Musings from Liza Loop

Joel Josephson is a member of the Learning without Frontiers Group on LinkedIn. He describes himself as follows:

“an uneducated educator, he never went to university but today is involved in initiating European Union education projects that are targeted at creating learning systems and methodologies for the future education of children.”

In April 2013 he spoke at a TedX on education. (“Joel’s talk” )

In late July he posted on the LinkedIn group: “8 rules for education”

Joel lists:

1. Autonomy
2. Personal relevance
3. Collaboration
4. Self-criticism
5. Autodidacts
6. Creative and emotional
7. No stress
8. Parents

I replied: Nice set of goals, Joel. I look forward to visiting you other postings to see whether you address how to implement these. I have a number of suggestions in case you are looking for more ideas. Please let me know.

Also, perhaps one more goal would be helpful to add to your list for young learners: being aware of one’s own learning modality strengths and weaknesses. By this I mean that even 4, 5 and 6 year olds can become conscious of whether they acquire information faster and retain it longer by looking at still pictures, videos (with or without audio), audio only or spoken live. The same type of differentiation can be explored within the medium of text as soon as they learn to read. When learning a motor skill children can understand whether they prefer to watch a demonstration first or jump right in to the activity. They also can pace themselves in terms of how far to break a task down into small steps. With mastery of these parameters of their own learning in hand youngsters can more effectively decrease their stress and become the autodidacts you admire.

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I find social media to be a good screening device for locating people who have interests similar to mine. But I’m always disappointed by the difficulty of having a serious discussion using these communication tools. Joel’s comments are tantalizing but lack the detail I look for to understand how his ideas might be implemented in real world schools. Of course, he has given us links to his TED talk and his blog. Still, I want dialog, no, I want multilog.  I want to put my ideas together with those of other people so we can generate a document or product that someone can use after we’ve hashed out the details.

Wikis were designed to do just this kind of collaborative work. Sadly, even though the platform is quite flexible, my experience is that very few people are willing to engage on a wiki and the ones I start end up more like blogs — I write a lot and occasionally someone adds a brief comment.

Perhaps I’m seeing the result of not enough of Joel’s #3 and a little too much of his #4. Is there a better collaborative platform out there that I’ve missed?

For more on Joel, see: https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3141501&type=member&item=5903577365379837952&qid=47f489e3-292f-46e8-b356-415c38d03f0b&trk=groups_most_recent-0-b-ttl&goback=.gde_3141501_member_22653084.gmr_3141501

I just had two awesome conversations with folks who work with CiviCRM, an open-source, constituency relations management platform.  Each of these young gentlemen was knowledgeable, cordial, helpful and imaginative.  Of course they would be — they donate a portion of their work time and know-how to support free software used by nonprofit organizations world-wide.

The challenge of the “open” movement is how to generously participate in the “sharing economy” without starving in a world dominated by “the dismal science” (economics – meaning a money economy).  The fundamental assumption of economic theory is “scarcity” — that to have economic value there must be a shortage or limited supply of something.  Economic theories do not apply in a context of abundance and we modern folks have forgotten that  economic value is not the only kind.  We live in an abundant place and time in human history — we have mental and physical energy to spare.  Most of us are so blind to this that we tend to hoard our goods and services. Even if abundance threatens we create artificial shortages.  If I give away the surplus zucchini my garden produces the local grocer will complain that I’m destroying the market that creates his livelihood.  He’s right.  Moving away from scarcity economics will require major adjustments in the way we think about wealth and interact as a society.

Curiously, it’s the folks at the top and the bottom of the money economy spectrum who are most likely to discover the non-economic, sharing economy.  Those at the bottom don’t have any money so they can’t participate fully in the market system and must find other ways of surviving.  Those at the top often discover that they can’t take their accumulated wealth with them and their kids are already sated so they’d better start sharing.

Luckily there are a growing number of people in the middle who are waking up to the idea that openly giving away goods and services, sharing, bartering and exchanging freely, enriches their lives in ways that money can’t. I just met two of them. Eventually I’ll pay them for some of their services.  But the bedrock of our relationships will be the knowledge that giving freely of their surplus energy is likely to generate more rewards than holding out for a higher bidder.  I’ll be richer for my collaboration with them and you can bet I’ll make sure they are too.