting to get it--doesn't describe the world anymore. And so people who have a better description of the world are picking up the tools of journalism and doing it. It's small. Its significance is not clear. But it's a potentially transforming development... I like it when things get shaken up, and when people don't know what journalism is and they have to rediscover it. So in that sense I'm very optimistic."

Old tools (broadcast model) --> New tools (Narrow cast model)
Which is similar to the change in teaching and learning
Old tools (I teach, you listen) --> New Tools (Learning Conversation, We collaborate)

Mentors and Learning Caoches are the new trainers, but with a conversational power which has an inherent substrate of authenticity.

Artists take over from Engineers

2004-11-02T01:51:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
I was talking to a student about his portfolio and this quote, referenced by the student, caught my eye:

Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to arists
- or more precisely to the communications craftsmen. The same
thing is happening now with personal computers.
Heckel, P. 1984. The Elements of Friendly Software Design. p. 5.

The artists saw they could do more with the new medium. Because they could see they COULD do more, they simply stepped up and DID SO. They wanted to express themselves.

As this short post is being written, on the eve of the USA Presesidential Elections, politicians, public relations people and journalists have turned blogging into a dark art. Witness the infamous rise of "Swift Boat Vets" and "MoveOn.org". Notice the emergence of the counter balancing "FactCheck.org". All very intriguing. A new form of persuasion emerging in the political realm by "communication craftsmen."

Chaordic phenomena

2004-10-31T01:11:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
Dee Koek has written the Chaordic Age. One reviewer said:
His insights, however, are clear and provoking. In the Chaordic Age, he contends,

success will depend less on rote and more on reason; less on the
authority of the few and more on the judgment of many; less on
compulsion and more on motivation; less on external control of people
and more on internal discipline.

This is the internal discipline of the artist. Chaos and order exist side by side.

Creativity and Technical Rationality

2004-10-30T11:43:00.000Z

Ones view on these two is incredibly important. Creativity is open, whereas Technical Rationality is closed.

Creative people are open to experience, they want to 'know' the world. Technical Rationalists work inside a closed domain, they want to make the world more reliable, they want to make the world more predictable.

In the new millenium the education must keep a balance between these two perspectives on the world. But our world in the UK at least, is skewed heavily towards the predicatble world of what is known and what can be managed by hierachies and bureaucracies. New ideas are often not wanted, they interfere with the smooth running of the institution.

If we say students are free to organise themselves, to be agents in knowledge formation, what do we make of students who choose to move in a safe predictable world grazing on hard facts? Do we recognise they are being 'creative' in making their own choices, or do we feel they are being 'timid' by playing safe? What is our position - do we ask for the design of courses to build in creativity and design, or do we say "this area is known, do you want to know it too?"

Should we allow students to learn in a closed system or in an open system? Is it not the case that in the world anything can happen? If so, why allow students the comfort of a safe harbour when in fact the seas are rough and the currents may be strong? Is the philosophy of the neophyte encouraging us to be over-protective of the learning experience?

The carapace

2004-10-30T11:31:00.000Z

Dr Brian and His Thoughts
A starting point is the contrast between Techical Rationality and Creativity. Techical Rationality is bounded, whereas Creativity is unbounded.

Creative people are in the world to make something new, to bring about a new way of looking at things and, all in all, are open to experience. They recognise there is a "rough magic" in the world. This magic may, or may not, be repeatable. They do not say 'something cannot be' from an a priori position. They do not seek to standardise eveything, they do seek to understand and express everything that they can. They are not respecters of boundaries.

Technical Rationalists work within a given domain. They respect boundaries. Boundaries define their 'closed system' for them. These boundaries may act as a carapace - an enclosing shell that keeps the rationalist in his world. Techical Rationalists seek to standardise their world. Looking at open systems introduces an unnatural, and unwelcome, turbulence into their world. They eschew the unpredictable for the predictable.

These two views have implications for education, especially in the knowledge era. Techical Rationality gives a false impression of the world as predictable, known and unfree. These are serious implications; indeed they should be regarded as reservations.

But the open world of Creativity has problems when viewed from the perspective of control. Our world of bureaucratic systems cannot handle creativity very well. It is not predictable enough.

Which world are we educating students for? The one, or the other, or both?

Studying and all that Jazz

2004-10-27T15:23:00.000Z

So here I am, post the PhD and the associated pressure, wanting to think about creativity, self-organising systems, flow and leadership.

I am not sure where this will go, except that the beginning is very important. The four talking points in the opening sentence can be fleshed out with a pair of subsidiary indicators. Thus: Creativity (Van Gogh and Piccasso), Self-Organising Systems (conversations and friendships), Flow (enjoyment and friction-free work, Csikszentmihalyi and Amabile) and Leadership (hefting sheep and taking people where they have never been before).