“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.’ ”

Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game

A long hiatus often indicates a formal life change; such is here the case.  I have a new job: Director of Learning Environments and Media Production; a potentially unfortunate acronym though perhaps accurate.  We’ll see how things develop.  I’ve been at it (formally) for about 3 weeks and not surprisingly things have been a little rough.  Again not surprisingly, most of the difficulty stemmed from underestimating from and change.  In other words I spent the first 2.8 weeks acting like a manager rather than a director, and it turns out that there’s an order of magnitude difference.  To resort to a military metaphor, it’s the difference between the classes of NCO and Officer (in the Navy there’s an odd concatenation: Warrant Officer, which may point semantically to a significant difference between the Navy and the Army). Managers (NCO’s) are responsible for getting things done; Directors, CIO’s, and the like are responsible for deciding what things need to get done, when they need to be done, and more than occasionally how they need to get done.  It’s the last that’s tricky.  There’s a fine line between “getting things done” and “doing things”, particularly when you realize that the common tools in both cases are people who report to you.  Gathering firewood is easy; getting others to gather firewood is a bit more difficult; knowing when there’s enough firewood for the entire camp is a responsibility; making sure there’s the right enough, not too much, firewood to go around is a full time occupation.

The Two Essential Secrets of Excellence:

You Have Time

&

You Have the Power of the Creative.

Leaving aside the fact that “Excellence” is a MORE or less meaningless term at best signifying: “some state better than right now” we can proceed with the workaround.  All problems fall into one of two categories: 1) I know what to do, but don’t have time to do it, and/or 2) I don’t know what to do.  It’s “and/or” because these two excuses are invariably combined to form a meta-reason for postponing change. But here’s how to Make Things Happen: Begin with the Power Mantra:

What Prevents Me?

(repeat as necessary)

Make this a real question; if you think “too busy” then spend the next hours watching what you do, is it really the case are you really constantly busily productive?  Could you find 20 minutes to think, plan, write, and another 10 to act?

Now that you’ve eliminated, as you most surly should have, “no time”, your mind will be full of confusion and guilt, overwhelmed with should, convinced by can’t, paralyzed by the perceptions of possibilities, failure, humiliation, destruction, devastation, even death, while if you do nothing, an easy choice, all that could possibly happen is what happened yesterday and the day before.  But by now it will seem that you’re taking this all a bit too seriously, yesterday wasn’t all that great, today’s no better, maybe a bit worse, and really the worst thing that’s likely to happen is not much, which is why you think you’re “Not Creative.” Because if you were Creative you’d obviously Know how to become Excellent. You would Know What To Do!

But What Do You Mean By CREATIVE?

Let’s explore.  It is generally known that Poets are by nature and definition CREATIVE, so let us consider two relatively contemporary examples, Alfred Joyce Kilmer and Thomas Stearns Eliot.  Both American with British overtones, and both have “created” works or at least phrases that haunt our culture.

Joyce Kilmer: Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land

One or the other is no doubt poetry at its finest. You may prefer Joyce Kilmer who was a good and brave soldier who was shot in the head dead by enemy sniper but who lives forever either as a hero or an example of truly bad poetry, if you think hero you’ll probable like the poem. But if you are of a more modernist mind you will prefer Mr. Elliot who like a good intellectual smoked himself to death, which along with his poem you may find a bit off putting, even a little pretentious. Either way it’s a very good argument for a subjective definition of being creative.  And thus frees me to offer:

The SECRET to being CREATIVE!

DO SOMETHING!

It really doesn’t matter what; the first thing that pops into your head.  If you have more than a single thought and you can’t decide, flip-a-coin.  Seriously, chance will eliminate the possibility of prejudice or expert bias.  What matters is trying things and keeping an open mind; what’s critical is paying attention to the results.  This is the secret to being what is called creative, The Willingness to Try Things and the Courage to Decide What Works.  All that is required of you, and it is small yet different from external things, is a certain mindfulness. Just a little practice and you’ll be ready for the next step:

And the tip ‘o the hat to the Oldaily:

Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010 the Sloan Consortium report on the state of online learning in the United States.

Learning Technology – Pervasive Learning and Usage of Sensors in Technology Enhanced Learning seriously geeky as you would expect from the I-triple-E.

Free Video Lectures 750+ Online Courses, 18400+ Videos from Top 30+ Universities on 35+ Categories

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

…

one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Not long after I finished reading I found myself as part of the University search committee charged with hiring a new Web manager for our department. One of my co-conspirators asked the candidate if as Wired m inagazine had suggested, “the web was dead.” The candidate thought for a moment and then replied, “that the old web was dead, but that what we had called the web had become so ubiquitous as to make definitions like living or dying more or less meaningless.” My mind did quick translation, “this is water.”

I’ve made a few adjustments to the structure of Learning Aesthetics,both in terms of the blogroll and to the readings section on the right which I’m using for my own handy reference and for yours. Expect things to change around a bit more in the future, and expect to see and hear from me with a bit more frequency.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I’ve suggested that we need to become community organizers, and given you a tool to help you get started; my assumption being that we need to get our own community going before we can start helping others organize and manage theirs. I’m fairly certain that my suggestion has caused a good deal paranoia and paralysis, because you don’t know how to make a community or how to use the tool. I’m equally certain that the real problem is that you’re looking for an easy solution when what’s required is simplicity; all you have to do is share something. It can be a link, a picture, a thought, an idea, a tweet, or a LOLcat. It really is that simple; share something on a daily basis and community will happen. It’s not easy, because it feels new, different, not something you’re used to doing, but it is simple, sharing is always simple …

‘Tis the gift to be loved and that love to return,
Tis the gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn,
And when we expect of others what we try to live each day,
Then we’ll all live together and we’ll all learn to say,

When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come out right.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Gifts>

photo credit: Nesster

Oh well, my real point is that we can’t turn off the electricity, so I may as well post this.  This Tweet just in form Michael Wesch: “Chacha … new ways to cheat on exams / new reasons to write different kinds of exams:  http://chacha.com/“.  You got a cellphone or a laptop, you got a question? Thanks to ChaCha you got an answer.

And speaking of devices; you may remember that I’ve changed keyboard layouts in an effort to improve my typing speed, futile so far. A side effect has been learning some interesting things about how my mind works, or as often as not, doesn’t work. I’ve always been a lazy typist; despite the best efforts all my high school typing teachers I’ve cheated by watching the keyboard as I type. Obviously that’s not real productive when you shift over to the Drovak layout because now the keys are all mislabeled. However, today I discovered that I type faster and with more accuracy if I watch the keys as I type. I can ignore the labels and sort of visualize the letters and the layout, weird. You never know what you’re addicted to or how hard it’s going to be to break the habit.

Image Mark Wubben

• Institutional control vs Individual Control
• Assessment: “…if we ask for grades, we’ll get grades back; if we ask for capacity, we’ll get capacity back.” If we give grades, we’ll get grades.
• Web 2.0 is the technology of inquiry.
• Identity is now an epistemological rather than an ontological problem.
• How can you prove who you are, or equally prove what you are?
• Identification – self-validation vs Authentication – validation by external authority.
• Credit cards as tokens of identity; an odd combination of physical possession, presence, and numerical uniqueness.
• There is no authentication without identification.
• No system of authentication succeeds?  This seems counter intuitive, but is probably true; that needs some thinking.
• “There is no token, other than my own body, that I can’t share.” But if the body itself is a kind of token of the self?
• Everything depends on my not wanting someone else to ‘pretend’ to be me.
• Who can we ‘trust’ to validate our identities, to allow someone/us to withdraw money from our bank account, to say we can drive, or to vote.
• OPENID: a persons identity is a web site.
• I have to admire an ‘expert’ who is willing to let things sort of fall apart without getting upset.