My direction.

This is going in my direction.

Let us leave to one side an instant where you are reading this. (Blogger)





It clearly is not a very evenly weighted exchange.

Google and I.

I own these words...up to a point.

What are you going to do when you grow up?

I never quite knew how to answer that question.

I knew that I would go to university.

People told me that was what I would do.

I had absolutely no idea what it meant to go to university.

I didn't know how to question that.

I did what I was asked to do at university...up to point.

It didn't really fit with any idea that I had about what I would be doing.

I had a very vivid and totally naive vision of what I might be doing.

I spent a fair old time in the pub with friends.

I was at a loss what to do next.

This is 'my direction'.

I have made all sorts of choices.

They weren't all very well considered.

I didn't really have the means to consider them very well.

I didn't really have anybody who helped me consider any choices that I might or might not have.

I was sort of happy to have some choices.

I was sort of paralysed with the idea of all the choices I might have.

It was a heavy weight of responsibility to make choices about what I didn't know.

"Go ahead choose your life."  

"Don't worry you only have one (life)."  

Life for many meant job.

I didn't want a job.

I preferred to hang out with climbers.

My friend who chose to solo up a Ben Nevis rock route in winter made his last choice.

Sometimes, not often, I was almost envious.

He had died doing what gave him meaning.

This is 'my direction.'

I had a short Twitter exchange

@SenorG @davecormier if people are themselves within the structure you give them then they already are like you.

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 8, 2016 

@sensor63 Sure. I think point @davecormier was making was avoiding steering ss in a direction that's not their own

— Noah Geisel (@SenorG) April 8, 2016

@SenorG @davecormier "not their own" is potentially problematic :-)

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 8, 2016

What is "'your own direction"?

To what extent do we need to deconstruct "own direction"?

I asked a Romanian girl what her ambition was.

She replied that her dream was to be a cleaner.

I didn't dream of being a cleaner when I was her age.

I have been reading Boris Cyrulnik's autobiography.

He was sentenced to die for being Jewish at the age of six.

He didn't even know what Jewish meant.

He only knew it was bad.

Was that his "own direction"?

Are these dreams "our own"?

As a teacher in an institution how can we focus on "independence" of students when often the only reason they spend time with us is that they depend on us for a grade.

@davecormier @SenorG that's an interesting one :-) the easiest way not to risk dependency is not to have a relationship :-)

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) April 8, 2016

Are we really interested as teachers in learners not being dependent on us?

If no learners or students depend on us how can we be teachers?

"What do you do?"

"I'm a teacher."

"Oh yeah? But there are no students."

"So?"

I was reading a critique of Ken Robinson's book "The Element" this morning on Torn Halves' blog.

http://www.digitalcounterrevolution.co.uk/2013/ken-robinson-the-element-the-iron-cage/

That is me going perhaps foolishly in my direction.

Torn asks some good questions.

What are we to do, he asks, about what he, after Max Weber,  calls the 'Iron Cage'?

I don't know.

I worry about using the word 'own'.

I worry about using the word 'independent'.

On leaving university I thought of all the things I couldn't do in this society.

I wasn't really sure what I could do.

I remember drawing a picture of myself in a cage.

I even started writing a script for the scene.

I have it somewhere.

I was screaming out of frustration.

The cage wasn't mine...or perhaps it was?

I only drew it.

Our fictions are never innocent.

Footnote.

I found the page with the cage that I had drawn at the age of twenty one on graduating.

It is an eery page.

How on earth did I know the word "widget" or talk of "touch screens" in 1983?

I half-remembered a T.S. Elliot quote.

I had no idea what "Picketty Witch Girl" referred to.

I had to look it up on Google...
https://sjhstrangetales.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/new-on-strangeblog-the-woman-who-was-allergic-to-the-20th-century/

"And the wind shall say: these were decent Godless people, their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf-balls."

Bits and pieces...

Assemble

Disassemble

INTEGRATE

DISINTEGRATE

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

Leonardo da Vinci

Take 3. 

I had just taken up writing this again when I was interrupted again.

Not only did I lose all that I had added, I lost track again of what I had been writing....

No matter.  

So here I start again. 

So here I am again.

I changed the title again.

I changed my title again.

Title 1: Kaleidoscope

Title 2: Odds and Ends

Title 3: Bits and Pieces

So where was I?

A kaleidoscope image keeps coming back to me. 

I was looking through a kaleidoscope and as I turned the lense I became aware that I was seeing coloured bits of myself or at least bits that I recognised. 

Were they mine, I thought?

It was a vision which emerged on writing in 'An Untext' .

This 'Untext' stems from connections made in #rhizo14.

(If you know nothing of either 'The Untext' or #rhizo14 this will probably make no sense to you.)

I look again through the kaleidoscope. 

I am looking through the lense and I become less and less interested in bit appropriation. 

"That bit is mine."

"That bit is hers." 

"That bit is his".

"That bit is ours.

"That bit is theirs."

I am frankly less and less interested in this.

I am looking again through the lense.

I am captivated by the beauty of the patterns that are emerging. 

I am looking again through the lense.

Bits and pieces...

I seem to be participating in other places on patterns which are being put together at the moment.

I am not all together sure when or where these bits will be seen in other lights of day.

I don't really care one way or another. 

I am just quite happy to play along and enjoy gazing at the patterns.

I am intrigued by what is emerging.

There's a thing with slides. 

I get a slide to play with. 

I enjoy colouring in the space allotted. 

I wasn't quite sure how I got to have such a slide.

I feel a bit like a little kid who gets a piece of paper to draw on.

I like drawing.

There's another thing with slides in a space called Voice Thread.

I enjoy colouring outside the slides.

I enjoy messing with sound and pictures and text.

I enjoy adding bits and pieces of graffiti here and there.

Then there's another thing which seems to be an article. 

I enjoy reading that.

I enjoy the writing bit without the colouring.

I enjoy the writing bit without the speaking.

I enjoy the writing bit without the drawing.

I enjoy being part and particle of making patterns, of becoming patterns...

Outcomes and outflows...

I am coming to conclusions.

I think conclusions and outcomes are deadly. 

I prefer what is unfinished, what is unknown, what is unknowable.

I prefer outflows, outsprings...

There is a quote which emerged in my head which I am struggling to remember.

An angel passes.....

Ah yes, here it is:

"This world is not a data mine to be exploited."

I observe the patterns emerging and say to myself, 

"I belong here."

"Nothing belongs to me."

Saved from the bin.

My precious, my precious, my precious.

Post prologue.

It was lying in a drawer amongst the jumble of other posts. 

It was marked draft. 

I had just deleted two other insignificant (to my eyes) drafts. 

For reasons that remain to be seen, these rough notes remained. 

It was unfinished.

I cut out a bit about Blackpool Tower which had gone on to be another post. 

I cut out bits which made even less sense than the rest. 

It was a curiosity.

It was like an object which I pick up in a tip and put on the window sill.

I thought to myself, 

"Why don't I just publish it and let it fend for itself? Somebody might help me make some sense of it. They might help me remember what it was all about. If it was important enough to start writing about then, it's important enough to save the scraps from the tip now. It will save me time later..."

So here is what was left on the edge of the blog bin:

Property is theft

It suddenly came to me to write this post. 

I claim ownership. 
I claim authorship.

I am the owner, the lone author. 

"Bullshit."

It all started with a fork...

Fork

"A fork?" I hear you say.

Yes I have been hearing a lot about forks recently. 

It started with Dave Cormier going on about forks and Github for rhizo15. 

Then there was a bunch of people going on about a forking Fedwikihappeningthingy affair.

Back references
[Mike Caulfield]

"A what?" 

Frankly I don't really have a clue about it.

I browsed a post of Alan Levine, then another of John Udell. 

I clicked around a bit, it looked complicated, I left it in a corner of my head with a large question mark. 

A large question mark?

As usual when I started writing, I didn't have a clue where I was being led.

A fork

Now where will this lead? 

A large question mark?

I read a tweet from my friend Kevin Hodgson.

@sensor63 @davecormier I never said that (i survived) … but I am breathing …. and writing … that’s something … peace, man
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) December 31, 2014

We had been playing around remixing, rejigging and recording. 

I suddenly felt an urge to speak his words.

I first included words from a comment to the blog post Cub clothing, conjugation, correction and community.



Then I just concentrated on the text of the tweet.

I recorded a first version.

  

Then I recorded a second version.

Which version of which recording sparked Kevin to respond?

@sensor63 @davecormier @telliowkuwp Dang. That’s what I sound like when Simon remixes my brain …. lovely strangeness … #rhizo15
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) December 31, 2014

Linguistic Archaelogy.

She was my age. She spoke English like a film-star from the 1950's.

Her cultural references were virtually all Italian.

It was a strange experience.

I suppose she was speaking the language like I would have done if I had never had internet or satellite TV.

Kids Drawing

This post is losing me. I am feeling confused. It is like looking at a child's drawing.

There are identifiable elements but as a whole it doesn't seem to stick together.

I shall take a few steps back to reflect.

How do I react when I am confronted by old drawings of mine or of my children which pop up in a drawer?

What do they mean to me now?

Why do I decide to save the scraps?

What does it mean to finish a drawing?

A few steps back.

I was once asked, "How old are you?"

I replied, "I am 52 and all the ages before."

I throw a few numbers down on the page to give myself some semblance of order.

1) Attribution and Tagging

Attribution and tagging of media elements appears here to be less about giving people recognition for individual creation than giving individuals or individual groups the possibility to identify, repurpose, reinvent, new combinations of elements.

2) Authorship. Ownership.

Why did I write this?

Did I write this?

If I hear Kevin's voice in a tweet and then record it with my voice, who does the voice belong to?

Does belonging count?

3) Confusing diversity

Is this a blog post? Is this a tweet? Is this a podcast?

Does it matter?

Will it make any sense?

Does it matter?


Post Script

Maybe this will prevent me deleting drafts?
When is a draft not a draft?


Image credits:


Smeagol http://lotrgifs.tumblr.com/post/1276777005/smeagol-my-precious

Kids drawing http://www.torange.us/Fashion-and-beauty/childrens-art-and-craft/Formula-1-Children-drawing-18706.html#

Question mark
http://hoppip.tumblr.com/post/36647761732/question

Fork https://www.flickr.com/photos/ejpphoto/2314610838/

Russian dolls...

It is an image which keeps coming back to me.

I escape one enclosure to find that I am in another larger enclosure.

It is the image of a Russian doll.

I have been spending much time reflecting on my place on the web, on the earth over the past few years.

I have recently been working my way through issues connected to the 'Reclaim your domain' movement.

I am struck by the 'self-proclaimed' impassioned pleas of Howard Rheingold and Gardner Campbell to build the web that we want to build.

I am convinced that they are putting their fingers on a burning issue which we need to work through.

An immediate reaction to the question of 'Reclaiming your domain' was expressed in my post of the same name. 

Auvergnat dolls.

I feel that we can not divorce our thinking about the 'web' space with our thinking about the physical spaces in which we relate locally.

One lens which has helped me think about role of technology in education has been Puentedura's SAMR model as presented by Doug Belshaw here:

There is a short presentation in this video 

I remark that the narrator in this video talks about 'the classroom' - transformation of the classroom.  

I can't help thinking that the 'classroom' lens is one which stops us thinking through a wider transformation of education.   

There is no question that mobile web-enabled personal devices are disrupting 'classrooms' and 'educational institutions'. 

Of the obstacles to building new models, we can note 'habitus' of teachers, the 'classroom discourse', we can mention 'standardised assessment' amongst others.

The real question is what are these boundaries obstacles to?  

Who or what is protected by boundaries which have been built physically or virtually? 

Who stands to gain from crumbling frontiers, from blurring of boundaries between work and play?

As a child I never imagined seeing the Berlin Wall fall.

I remember witnessing the moments of joy when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. 

What were we witnessing in these moments? How were once disconnected people connected?

I remember using the image of the Trabant to talk about the contrast between Walled Gardens of the LMS/VLE and the construction of Personal Learning Environments enhanced by Web 2.0 applications and Google cloud computing.  

Institutional enforcement of the use of out-dated communication tools was, I reasoned an obstacle to the learning of the students.   

It wasn't just an obstacle to the learning of students, it was also a means to protect the positions of a technological elite, who had the power to dictate the tools to be used.  

Outsourcing of net hosting and institutional virtual environments would/will inevitably mean de-skilling, cost-cutting measures and dependence on massive corporations.

The Trabant disappeared from production, replaced by Western-made models.  It's disappearance was symbolic of the defeat of a political system and its socio-economic elite.  

A Trabant

There is no doubt that learning spaces in which I am working are being transformed physically and virtually by the possibilities to connect more widely via affinity with people around the world.  

This is exciting, we are moving towards a new era, of that I have no doubt.

I am constantly brought back to my image of Russian dolls.

We can not concentrate our attention simply on education without seeing how it relates to economic, ecological, social, and political contexts. 

One thinker who has helped me reflect more widely on Learning Futures has been Keri Facer.  

'Non-stupid optimism' is an expression which resonates for me and 'educated hope' is what I aspire to. 

Hope and power

As educators we do have real power to enable sustainable change, we must realise together we do have real power, we do have a voice, which can be heard, the young are our hope. 

I come back to 'Reclaiming my domain', again and again.

I am quite happy with the idea of running my own server.

I am quite happy with the idea of building my own WordPress space with a name of my own.  

I would however not want to stop there.  

When I hear, we can build the net together, are we speaking about building our own computers? 

Are we speaking about running our own cables? 

Are we speaking about becoming our own ISP's?  

Building our web is one thing. 

Building relationships locally with those globally is quite another. 

How does all of this relate to the bigger questions of society as evoked by Keri Facer?

How do we react to writers such as Douglas Rushkoff?

“Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.” 

Douglas Rushkoff.

Is this what Howard Rheingold and Gardner Campbell are talking about? 

If this is the case, then we need to start thinking much more widely about the societies in which we are living, and how power is structured.

We need to think through what these Connected Courses are really preparing us for?   

We need to ask our friends:

What it is we are working towards? 

We need to spend much time on this business of building new relationships with ourselves and others. 

We can not expect to embark on new relationships without accepting that our relationships with ourselves will inevitably be transformed.  

New environments require new language.

I can not conceive that this map is 'our territory'.

Do others consider that they own this?  

Might 'owning your own domain' be an outdated metaphor?  

Maybe we need to start thinking over our ideas of what constitutes 'ownership' of what constitutes 'capital'. 

How can 'capital' be other than social?

What are we educating ourselves for? 

I am only too aware of my ignorance, of my inability to find answers for my questions.

We must educate ourselves beyond our 'stupid optimism' to build a web of  'educated hope.'

What will be our legacy my friends?

I am at a loss for words.

And as I ask one question, another appears, incessantly...