GPS

We brought three phones to some children in one village - we had put some "English language learning content" into the phones in various folders and other arbitrary places and wanted to see what the kids would discover, use and challenge us to improve, focus on further and possibly re-invent.

I had been told that these kids had not had much previous exposure to phones before.  Maybe some of their parents had phones but they were generally from an area where mobile phones were not yet a pervasive reality.  In this age of smartphones, internet and so much trending dazzle of the impending wave of tablets, these were kids whose source of outside innovation was still paper-based information - members of the group of over two billion people in the world who do not have mobile phones.

This is a group of people who continue to be overlooked by many companies and otherwise well-intentioned institutions for simple reasons like "there's no business" in taking up the challenge of finding ways to bring benefits of mobility to these people.  I have heard many nice, good people who have given me nice and good and well-mannered explanations of well-intentioned efforts but essentially saying "we don't have the resources for projects in these areas; come back when you figure out a way we can make money and we'll talk".

When we arrived in a village, there was one girl who had a government issued English book.  When asked if she knew what was in the book she replied no, she only knew that it was English, but didn't understand any of it but was interested and was always looking through the book because it was interesting.  Other children were standing around her looking over her shoulder, kneeling next to her, heads craned to catch a glimpse of the pages.  It was an old frayed copy of what looked to be a first level primer - mostly pictures that were being directly associated with words.  She was flipping through the pages like a girl in another country far away might flip through a glitzy fashion magazine with sighs of dreamy visions of someday being in a world where those fairy tale dresses in the pictures might enclose her own reality of how she could see herself in some distant future.

If that girl from far away ever gets there I wish her well and only hope that those nice clothes fall upon a body that takes her intentions to heart in ways more meaningful and more impactful than the well-clothed words of those nice and good people of nice and good companies...

The children took the phones and started to explore.  One boy began working his way through the folders with a determined focus and rigor that reminded me of how someone described the way a visually impaired person sometimes develops a sense of space as they walk around - first becoming familiar with one length of space, then venturing a right or left turn and expanding that space very systematically and returning along the same path.  Or maybe it was just a simple process of working through every single nook and cranny of a landscape that this boy knew might offer up so much potential at any moment.  This boy was following the folder trail, exploring into a space of who knows what.  I was waiting for him to find the content that we had placed there. 

Eventually he found a few audio files that we had made - English spoken first, followed by Marathi.  I heard him call some friends over, speaking in Marathi, and I heard the word "English".  Soon there were many children flocked around him, looking and listening.  The boy played every single file many times.  Mango - anba...

Then the boy did something interesting - he went back to his systematic search and somehow found some files that I had not even known were there.  I thought I had deleted all stray files and folders but somehow I had missed these folders - the phone was a GPS enabled phone and sometime along the way (pardon the pun) someone had downloaded some maps and the voice instructions and this boy somehow found the folder that had the English voice direction recordings.  He clicked on one of the files in such a way that it not only began playing in the media player, but automatically played one file after the other.  He realized after a while that there was a repeat button and began playing "turn left" over and over, and the kids around him began saying "turn left" with increasing enjoyment - like it was a phrase that was pleasant on their tongue, easy to say or just somehow funny?

I wondered if there was some phrase in Marathi that had an equivalent sound?  Like maybe something like tornluft that means something goofy like underwear or earwax or tickle or pig nose?...

A funny image crossed my mind - a nice and good company personified as a child running through a field finally freed of the well-intentioned nicely-clothed surfaces of necessary words and able to run free with the joy of knowing that there is a way to bring benefits to children around the world - running with a renewed sense of direction that no technology-opted GPS (and possibly no business model) can calculate, determine, articulate or bring to life...

Two

I heard this story: there was a boy in a classroom who was shown a picture of a spoon and asked, "What is this?" The any said, "Two." The end. But then I heard the rest of the story. The boy had an English grammar book. In the book there was a page that presented numbers. By the number 2 there was a picture of two spoons.

Message in a bottle

It’s like walking along a beach and seeing a bottle washed up on shore.  You open the bottle and there is something that all of your past experience and understandings and assumptions have you recognize as a message, but it is not in any language that you recognize, so for all practical purposes is of no value whatsoever, either to you or to the person who had originally written it and placed it in that bottle.   

Do you even know that it was the same person who put te marks on the paper and who eventually placed the paper in the bottle?  So many possibilities but there you are, with only your imagination, of nonsensical vows of love written by a couple who the tossed them to the endless seas with no sense of a need of anyone ever finding them or a poem written by a solitary soul who then placed it in the bottle envisioning someone somewhere reading it and completely understanding its every nuance, whatever and anything but there you are.  A bottle and a message.   

You see a silhouette of a person appear in the distances, moving towards you and you know with the knowledge that only deep believe can summon that this person knows the language on the piece of paper that you hold.  Suddenly a whole world of possibility opens up to you.  Who is that person walking towards you?  What can they tell you, and what can you learn?  And if you were that person, what might you say about the message that you are able to read and which you would want to share with the other there with you?  Who would teach what?  Who would learn what? 

Holes

I was told an Indian saying: "If you find something good in a hole, take it and use it and appreciate it no matter how big or small the hole is." thinking about all the people I've been meeting, there has not been a single person who has not offered me some help or insight into this world around me, from directions if only halfway or maybe only a few hundred meters towards where I want to get to, to facts, history, details, stories, jokes, by the ways, a line comment, a suggestion, a simple answer to a simple question. But actually it's been no different throughout the years. Thanks to all of you and I can only hope I have been able to give something back within all the realities of those goofy holes that have been me...

Everywhere is a well-worn trail

I haven’t thought to explore so far within details of the Indian Olympic Association’s (IOC’s) latest activities but feel humbled by the extent of challenge, fortitude and determination to put a strong face forward into heavy winds of questioning, skepticism and anger.  Regardless of what the inner workings of those who seem to be considered the usual suspects, there is a sense of something astir that might be a little more than pride.  But then, what seems to be the question so many are asking is why should the activities of a few work against the many athletes who spend so much of their time and energy and perseverance trying to attain a dream, a large part of which is to compete under their country’s own flag at the Olympics?

I was supposed to have some meetings at a local college today, 6 December, but was told that this day is a national holiday in honor of the man who had led the writing of India’s constitution back in 1947.  So no meetings after all.  I decided to take a walk up Nagphani, a hill to the south of Lonavala, which was essentially a matter of taking a tuktuk to a nearby town, finding the railway station, walking up through a saddle between two hills, heading around the backside of the western hill, meandering across a valley and then trudging up the slope that led to the summit.  It was a hot winter’s day.  One main thought was to reference landmarks for the return trip; I filled up the landscape with points of return.

This was all fine and good on the way back except for one area that I came to call “wing it slope” on the backside of the western hill leading towards the saddle.  I wouldn’t say that I got lost – I was all the time aware of the lay of the land, the hill and the saddle, but there was a spot of time when I didn’t have a clue which trail I should be on.  All trails were fine – they all went somewhere that could seem like the right way at least for some short moment of time.  I could have felt like I was “everywhere and nowhere”, which is that terrible moment when the land begins to whirl around us, when we attempt to grasp at things that are ungraspable, when we lose focus, lose a sense of place, lose our way, lose composure and level-headedness – when we are in the most danger of really getting lost.  But I held to my sense of place, the sun’s position, the angle of the slope, a sense of where the hills were around me and kept moving on and eventually got “back on track” or as Aerosmith put it, back in the saddle again.

It was when I returned to my hotel room that I read the article about the IOC, and got thinking about some of the quotes of the athletes.  “It feels as if we have been thrown into an orphanage…”  “Politics should not be allowed to spoil sport…”  “There’s so much internal bickering and power struggle…”  And one commentary that alluded to a need for the cleaning up of a system that doesn’t treat sport and sportspersons as its raison d’etre.

There are choices at every moment and many times there might not be so much focused thought on the big picture, the ultimate aim or goal or destination, or, for instance, the ones who will ultimately benefit, or be penalized by being shunned by whatever action is chosen.

BR Ambedkar had been a Dalit – an untouchable - but he succeeded in getting a college education, prestigious degrees and a position that allowed him to bring a voice of civil liberty into the words of India’s constitution.  To honor him with a special day of holiday (which happens to also be Finnish Independence Day and the feast of St Nicholas, who was known for his acts of charity and love) seems to be giving a nod of honor to the act of focusing on the people who benefit from any action we take, rather than maintaining a focus on immediate, directionless, everywhere moments…

Noise

I was meandering along the streets of Mumbai and found my way out to the shore, moving amongst people, always people, and everything around was people within thousands of activities, and for some strange reason I got thinking about noise, and the way we typically think of noise as, well, noise: "This place is noisy," or "Where's all that noise coming from?" or "How can there be so much noise?" 

And I thought about learning, and how the best learning is usually quite noisy.  For instance, I think that learning might not always shine with its brightest light within "systems".  Content might be framed by a system, a curriculum might be defined systematically, a schedule might be established within a systematic approach to optimizing time - but the learning itself?

But before you go off running in the direction of children jumping around yelling and chattering and making a general ruckus and ruin of their learning environment, let me explain something about how I'm envisioning noise.

Noise as a word has a very close connection to the word "nausea" - a close cousin to seasickness, a drinking buddy with tipsiness, being a bit off-kilter, sort of dizzy, sort of off balance, befuddled, woozy and wobbly, dazed and confused... Like a mariner out on the high seas, rolling with the crashing of waves, getting battered about and getting feeling a bit out of sorts, but hey it's not all smoothness and sheens of calm out there. And that act of learning - those noisy moments when things crash upon themselves, wheel around and do the dervish with understandings sending assumptions weavingly away and causing us to rethink so many layers and depths and even the smoothness and sheens of so much of what we might even want to maintain as smoothness, but finding that it all just wobbles a bit, and makes the surface upon which we stand wobble, and makes the landscape or seascape or whatever scape has been constructed around us shift about in ways that may not have us feel like we're in as much control of our posturing as we might have imagined just a second before.

Then the ship rolls down into the sheltering trough and learning might call that brief moment of calmness knowledge, or understanding, as it gets its sea-legs set firmly on the deck in anticipation of the next beg swell.

And it can begin with the simplest of words and what do we know about layers of thought or conscientious depths?  For instance, how do children learn?  What is the noise?  Sometimes it's so difficult to envision what sparks a child's sense of learning and so difficult to maintain a perspective of this without drifting off into some space of one's own beliefs of what is best and right and proper, and we should be vigilant because that's when the "systems" tend to begin to re-emerge with their tendency to calm the tempests and smooth out the seas?

Ends of rainbows

There seems to be an ambivalence of attitudes towards the arrival and ongoing presence of IT in India and how it has woven its way into various mindsets of education; but actually it might be an ambivalence that is much older than this most recent technological wave we are calling IT.

At one end of the rainbow, IT has been accepted with open arms and enthusiastic fascination as great thing for a country that seeks to build a solid base of experts in a field that has taken the planet by storm as it wraps its digitized magic in wondrous interlacings of creativity, innovation and evolutionary commercialization.  A whole multi-layered matrix of schools, trainings, academies, institutions and universities compete within the highly competitive playing field of education, moving hundreds of thousands of students through the intricacies of instilling a solid basis of core skills in preparation for their emergence into this vibrant space.  Cities like Bangalore, with its “invisible downtown” somewhere around MG Road and Brigade, have completely redefined themselves as “the place to be” for tapping into the dream-stream flow of IT innovation.

At the other end of the rainbow is what you might say is that distant end (there always seems to be a distant end): the end that is a bit more vague, maybe a little out of focus, hazy, misty, effecting a sense of not so much settling upon horizons as much as a shrouding of an understanding of what might be a horizon, that seems to find solace in resting within a state of emitting some essence of not quite being where it seems it might be. 

This end of the rainbow is imbued with a feeling that IT has somehow confused the way people – students, parents, teachers, administrators, and on and on and on – see, embrace and evolve the role of education. 

Being a person who has so many times caught myself tending towards those vaguenesses of misty rainbow shrouded horizons, I find my attention here also being drawn towards listening to the ways people have been describing what seems to be a quite nascent feeling – that IT has somehow muddled and confused education to the point of disregarding elements like social implications and realities of self. 

For instance, when defining career paths.  A former colleague of mine summed this up quite nicely when he said that “IT has brought about a very solid attitude of ‘education as an investment’ that has led so many parents, and their children, to view education within a mindset of a need to stay focused on the path to success.”  I’ve been told that there is huge competition for students to attain best grades for best universities, starting all the way from preschool.  One person told me that some schools for children do not have playgrounds because they are so “academically focused” that playgrounds are seen as “distractions to learning”.  Many of the for-profit schools are working within the dynamic of passing students through the well-tended landscapes laid-out with clear trajectories of potential towards success – what one person described as a “channelized vision of education”.  One person said that there is a danger of building high expectations without enough effort being put on framing academics with “the right picture of the reality” right from the beginning so that students don’t get disheartened when the reality shows up…

But there are many activities and initiatives that are seeking to bring perspective into the views of education , consideration of career choices, and reality checks on how things might be “out there” – and it was surprising and inspiring to me to hear that there is one initiative that came into existence well before all of the momentum of IT had even reached first gear in its shift from grinding mainframes to finely-wrought flows of data upon a landscape of seemingly endless potential.

VEDH (Vocational Education Direction and Harmony), a TED-like event for kids around the age of 14-15, is now in its 22^nd year of existence.  I was fortunate to be able to attend VEDH in Nashik on 2 December, and although most presentations were in Marathi, I was able to feel the energy and enthusiasm of the panelists and the students and had some great discussions with some of the organizers.  This year’s theme was “Impossible to Possible” and the presenters took up this theme with their own unique personalities as the moderator, Dr Anand Nadkarni brought out their best.   

My understanding of their attitudes and feelings of hope and strength was defined through the kindness of the the man seated next to me as he occasionally whispered various phrases in English:

You all have opportunities and awareness that you can take charge of your own future.

Spend time with yourself.

What you know and what you are passionate about may not always be represented by the system.

Turn your passion into your work and you will be fulfilled.

Every moment is a mix of so many things, but it is harmony.

Believe in yourself and others will believe in you.

It was an amazing experience to sit there and hear these whispers, to see these people on stage who have remained focused on dreams of taking awareness and understandings of their own self into a future defined not by “the channels” but by vision and fortitude - and then to turn and see 3000 students and parents hearing these words in their local language and think that those moments might be moments of inspiration that define some element of some of their futures.

Maybe the misty sort of rainbow-end isn’t so misty after all, but is there to be brought into a clear focus of the destination to make of it?

Vegetables

I rolled down the window of the taxi to smell the vegetables lining the street like garlands laid out welcoming a victorious army. The army notes through the piles, filling boxes, bags, backpacks. The victory is plenitude. The bus is not yet full but I've been told that this is the last available seat. Number 13. It will be about four hours of traveling. There is an old dirty vomit-smelling rag hanging on the seat rail in front of me. When no one seems to be looking I brush it off so that it gently wafts down to the floor. A man appears at the front of the bus with a clip-board and hands it to the man in the first seat and then hands him a pen.  It seems like some sort of sign-in. The man with the clip-board progresses down the aisle, each person taking the clip-board in turn. I see him go to hand it to one woman. She gestures at the clip-board with a motion that reminds me me how I brushed away the dirty rag - maybe not the same depth of a question of what it actually was but of a similar wish for it to maintain a nice functional distance, not repulsion as much as just wanting to have it be away. The man seated next to her takes the clip-board. I wonder if what I thought I had seen was what I had actually seen. Even in my mind I try to re-see that gesture. A well-practiced subtlety; a sort of easeful purpose and I can imagine that she just likes her man to do those sorts of perfunctory boring things like filling in clip-boards just as I can imagine the dignity with which she would ask her man to remove the rag from the seat railing? We see what we see and on any given day we can only hope to celebrate our own little victories of sight in the never-ending war of comprehension. Victory, and sight, are relative things.

Try this (1)

I have begun analyzing myself within this context of moving through a country, a culture and a mix of languages that are different from what I am used to moving through in my typical day to day world.  Language is an important part of this.  Most people speak English to some extent and I tap into that like my nose grabbing ahold of familiar smells within so much that it does not recognize.  I even surprised myself one day when I caught myself thinking that I liked the smell of cigarette smoke because it was the only smell i could recognize... 

Some people seem to have a few English sentences that they have practiced.  Yesterday when I was traveling back to my hotel, the autorickshaw I was in was running out of gas.  The driver turned to me, said "petrol" and took a detour down some back alleys that I would not call roads but maybe paths with some elements of past attempts at creating a road-like surface - basically an series of potholes that had concrete chunks in them and around them.  The driver navigated through them like I remember my friends navigating through muddy pothole ridden trails in Alaska on their four-wheelers.  No different really - only maybe the sights and smells around.

When the driver pulled over he said "five minutes" and walked away.  I pretty much knew that he did not specifically mean "five minutes" in any sense of a particular element of time, "five" maybe being a safe number to use to designate a measurement like "a few" or "let's see how many".  I sat back to see what would happen. 

There was an old woman on the other side of the street.  I smiled, she smiled.  I listened to the sounds of birds, of children.  Some faint music.  A faintness of indications of traffic in the distance as if all those potholes ate at the harshness of the traffic noise until all that reached me was a wash of honed down humming.  Quite peaceful actually.

The woman walked around, easefully, slowly, not necessarily towards me but eventually arriving over by the rickshaw.  "Which country?" she asked.  My mind wandered.  Which country was I thinking about?  Which country was I from?  Which country was where I called my home?  Which country did I dream about calling my home?  "Finland," I said, and she nodded and smiled and I really didn't know if she understood or if it really even mattered.  "Water?" she said, exposing a plastic bottle that she had under her shawl.  "No, thank you," I said smiling. and she nodded and covered the water bottle with her shawl. 

"Thanks, thanks, thanks," I thought, racking my brains, knowing that I knew that word, where was it, what was it, sh something shakra, shukra, shulkrita, shukria, yeah, shukria, something like that, I knew it was something like that, it seemed to match a memory and all I wanted to do was to say the word to the old woman who was now looking down the street, still smiling a serene smile, and I said "shukria" and her head slowly turned and her eyes met my eyes and her smile did not fade, and I thought that she nodded but couldn't be sure and she calmly as if without effort turned and walked away and the driver came back as if on cue,went to the back of the autorickahaw and fumbled with what sounded like a propane tank, went away again, came back "five minutes" later, fumbled a bit again, got back into his seat and off we went.

Eagles, ducks and a chicken

The auto rickshaw added an interesting dimension to meeting a friend at one of the engineering universities, all forward motion, bumps, noise and views of amazing entrepreneurial spirit all around, people doing business on almost every available square meter of sidewalk space, selling, re-selling, creating, dealing, observing, running, walking, sitting, waiting, discussing, building, pushing carts, cooking substances, re-purposing objects, re-purposing materials, all for the ultimate benefit of those who they could proudly call their customers.

How many were thinking about providing "experiences"?

I once heard Ken Blanchard tell his story about ducks and eagles - ducks walk around quacking about why this and that can't be done, what's wrong with the system, why they can't do anything about it, why they can't help you, excuses, excuses, blah blah blah, quack quack quack, while eagles move through the spaces above a situation eying it with a calm intent asking well now what can we do about this to make it all work out?

My guess is that a lot of those people the rickshaw was passing had an eagle-like experience mentality, focusing in how to make things work out as naturally as that policeman got into the rickshaw with a live chicken in a plastic bag and rode with us for about a kilometer before departing. 

Hope

Some notes on one man's view on hope:

I spoke with one man working at the hotel about children and hope.  He is the father of two children.  He has very strong and high hopes for his two children and sees education as a very important aspect of this.  Every month he and his wife put a not so small percentage of their total earnings into their children's education.  he said that it is sometimes not easy but they are always trying to do the best they can.  There are very many costs.  Education is not free.  He said that he is fortunate that his children are good students because it is very difficult if a child has learning problems.  "No one wants to talk about this," he said.  it seems that if someone's child is having some sort of problem, it is difficult for the parents to reach out to seek help.

I asked about families who want to keep their children at home working in family businesses.  He said that this is true, but it is not usually because parents do not trust education or see education as any sort of threat to having their children continuing to work with them in the family business - it was more that there are sometimes no possibilities to have the children attend school.  Maybe there is not enough money or support, and it is a vicious cycle of having to make the money for the child to attend school but needing the child to help with the business to make the money, which leaves very little time then for the child to actually attend school.  "Drop-outs" in this context might be thought of as children who are "recalled" to the family business in order to try making more money to get the child back into school.  This man I was speaking to said that most parents understand the value of education and hope for their children's best possibilities and want to give their children the best education possible, and see the value for instance of children learning math and English to bring this competence back into the family business, but many times there is just not the possibility to allow for the child's attendance.

Disney

On the plane down to Bangalore I got talking to a man who was visiting all of the major airports in India to assess service quality.  He had a “light reading” book with him titled If Disney Ran Your Hospital

Talking with him, I could understand his interest in this book - he works in an area that serves the needs of many people, and these many people do not always think so much about what is behind their "experience" of passing through an airport.  But there is a very large amount of levels of planning and logistics of so many little details that add to the overall experience, all of which bring great benefit to those having the experience.

I went to three bookstores trying to find the book but none of them had it, so I haven’t read the book and am not sure what the “Disney way” could be, but I’m imagining for instance, that hospitals need to create an atmosphere that resonates with the people who are there for reasons I imagine all have to do in some way with health.  reading some of the book reviews, and recalling what this man had said about the airport experience, it seems that what the "Disney way" focuses on is a perspective of each individual person as a unique admixture of life contexts, who each have a role and need and desire to attain the best balance of information that's most relevant for them to get the most relevant and beneficial "health experience". So for instance in Disney World, they would be able to have control of their experience, making informed decisions on the way to navigate through the vastness of all the choices of timings, rides, eating, meeting Disney characters, resting, buying souvenirs, going to the bathroom...  In a hospital, this could translate into the ability to make informed decisions about medicines, treatments, foods, exercise, preventative activities, mindset and attitude, alternative medicines, healthcare, etc as realistic aspects of our journey through life?

Now, if all of that were to be translated over to learning and education, we might seek to look at each individual within their many different life contexts and explore their quest to attain the best balance of relevant information so that they can make informed decisions about their learning experience.  It might be that there would be quite many similarities to the potential for the health space to transform towards a more empowering experience of informed choice by framing the learning experience with aspects of informed choices for navigating through the vastness of potential, ways of learning, contexts for learning, communities for learning, timings, exercises, comprehension, reminders, etc as realistic aspects of our journey through life.

The man told me that the Deli airport was chosen last year as the #2 airport in the world for quality of experience.  I asked how far they were behind the #1 airport and he said it was very close, and said that the deciding factor had been that the Delhi airport had gotten comments that it not had enough toilet paper in the women's bathrooms.  Simple things.

Kingfisher

When I took the shuttle bus between Delhi International and Domestic terminals I caught a glimpse of the tail-fins of many Kingfisher planes exposed above a tall concrete wall, looking like gravestone markers across an expanse of calm light blue endlessness that was the clear India sky.

I'll have to ask someone, or many people, what their views are on the seeming demise of what I had thought to be a really nice airline with comfortable and good service and a good attitude to everything that their brand touched.

Is there some element of a cautionary tale to all who have even the slightest tendency to envision how money might roll into town all guns blazing without really having such a firm grasp not only on those 45s of their Western myth-vision but also on the reality of whatever situation they're riding into whether it be a highly complex phenomenon like moving people through the skies or the simple, straightforward, wondrous chaos of transversing spaces of various ways to accept, reject, question, posit, share or shun education?

I spoke to a woman in the airport about children in India.  She told me that many children do not get the chance to go to school because parents want them to work in their family businesses and thus see education as a threat.  I asked her if that was still largely true, meaning, is it something that is still quite common?  Yes, she said, it's quite common still.  She seemed well-educated and seemed disheartened by what she was telling me.  I wondered if there are activities that are seeking to bridge this mindset towards making these parents aware of alternative possibilities.  Could there be some intermediate reality, where a child's introduction to education might actually help the family business?  Could there be a dynamic where a guns blazing approach has no direct bearing on the potential for positive outcomes, but where positive outcomes nevertheless emerge and thrive?  I'm sure that there are many people asking these same questions, many people and organizations exploring this landscape of so many intertwining hopes and dreams and fears, and many groups, people, companies and collaborative attempts that are seeking to work through this for the ultimate benefit of children, which is always, I believe, ultimately for the benefit of the communities within which these children live.

Learning

I seem to remember that "learn" was originally the root word for what we now define as "teach" and that there was some connection in those early words with "lore", as in folklore, as in storytelling.  You "learned" something by telling about it - in a sense, the "learn" aspect was in the passing of information from one person to the other, with the learning being done by the one who held the knowledge and thus who passed it on.  It kind of fits the old adage that you never know what you really know until you try to tell it to someone else.  I imagine the one receiving the learning as one who journeys through a landscape that is being posited by the one who is presenting learning - establishing the space within which one begins to move, explore, discover.

It can also be thought to be about letting go.  It's a bit like "stuff".  So many people have a tendency to collect stuff, yet there are those who seem to always be giving stuff away.  In the Finnair magazine on the plane, Arja Suominen's editorial was about (excuse my crude paraphrasing) how many people remember having experiences more than they remember possessing things.  Is the stuff of life what we move ourselves through, experience and share for others to experience?

It's like love. What is it?  If you want to collect it, what do you have?  It's only in giving it away that it seems to begin to develop a sense of developing some sense of substance however tenuously sensed.  It cannot remain static, like the firing of synapses in our brain that create ideas - if they stopped, there would be no thought.  It's like the idea of how our bodies are in a constant state of turmoil and chaos, battling viruses and all sorts of firefighting drills if only because the body needs to keep in constant motion, in a sense, sharing its vitality across many different levels of interaction if only to effect an ongoingness of a flow of energy.

From this perspective, learning and teaching are interwoven aspects of this ongoingness, a dynamic of the passing on and sharing of movement within a landscape of potential.  We define that potential, we define that landscape, with the definition being framed by what we are given as fodder for the flame we might call life.

Lemons

I was getting packed and ready to go and went to empty out the fridge and saw that there were four lemons.  I recalled something a friend had once mentioned about the somewhat odd alkaline state of lemons (I would typically think that they were acidic because of their sourness), which helps balance the body's Ph levels against all of the acidic rush of so many foods available on store shelves these days -but this supposedly only works for about 20 minutes after cutting into the lemon before it too slides over to being acidic.

I got thinking about all of the amazing stuff that tends to just happen to emerge within conversations; you talk with someone, share news, facts, gossip, information, details at the wayside of relevance, jokes and banter and suddenly they're telling you something, like in so many conversations when it seems that people tap into what's underneath all of the back and forth to access an innate wish to keep practical information moving, as if as some undercurrent to the day to day talk - how to do things, what to look for, how to avoid problems, how to make something, how not to break something.

It might be that we give indications of interest, sometimes even unconsciously, and others pick up on that - so many good people willing to share so much, and they share so much...

Created by humans, the internet seems to mirror a sense of design around a similar dynamic - we articulate our interests, for instance in a search term, and it replies back with suggestions, or we move through various activities and the side bars start to feel around for ways to grab our attention...

But it's still not nearly close to any level of where so many people seem to be able to sense where you're coming from at some almost sub-conscious, sub-rational level of an essence of interest.  They throw out a few exploratory queries, watch you and hear what you say and boom, there they are, telling you the most amazingly interesting and useful things.  Maybe it's not so much about academic degrees, prestigious positions or walks of life as much as it's about that good old basic willingness to share worthwhile information and knowledge.

Centuries before Socrates sat under his tree, people were sharing information and knowledge.  Over time, it's been turned into a type of art form, what some might call teaching, advising, mentoring, showing the ropes, what others might say is having a gift for gab, yet some cultures seem to disregard this art, some seem to make excuses why they can't give it more attention, some seem to be confused about how they can raise its stature, get more people involved, build upon the growing surge of technologies that well up on the shoreline of potential.  One possible way forward is to allow for informal associations of communication to form into ad hoc communities of driving interest, and provide means for these communities to find their identities.  Possibly.

I made lemonade.

Charro

I remember exactly where I was when I first tried spotify - I was in a taxi in Mexico City going by a bar or some such place that was called "Charro" - which I remember only because I like watching even the goofiest of Westerns and remember Elvis Presley's "Charro".

I asked someone what the word meant.  "It's like a guy who tells a woman he loves her and will be back but she knows that he won't come back."  Well, there are for sure quite many other ways of defining it, and maybe Elvis didn't play that sort of character but come to think about it, maybe he did.

In the taxi I had been playing with my phone and had just opened the spotify app.  I had distractedly gotten it all set up in the hotel room along with a few other apps, and there I was ready to try it.  But I distinctly remember thinking, "this probably rips a huge chunk of data out of the network..." Like a gun blast sending a bullet to high heaven to rip through flesh, data flies with a vengeance.  I hesitated.  I looked out the window and saw The Word painted on the side of a building.  I turned off the app.  That was my "first try".

I've been hearing a phrase "spotify for education" being thrown around by various people.  It's a great concept.  For instance, a space "where anyone's songs of knowledge can be found. where teachers are learners and learners are teachers".

Interesting how fast this term has moving into this space of use.  Not as common as Band-Aid but moving fast.  Yes, a great concept, browse, listen, create, share, be shared, join together...  Mobile education does not have such a common shared and sharing space at the moment.  There is much that is separate, and separated.  It would do well to bring some more togetherness into the picture.

But IMHO the Charro syndrome should be avoided.  Something like: try not to go into a space, bring promises, money, technology, plans, partnerships, predilections, predictions, presumptions... and then have things fizzle when the well of whatever philanthropic groundwater stream dries up.  This should not be about corporate social responsibility or any of the other tangents of well-intentioned initiatives with agendas hidden or not, clear or somewhat muddled policies and strategies that push and pull like that Dr. Doolittle creature...

And it should all be for the ultimate benefit of children who can grow, and thrive and learn and teach onwards.

And it shouldn't end up ripping into huge chunks of data?

And it shouldn't end up haggling about DRM?

And it should allow "the experts" their voice in all relevant forums even if  "those other experts" do not recognize them as experts?

And it should, as a tool,  be able to be reverse engineered, chewed up, improved, re-shared around  and possibly even presented out into a free space of onwardly good action just like any good open source tool with good open source manners brought to any wondrously good open source feast of something quite akin to paying it forward might potentially do?  Jeez I have to admit that I really do love run-on sentences:)