The Rhythm River pages are up at squareONE. I made a quickee montage to promote this latest tool; albeit the development unfolded over twenty years.
[flashvideo filename=http://squareone-learning.com/video/RhythmRiver2.flv /]
Music is Kayyam, from my 2002 recording In Khorasan. It can be streamed in its entirety over at nogutsnoglory studios, at the bottom of the world hed music page.
Filed under adult learning, music
The first beta test of videographing a squareONE tool process. I recorded demonstrations of Grab Bag and Play of Opposites. Thanks to my brother and his camera. (I’ve got my eye on a Canon HV20 to be purchased after the first of the year. I’ll also use it to tape a new tool I’m developing that uses an interview process and is oriented around conversational learning.
[flashvideo filename=http://squareone-learning.com/video/Opposites_demo.flv /]
A single take…
Filed under adult learning
My brother and his family came to visit and I finally remembered to ask him to bring his camcorder. He did so and we were able to ‘beta test’ my concept for documenting demonstrations of squareONE experiential learning tools. He and I went to no lengths at all to make this slick. The video of Grab Bag is literally one single take filled with lots of flaws. Still, the test was a success and so I’ll soon be shooting more measured video.
[flashvideo filename=http://squareone-learning.com/video/GrabBag_demo.flv /]
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning
Sometime in the spring of 2001 my colleague and professional partner Judith hipped me to an interesting project. She knew a filmmaker who was hoping to commence a project about sports and experiential learning. ‘Would I be interested in talking over the experiential learning aspects with the filmmaker?’
Sure. And so Judith waved her finger across Starbucks and a lithe red haired woman approached our table and pitched her project. She told of a Sunday pick-up softball game played on a local diamond. This game has been going on for 15 years; anybody who showed up and wanted to play could join in; it’s duration was set by a noon ending irrespective of what inning it was.
I asked Laine, the filmmaker, what she thought the experiential learning hook was for her film. She told me some more intriguing things about the game. It attracted regular players from all over and, yet, most players didn’t know each other’s last names or what people did for a living. She described really good players who didn’t mind playing with the most green and inexperienced players. Although a score was tallied, she mentioned that a lot of times many of the players didn’t know the score.
“It’s not very competitive, even if there are some intense competitors.” She told me.
I certainly was intrigued. Laine suggested I check out the game myself. After all, ‘anybody can play, no matter how bad they are!’ (I must have chuckled to myself, knowing that somewhere at home lay a thirty-plus year old Wilson outfielder’s glove.)
“Laine, how did the game come about?” Then she blew my mind with her answer.
click for large version
“A professor at Weatherhead started the game up, first on campus and then it moved to Forest Hills. His name is David Kolb.”
“The David Kolb?!”
(Yes. David A. Kolb, author of Experiential Learning. Experience As the Source of Learning and Development. How important is this book to me? It would suffice to state that Dr. Kolb’s essential work then (1984) and to this day provides a cornerstone for my understanding of our field. His contribution is, for me, equal to the other cornerstones provided by the contributions of William James, Gregory Bateson, and Jack Mezirow.)
Yup, Kolb is one of my main guys, and Laine’s invitation to check out Kolb’s pick-up softball game pleasantly shocked me. As Judith said later, ‘I just wanted to see the look on your face!’
So it went. The film never got made or even started, yet I’ve played almost every Sunday since that fateful day at Starbucks. I’ve done so in accordance with one of the game’s ‘meta’ protocols: the seasons begins on the first Sunday after tax day and the season ends sometime in November when the weather suppresses the turnout below the minimum needed to play. Ha! We’ve been known to play with a minimum of six players.
That first season I planted myself in my old position, left field, and have stayed planted for seven seasons. I take the immense enjoyment I get for granted, except Dave’s wife Alice and he have collaborated on a research paper about the game and its learning ecology. Thus, last season I was invited to be interviewed–as were all the players–as part of their research. I went further, did some research of my own kind, and supplied ethnographic notes. Once I began to reflect and think about the game, about its rituals and routines, and about the way it binds participants to a shared construction of its distinctive ‘lifeworld,’ what had been taken–by me–for granted morphed into a much more fine grained regard of the complex social and developmental system that undergirded the game’s survival cum vitality for over twenty years.
The paper, Learning to play, playing to learn, A case study of a ludic playing space, (Kolb & Kolb, Journal of Organizational Change Management; 2008) incorporates and cites some excerpts from my notes. Cool beans! It’s an excellent work of qualitative and phenomenological research. The Kolbs delineate a clear case using complex evidence in support of an (also) complex hypothesis. Basically, the informality of the softball game nevertheless supports complex processes, some formal, some tacit, that in turn support learning in, as the Kolbs write, intellectual, physical, spiritual, and moral realms. Given how embedded I am as participant/observer in the very praxis the paper investigates, it’s no complaint for me to note that this game-as-exemplar could infuse a more lengthy treatment–even make for a good film!
I’m holding the camera, and Dave, Tom, and Jim are on their way out of the park on November 9th, evidently the last day of this year’s season, and the first day since last year’s last day when not enough people showed up to be able to field two teams.
Just like it was with left field, when Dave delegated me to make out the line-ups every Sunday, calling me from then on ‘the handicapper’, I planted myself in the role. Earlier this year, Tom, a longtime player and our oldest player (70 years young,) said to me, “How come you always put Kolb on your team?”
Well, it’s like slotting yourself in to be Chuck Yeager’s co-pilot!
***
(Sometime soon, I’ll have comments on another recent publication by Alice and David Kolb, The Learning Way. Meta-cognitive Aspects of Experiential Learning; <pdf> Oct.2008; Simulation Gaming)
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, play
Sat down with collaborative learning specialist George Por, and a group from E4S, over delicious Thai food, on Thursday. It was a great session, yet suprisingly it became oriented around my experiential tool, Playing the Opposites, rather than George’s groundbreaking work in intelligent human networks and collabortive learning. This was a bit of a missed opportunity, because George travelled to Cleveland from Belgium, had a packed agenda, and this was our only encounter.
Still, the group rolled with the compelling and thoughtful flow, so we commenced an individual and collective reflection on a question, “What hints might we learn about advancing sustainability?” and used the card deck of opposites to inspire our conversation. As it turned out the experiential play teased out lots of insights. In the nosy, tiny and busy restaurant we could not afford ourselves a chance to document the proceeding. Nor could we take the process into a second 90 minutes, yet, in such a group of smart people, our moment was a fully engaged one.
By the time I parted with the group and George, George and me had decided our concerns and approaches were in so much affinity with one another that we were sort of like brothers!
George’s own work is all about actualizing the humane whole from human parts, using the power of relationship and the vehicle implicit in any and all kinds of networks to further the cause of collaborative work and collective enlightenment. Just a simple search on google showcases how many networks George is energizing.
It would be interesting to ‘square’ his and my ‘differentials,’ because its where we don’t overlap so much that possibly fruitful differences could be leveraged. George, during this session, was open to my emphasis on the (so-called) lower. Or, on what in other contexts is termed shadow, or the inferior, tacit, hidden, etc.. This comes out of the model for the Play of Opposites, and it reinforces learning from not only what is attractive but from what seems strange or repulsive.
One of the graces of having so much mindheart power around the table, was how far our interplay danced. It was cool and an honor to have such a moment with friends, and a long lost brother!
George Por:
Filed under sociology
Political question of the day: who is more experienced?
Questioning the efficacy of experience begs the questions: “what is meant by experience; what are the relations of experience to capability; what–for you–are the optimal benefits of experience?”
My informal surveys reveal that most people have never thought in any sophisticated way about the nature and benefits of experience. In fact, most people adhere to quaint (and false) hydraulic notions about experience. A hydraulic notion posits that experience literally inputs capability, thus more experience provides for more capability.
It is worth noting that the question, ‘what are the optimal benefits of experience’ will tend to evoke responses about performative quality. In other words, if experience is considered to be primary to development, then the goals of experience are performance, capability and future capable performance.
If you read this and sense that ‘optimal experience’ must play a part, rather than ‘any old experience,’ then you are on the way to putting experience in its proper relation to capability.
From the perspective of my own folk psychological prejudices, were someone to ask me what the nature of experience is with respect to anticipating the capability of a candidate, I would begin my answer with this:
A person’s robust, or not, navigation through life events will allow for the development of capabilities. Those capabilities will combine abilities of perception and construal, knowledge, rehearsed adaptive responses, affectual factors, features of cognitive complexity, heuristical routines, novel routines. Also impressed upon performative behavior will be tacit, subconcious, and implicit factors.
There is nothing about experience alone that provides for specific developmental impacts. If it’s not experience alone, how might we describe the certain kind of experiences which impact the development of capability and the performance effectiveness? I’m implying here that capabilities are developed by complex processes that are not generated by experience by itself.
I’ll mention two broad categories of experience. First is intentional pedagogic or andragogic learning. Their fruits would construct and support knowledge and other capable features. I’m deferring from a richer conception. I’ll set this aside but acknowledge that one point of experience is to learn by using experience to learn.
The second, among many forms of experience, is doing a task under a high cognitive load. Alternately, this is described as performing a task for which a requisite demand is a cognitively complex demand. The task is hard because its cognitive demands are challenging. Here’s a technical description: a cognitive system’s intention within a problem space must construct productive responses so as to obtain a solution and meet the implicit goal of the problem space. To understand how to generate a solution is, broadly speaking, the developmental goal of this type of experience.
Here’s a description from Raab and Gigerenzer, (2003: Intelligence As Smart Heuristics)
Intelligence is thought of as an assembly of “factors,” either one (g), a few, or many. This tool-driven metaphor (factor analysis) has its limits because it does not describe how cognition translates into behavior. We propose a new view of intelligence that provides the missing link in terms of heuristics. Human intelligence, in our view, is modeled by an adaptive toolbox that contains building blocks for heuristics to direct search for information, to stop search, and to make a decision. Smart search rules describe how people find the few relevant pieces of information, in memory or in the outside world. Stopping rules describe a primary function of cognition, to ignore or discard irrelevant information. Decision rules translate the information searched in memory or in the outside world into behavior, such as what profession to choose or what products to buy. The adaptive toolbox embodies an ecological, not logical, view of rational behavior. The building blocks can be recombined to form new heuristics, which are rational to the degree that they are adapted to the structure of environments in which they are employed.
Framed by social psychology and concerned with interpersonal knowledge, here’s Burleson and Caplan (1998: Cognitive Complexity)
Research comparing experts and novices on a variety of information processing tasks has found that experts are better able to: (a) develop detailed, discriminating representations of phenomena (e.g., Lurigio & Carroll, 1985), (b) recall information from memory quickly (e.g., Smith, Adams, & Schorr, 1978), (c) organize schema-consistent information quickly (e.g,. Pryor & Merluzzi, 1985), (d) notice, recall, and use schema-inconsistent information (e.g., Bargh & Thein, 1985; Borgida & DeBono, 1989), and (e) resolve apparent discrepancies between schema-consistent and schema-inconsistent information (e.g., Fiske, Kinder, & Larter, 1983). These expert-novice differences correspond closely to contrasts distinguishing those who are more and less cognitively complex. For example, compared to those having less complex systems, persons with complex systems of interpersonal constructs: (a) form more detailed and organized impressions of others (e.g., Delia et al., 1974), (b) are better able to remember impressions of others (e.g., B. O’Keefe, Delia, & O’Keefe, 1977), (c) are better able to resolve inconsistencies in information about others (e.g., Press, Crockett, & Delia, 1975), (d) learn complex social information quickly (e.g., Delia & Crockett, 1973), and (e) use multiple dimensions of judgment in making social evaluations (e.g., Shepherd & Trank, 1992). These results suggest that interpersonal cognitive complexity is properly viewed as indexing individual differences in social information processing capacity.
Finally, distinctions between second order ‘I shall do what I do’ and third order ‘how shall I determine what I shall do?’ speak to the increase in complexity between automatic or habitual performance-in-response-to-a-task, and, fitting a rehearsed range of responses drawn from a repertoire or a novel, (ie. experimental,) response to a task; this developed through active experimentation.
It’s this very last element that is unlikely to be revealed in an elicitation, (framed by folk psychology and evoked as phenomenological answer,) of what are crucial performative, solution-oriented capabilities.
Politics. Experimental capability may not be a component of policy given by ‘experience.’. For example, even though the results of the supply side experiment are in, and its distinctive risk management features are well known, we might then do well to discount a claim to economic experience based in the wish to do such an experiment once again. (After all, the overt hypotheses have been falsified.) So, it is perhaps time to do other kinds of cognitively complex (so-to-speak) economic experiments.
This points in the direction of capability, not mere experience; capable policy trumps ‘experienced’ policy. I don’t want to know who is superior in experience, I want to know who is superior in capability, and, who won’t do failed experiments again.
EXPERIENTIAL MARTIAL ARTS I.
(originally published in The Lakewood Observer)
“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.” – Maurice Merleau Ponty
It is the case and sadly so, that the larger portion of child’s play is stripped from the adult over the course of their maturation. We wander through the world as adults and we miss a lot. Fortunately, with a modest commitment of time there are any numbers of awareness softening calisthenics grown-ups may do to recover childlike capabilities.
1. BLOCK WALKING
Pick a block, any block. You’ll have to start as a beginner but your walking chops will be recovered quickly. This exercise requires about 120 seconds every day.
Start from a stop and walk the block slowly. Name what is perceived: “sidewalk slab,” “window,” “futon,” “sign,” person,” “slab,” “smile,” “window,” “door”. You get the idea. Do this once a day for several weeks and soon enough the naming will drop away. Let the block become your train of awareness. The only hard part is extracting the necessary 120 seconds every day. Do this for two minutes every day, do it for 30 days. See what results from giving up sixty minutes to this over the course of a month.
2. BALL BOUNCING
Buy nine rubber balls and be sure to test them. They must be bouncy enough to bounce right back into your hands. This exercise requires five minutes three times a week. Also, you’ll need to find two neighbors to join you. Yes, they can be your roommates if need be!
Pick a time and stand at the end of your front walk and, with your two companions, bounce the balls for five minutes. It is almost a sure bounce that after several weeks of doing this other persons will want to join you. This is what the other balls are for. If you approach this with any discipline at all, over the course of several months, you may find most of your block has joined the bounce. (If you need more balls, go buy ’em!) Enjoy what results.
Filed under adult learning
Hillary Clinton: “Experience not only counts, it is all that counts.”
Mrs. Clinton’s rhetoric here makes no account of an interesting division among Democrats. Barack Obama enjoys a substantial edge in that better educated, more affluent Democrats support him over Mrs. Clinton. How to account for this edge among people who are much more likely to understand what are the actual features of experience? After all, the term ‘experience’ points in the direction of a rubric, in the direction of a means for assessing what counts as experience. Obviously, experience itself is constituted by other features. Experience matters and it’s how to count it up that matters much more than any store of experience.
Reflect on what is meant when someone is characterized as having experience. This characterization is against the notion of inexperience. First, experience means that someone has been through various situations. Second, it means they have been through those situations with awareness. Third, it means this awareness has engendered learning. Learning about: what to do; what information is needed; which resources are possibly worthwhile; what are possible options for responding–in effect what are the possible solutions to a problem posed by a situation.
Taking experience as being the central aspect of developing awareness and problem-solving capability in going through problem-posing situations we come to the idea that the ability to analyze, interpret, hypothesize, synthesize, respond supports experience rather than an amorphous ‘experience’ being the support of arrays of capability.
Far from representing a kind of gas tank full of just situations, Experience is the praxis via which awareness and capability is deployed. It is a term of process rather than a mere term of storage!
Looked at this way, (looked at as the term for how situations are cognized,) then it becomes clear how it comes about that greatly experienced persons screw up. Sometimes the word stupid describes the screw up neatly. It was stupid of the Nazi General Staff to invade Russia without anticipating an adequate support infrastructure. History offers a legion of examples of the purportedly wise and experienced tending to repeat mistakes made in previous situations, or, tending to use old operations to resolve new problems. (*comment on Hillary Clinton’s Iraq judgment inside the fold.)
Unfortunately, the appeal to experience doesn’t break apart until you consider what are the details of the structure of experience. We don’t need to know what is the foundation of our airliner’s pilots’ experience to understand that we wish those pilots to be experienced. This said, we also don’t want to know of any difference whatsoever between a pilot with decades of experience and the rookie pilot who is commanding the 767 for the first time. Yet this is just another way of exemplifying the idea that it is the capabilities evoked via experience which make all the difference.
It cannot be, then, that, experience is ‘all.’
Filed under adult learning
Lakewood Ohio’s Visionary Alignment often finds its grip on the Observation Deck of the Lakewood Observer, the city’s all volunteer community newspaper. A thread there, unfolding since May 12, Race, Courage and the Future of Lakewood exemplifies the spirit of deep inquiry that is one of the core facets of this project.
The Visionary Alignment is about marshalling citizen-centric inquisitive resources for the sake of developing community understanding. When I was a part of the project close to its inception in 2005, I suggested that if a community implemented enough informal anthropological capability, its energetics would be transformed and, over time, the deep processes of relationship between and among residents, institutions would also change. A second supposition is: this would also alter the ecology of the city’s socio-cultural and economic and political economies.
This long discussion is extremely important and worth close attention. It is possible that Lakewood is among the very few communities in the US with the chutzpah and commitment and devotion to proceed to dialog openly and with a certain genius about some of the most difficult issues post-industrial suburbs are faced with today.
Back in 2005, we dreamed about how processes of inquiry could be designed and implemented by non-professional investigators. At the time, it seemed such a folk anthropology would require training investigators in how to make inquiries, document them, and interpret data without infecting any part of the process with too much pre-conceived prejudice, cognitive biases, and impulsive agendas. One thing we put on the table was the possibility that high school students could lead the effort.
This remains an excellent idea and I’m reminded how valuable a little bit of training in anthropological method and in social cognitive psychology could be.
For the past two years I have been researching with a colleague the following mouthful: informal, self-managed problem solving in dyadic interpersonal contexts. Okay? The research is informal and is driven by loosely coupled folk psychological theorizing about potentially productive heuristics. This means the theorizing is pragmatic but not formally disciplined. Although it could elaborate formal theorizing based in rational-emotive psychology, this isn’t its focus. Self-managed refers to intentional self-regulation. Obviously problem solving in a dyadic context simply means between two people. However, the experimental implementation is that of one of the pair of persons.
The foundational premise takes the form of a question: what kinds of intentional acts can be utilized to interrupt reactive cascades which normally result in a habitual response, and, due to this possible outcome, can be utilized to generate more, rather than fewer, options for problem navigation, negotiation, and, resolution.
Here are two schematic representations that integrate the pragmatic results of experiential experimentation on several vectors of self-management. One result is that the heuristics we’ve employed are apparently productive in the right circumstances.
A typical ‘high velocity’ cascade might lead to: heightened anxiety/heightened reactivity/habituated, non-productive response.
Note that the (so-called) MDFI Matrix cannot schematize habitual flexibility.
Filed under adult learning, folk psychology
I went to my 35th high school reunion this weekend. I graduated in 1972 from Hawken School, having entered as a 10th grader. At the time Hawken,a private ‘prep school,’ was an all-male academy. Two years after my class graduated, women were admitted. Everything, apparently, changed!
1972 was a year in a storied era: Nixon, Nam, psychedelia, hippiedom, and callow questioning of authority are just a few of the features of its context. Over the years, my own questioning has become rigorous rather than callow, but, as I mentioned to my balding classmates, the traces of the olden experience have been sustained and etched.
We get together every five years and, for me, the reunion always provides an intriguing moment of socio-anthropological research into the developmental flow of male life. Way back when: I entered a school full of tribes with the core tribe being the sons of Cleveland’s east side professional and legacy elites. Still, the flux was such that the sorting process landed me among the artistic and long haired!
35 years later, the sorting comes undone as we’re all well into the common vicissitudes visited upon late middle agers be they burdens of health, relationships, family, career, or finances. Those ancient tribes unravel and the loosening and retying makes reunion time uniquely interesting and, dare I suggest, honest and reparative.
Somebody asked me whether I thought people actually change much over the years. As we recollect and recover together memories of misty high school days, it’s a natural question to ask. Are we conversing together as slightly altered versions of our teenage selves, or, doing so without bothering to reconcile great changes, or something else?
It is more than my prejudice to suggest the factors of nature and nurture aren’t easily separated, then to be held apart. But all I said when asked was, “I think life changes us alot.”
Of course, it’s a fascinating question for we know that the oak of personality does grow from the acorn of personality. However, it is also understood that a 5 year old’s self-report and somewhat unmediated self-presentation are categorically different than what they will be decades down the pike of life. Also, just to differentiate factors in a 5 year old is problem enough. Nature? Nurture? It’s a bit of both; but the homo sapiens sapiens is the beast able to recall and reflect and review and rehearse and. . .adapt. Learn. Change.
Jamie aka Dynamo Man, Hambone, and David “Hillsee;” two of my closest friends for over 36 years sitting on the couch in my abode. My soul brothers…
I suggested to my classmates that they consider the opportunity for relationship between us–nowadays–as being predicated on deeper processes of knowing and learning. And these are about what each of us has come to, is about, is.
Whether people basically are developing some given-by-biology template, or are growing from not much more than early developmental blueprints, or are engaged in personal evolution of a more complex and entangled, and even mysterious nature, it seems patently obvious that how one goes about knowing is subject to great enhancing movements and enrichments and maturation.
We come together every five years and sort of work on that kind of knowing. We’re no longer very inexperienced in many respects. Men tend to deprecate their relationship skills, yet there is no better test ground, for men, for the foray into interpersonal knowing than the extention of charitable intimacy to another male friend.
Tis very special.
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, personal
excerpt
Human beings have a tendency to ‘live in their heads’. This phrase covers several facts. First, men have a tendency to overtheorize. Some things are ruined by too much thinking on them, things which are essentially matters of experience. What is more, almost anything can be source of immediate experience, and so almost anything is vulnerable to ruination by too much theorizing. The second fact is this. Such theorizing usually presents itself phenomenologically as internal verbalization, and the internal verbalization often insinuates itself between ourselves and the thing experienced. This is how the thinking interrupts experience and how it leaves us with only our verbalizations. This leads to the third fact: when our theoretical internal verbalization is interposed between ourselves and external things, the object of our awareness becomes ourselves. It is we who are doing the theorizing, and to be aware of the theoretical verbalizing is to be aware of ourselves. This state of mind is undesirable, for it is a commonplace that our happiest moments come when we are not conscious of ourselves, and that most forms of consciousness of self are baneful. It is hard to say why this is so; perhaps the resources of a self are much more limited than the resources of the world, so only an object-directed consciousness can satisfy the human appetite for variety.
The disadvantageousness of this state leaves us with a problem: how can a man with a propensity for injecting his theorizing between himself and the world be coaxed out of doing this? I would suggest that this is the problem the Zen master is addressing, and the koan is his answer. One technique is out; ironically, the very technique I’ve been using. It does no good to mount an argument about the disadvantages of living in one’s head. This would be one more theory, one more verbal construction for the unenlightened to interpose between himself and the world. The activity has got to be halted, and what the Zen masters realized is that it can’t be halted by arguing, however subtly and cogently, that it has got to be halted.
The point of the koan, then, is to halt living in one’s head by presenting inescapably candidate objects for immediate experience. The objects are presented in contexts normally reserved for verbal theorizing, since the abrupt shift of context makes them perspicuous. Thus, when the student
is lost in a cloud of metaphysics surrounding the One, the master turns his attention to a robe. He turns the student’s attention: he doesn’t say “Your attention would be better spent on a robe, for by seeking fulfillment in speculation you are like a dog chasing its tail in the hope of nourishment.” This is an interesting argument, and the odds are the student would pursue it. The Master shows without saying the advantages of experience. He could in fact do this by adverting to a river or a fox; he could clout the student. Anything would do – that is what is insightful about Cheng’s principle of ontic substitutability.
It supports this view of koans that Professor Cheng himself sometimes hints at Zen’s emphasis on immediate experience without developing the implications of his hints. He says in a footnote that the principle of ‘contextual demonstration’, closely allied to ontic substitutability, could also be called the principle of experiential reconstruction “as it is intended to indicate the fact that after ontological reduction reality will be experienced in whatever way it happens to be experienced” (102). This latter, I have argued, is nearly the central point of the koan. How “reality will be experienced in whatever way it happens to be experienced” follows upon ontic reduction is something Cheng does not tell us. I suspect the cited passage reflects Cheng’s awareness that the ‘principle of experiential reconstruction’ has a much more central place in Zen Buddhism and the institution of the koan than he is in a position to allow, and he tries to make it follow from the principle he has construed as the point of the koan. But it will not follow, so far as I can see, and this suggests that Cheng has erred in his extraction of principles from the koan.
Comments on the Paradoxicality of Zen Koans
By Michael E. Levin
The Journal of Chinese Philosophy
V. 3 (1976)
pp. 281-290
Filed under Religion
All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence.†– Emmanuel Levinas
Instant Oracle – An exercise of Experiential Martial Arts
Here’s a fun exercise you can do with your friends on a rainy day. Because the experiential martial arts series asks users to do the exercises in public, this particular exercise is a good one for a coffee house, picnic table, or casual public space. Invite onlookers to join in the play and see what happens.
The Instant Oracle. Gather up some old magazines and mail order catalogues, glue sticks, crayons or markers, and thirty 5 x 7 index cards or fifteen halved sheets of blank paper. You will need one full piece of paper, or, even better, a single sheet of card stock or paper-sized cardboard. Spread them on the table. Fold the single sheet in half and write on one half an announcement for your game: INSTANT ORACLE – CARE TO JOIN IN? Fold it in half and make it into a tent card. This is the set up and is all you will need aside from a playful, exploratory intention to spontaneously learn.
You make up the cards of the Instant oracle by intuitively capturing pictures from the magazines. Tear out pictures you are drawn to and do so for any reason or no reason at all. The only guideline is: you’re drawn to the picture. Glue them to the card, leave some room for a title, and then name the card. For example, if you tear out a picture of a pretty bed set from a catalogue, you might title the card, ‘bed set’.
Once you’ve created the beginning of the Instant Oracle’s deck, you’re ready to play. If an onlooker wonders what the heck you and your pals are up to, invite them to play and have them make up some cards. Of course they will ask you what you’re doing, and the answer is: “We’re making up cards for the Instant Oracle so we can ask it questions.â€
After the group has created twenty or more cards, it’s time to discover the wisdom of this newly created Instant Oracle. Put the cards together so you can’t see the pictures. Address the oracle by asking it a question of personal interest. I recommend constructing the question along a ritual and formal design, ‘Oh great Instant Oracle, please tell me…’
For example, you could ask, “Oh great Instant Oracle, please tell me about my prospects for discovering my true calling.â€
Reach into the deck and pull out a card. Your selection is obviously random and the oracle’s response is instant!
Say you pull out Bed Set. Bed Set? What does a bed set have to do with your life’s calling? The Instant Oracle has spoken. This experiential exercise is all about playing with the answer creatively and insightfully.
“Hmmm, a bed set is the bed you make and lie down in. It’s the place where one rests and recharges. Associations are a fine way to amplify the oracle’s answer, as is word play, or other elaborations of the raw stuff of the picture and title. ‘Set in bed’ relaxing; the privacy of the bed room, the place of sleep and dreams and, usually, the place ‘all your own’.â€
The key to the discovery of insight is the way you explore and interpret whatever comes up. The learning design is quite simple: ask and let the card inspire the answer. The design is effective because it’s the engagement and amplification of the data out of which insight emerges. And, it surely will.
In a group, it’s recommended that the interpretation proceed in three steps. Allow the questioner to interpret the card first. Participants contribute next. A good rule for the collaborative step is: contribute comments about what comes up which are about the card, and not about the personal question. Finally, the questioner plays with the entire data set, first insights, collaborators’ comments, and, hopefully, amazing discoveries in the last step.
In a public space, just laying out the materials and tent card will cause onlookers to be intrigued. Invite them in and learn together. To play with complete strangers is part of the purpose of the exercise. It’s true the unknown factor they bring to the table could limit the sharing of a truly personal question, yet it’s also true that trust of the process and its unknown factors is the best way for the players to deeply engage the wisdom of the Instant Oracle. The purpose of the exercise is to experience playing together with important questions on the table. The goal is to discover through collaborative play helpful, perhaps profound, answers to the questions. Bingo. Instant learning.
Filed under adult learning
Judith Buerkel, February 12, 1941-March 24, 2007
I’ve been privileged to be the not very good student of a succession of teachers. (This admitted, I remain surprised how much of the transmission gets through despite my own resistance!) Judith came into my life under a surprising fitting together of a corner of the jigsaw puzzle in 1995. We worked together, founding squareONE in 1996, until she first became ill in 1999. She courageously investigated death’s gateway a number of times before departing from her fragile body this weekend. God Willing, her peace is now assured. Alhumdulilah!
The glue of our process together was a series of weekly meetings over 30 months. We also conducted a couple of dozen workshops, yet the daring request I managed to meet was to stick my finger into her circuit regularly. Her teaching was not formal but it was bravura. She didn’t introduce me to the experiential mode but she exemplified how to go about it. She was there in every case to help debrief the experience in the aftermath of (my) task. I don’t feel she knew that she knew what she was doing. I trusted her anyway.
However, she was so effective that toward the end of her coiled journey I was given the opportunity to affirm to her the impress of her transmission.
Filed under experiential learning, personal
from The Shifted Librarian.
Hot Books is a game designed to bring life back into libraries by forcing players to explore, discover and share the deserted and unexplored spaces that make up a library.
See also:
Sometime in the next month or so I will summarize the extraordinary seven installments of a workshop given earlier this year at Lakewood Public Library. Also, I will reconfigure the web resource from Lakewood’s web site, and attach it to the squareONE web site.
The series was initiated to prove the concept:
Transformative learning is an aspect of adult education and experiential learning. In the modern library the lack of formality, the encouragement of do-it-yourself investigation, and the breadth of library resources aptly fits with initiatives oriented around informal learning leveraged through active, experiential engagement in and with the library and its resources.
In the conventional sense of self-directed learning about a subject of interest, a library presents an array of resources a learner uses to investigate and learn about this subject.
However, when the subject is one’s self, the hallmark of learning is learning through which this “subject” activates a process of discovery and testing and change. Such initiatives are ultimately emancipatory, and expressly the goal of this type of learning is self-knowledge and advances in personal capability.
The concept was proved. (Hat tip to Alana, who attended every session, and also to Fred and Ken.) In fact, the series was a high point of my own game-making career. One of the neat realizations shared with participants, aggrandizing as it may be, was that our collaboration and innovative use of the library, had never happened in this way ever before in any library. We all were groundbreakers in experiential learning in the environs of the great Lakewood Public Library.
Rather than decide between cognitive, somatic and phenomenal modes of experiential learning, the conceptual underpinning of transformative learning utilized for the programs at Lakewood Public Library integrates the three modalities and terms this integration: Integrated Learning.*
Integrated learning joins experience of relatedness to features and phenomena of the world (including other persons,) plus one’s spontaneous perceptions plus reflective conceptualizations about these experiences. It’s aim can be a: test of learning; discovery of further possibilities for investigation; or insights powerful enough to cause transformative effects.
[Lakewood Public Library Transformative Learning Portal]
—
(* Integral Learning’s conceptual framework with respect to its cognitive aspect is closely related to the learning models of David A. Kolb, et.al., and Jack Mezirow. With respect to the phenomenal (world-situated) aspect it is indebted to the work of Paulo Freire. Whereas its somatic aspect emerges from a variety of models and theorization in the interdisciplinary realm of embodied learning, etc.)
Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, Kenneth Warren
“You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, disbelief. Free your mind.” Morpheus (The Matrix)
Creating a mastermind is one of the fastest ways to get what you want. Our world is too complex to achieve much of anything by ourselves. Nearly all of our knowledge comes from outside ourselves.
Plus, when two people and especially three or four people get together, sparks fly. In our knowledge-based world, it’s nearly mandatory to constantly hone our skills. Books help. So do audio and video. Yet, the human touch is still the most powerful fuel to energize our minds. Year after year, professionals rise to the top of their fields by investing in themselves.
There are several ways to create a mastermind. 1) You can create an internal mastermind or role models (living or deceased), 2) You can join an association, 3) You can create a study group, or 4) You can find a mentor or coach. full article fr:Net-Intelligence
This is a start, at least. I’d could add quite a bit, but will add just a little. ‘Getting what you want’ is a constraint on open-ended learning worthy of its own deconstruction. What…why…how…are always good questions.
Yes, a group is a fine vehicle too. Leverage the differentiation. Different members want different things.
Also, getting what you don’t want can be a very powerful countervaling move. Sometimes the most explosive learning is the result of finding out that what one wants is something beyond what one thinks is wanted, or, that what one needs is entirely different than what one wants.
A Master Mind group is a good vehicle, yet the best groups most of the time benefit from keen facilitation. The more open-ended the group’s aims, the more keen must be the light touch and guidance of the facilitator.
Filed under adult learning
I’m very curious about the process through which people really get to know each other. And, just as fascinated by the processes through which people fool themselves into believing they are getting to really know one other. There is overlap between the former and the latter kinds of processes. Some people are very good at both, but, a person who is good at getting to know another person is likely to well understand what the differences are between really knowing and surface knowing.
It’s tempting to insert here that it is a two-way street too, but, my experience is that there can be a significant differential between two approaches and how effective each, in actuality, is.
When engaged with other persons my common mode is research and participant/deep observer, so, at a minimum, I’m often sitting there being greatly amused by processes of interpersonal knowledge building. For example, it is often for me a case of observing how much interference there is in people’s attempts to be present, listen, respond, and, overall, apprehend what is going on. This goes for me too: reflecting on my own interference.
Dave Snowden refashions the affectual component of the transformative learning model for the sake of innovation.
I have long argued that there are three necessary, but not sufficient conditions for innovation to take place. These are:
- 1. Starvation of familiar resource, forcing you to find new approaches, doing things in a different way;
- 2. Pressure that forces you to engage in the problem;
- 3. Perspective Shift to allow different patterns and ideas to be brought into play.
Creativity is just one way, and not necessarily the most effective to achieve perspective shift. In fact I am increasingly of the opinion that creativity is not a cause of innovation, but a property of innovation processes, its something that you can use as evidence of innovation, but not to create it. full post: Culture and Innovation
STARVATION -> PRESSURE -> SHIFT match neatly with the (my) instrumental model, EXLORATION -> DISCOVERY -> INSIGHT. The preliminary phase of the latter model, intention could be covered in affectual terms by many possibilities. One could be frustration. Another could be ambivalence. Both note the beginning has to do with recognition of something being played out and this obviously plugs neatly into exhaustion. Shift in affectual terms might be experienced as Release into ease, or flow, etc.
It is tacit with respect to my own sense of modeling perspective change that affect and eros underlie the learning phases. They are hidden and decisive factors inasmuch as, for example, exhaustion hopefully leads to vitalization. The affectual undercurrent of the apprehension of innovative potential may be particularly revitalizing at the point an experiment may be identified and soon implemented. To give a new idea a test is energizing. It’s the move through discovery to the possible test realized in the perspective shift that exhausts exhaustion.
Filed under adult learning
Eshu Elegba tale discovered at Tim Boucher’s Pop Occulture
Eshu was walking down the road one day, wearing a hat that was red on one side and blue on the other. Sometime after he departed, the villagers who had seen him began arguing about whether the stranger’s hat was blue or red. The villagers on one side of the road had only been capable of seeing the blue side, and the villagers on the other side had only been capable of seeing the red half. They nearly fought over the argument, until Eshu came back and cleared the mystery, teaching the villagers about how one’s perspective can alter a person’s perception of reality, and that one can be easily fooled. In other versions of this tale, the two tribes were not stopped short of violence; they actually annihilated each other, and Eshu laughed at the result, saying “Bringing strife is my greatest joy.
Filed under adult learning
nogutsnoglory blog IO9 Flowing Data Make Blog Weird Universe