What is real learning?

This was an important find today, The Experience Designer Network: How do we learn the things we value most? Resonating deep within me. It structures so many thoughts and feelings i have had into a coherent series of chapters laying out a much deeper vision of what education really means. What i loved about this discovery was the light it sheds on education as merely learning information, which is how most of us have experienced our years in school.

Also of note was the discovery of the work of Chris Corrigan and Michael Herman . They both have refined their facilitation practises with groups, .org and one-to-one, to using the four practices of Open Space.

1. practice of opening. it's about willingness. willingness to see, to know, to open. it's personal and reflective, but can be felt physically in body and charted in organizations.

2. practice of inviting. it's about goodness. finding benefits TO others, as in what's in it for them, and also benefits IN others, as in recognizing what they can add to the process of achieving what is desired personally in the first practice. it makes that first practice social, collective, organizational, and cultural, but also documented in invitation emails, letters, posters.

3. practice of holding. it's about supporting movement and change. providing space and time, structures that support without making decisions for people, giving attention, carrying in awareness or carrying forward, holding in one's heart or home or conference room. it creates room for others to expand, explore, experiment... to bring new things out in the world. it is simultaneously logistical, mental, and emotional.

4. practice of practicing. it's about sustaining, returning, realizing, and making real. this is action, taking a stand, making progress, going somewhere, documenting results. this implies the continuation and diffusion of the above. standing ground, staying the course, seeing things through. it is the personal and individual (I, me, my) pursuit of the good that WE invite, in the space that WE provide. It can look simply mechanical and become deeply meditative, as we go round again, starting with Opening. (note... this might also be called the practice of 'participating,' perhaps 'making,' or simply 'doing' or 'changing.' stay tuned"

I use parts of this intuitively in how i work with people so this scheme is useful to reflect on my own patterns. Very cool.

P2P and Human Evolution

This wonderful article written by Michael Bouwens is essential reading. It Places Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework.

Inkblot Europe

What does Europe look like folded over itself? Here's a dark and psychological thriller I conjured up while playing around with maps!

Microsoft MyLifeBits

A videocast takes us into Microsoft Research to preview Mylifebits. It promises to be nothing short of mind-blowing! Imagine being able to capture everything in your life. Well maybe you would rather not.

Postcard from Myanmar

It great to hear from my father who disappears annually to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life. He goes to S.E. Asia each year. The heat is good for his body and the lack of post coming in though the door and distractions from the busy urban life, minimized. Not heard from him for a while before this postcard arrived from Myanmar!

He writes "The people are so warm and friendly and the landscapes just amazing. Been trekking for 5 days to villages where it's like time stopped long, long ago."

This reminded me on a short lecture i heard by John Thakara yesterday on development here in the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. He questioned all our assumptions about what undeveloped versus developed socieites are.
We often think:Development = growth and productivity, development = infrastructure and that well-being = owning shit. So called "undeveloped countries" often have far higher social capital, like my father's experience in the lost villages of Myanmar. Development often destroys social capital. The challenge is how can we address the loss of social capital in Western indust./informationized societies using all the creativity and longing at our disposal

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators

BROADBAND MECHANICS 2005: "DLAS ARE “WEB 2.0”
posted on BM site....
"DLAs are the next generation portal. Yahoo and AOL did such a great job at defining portals, that their domination virtually destroyed all innovation in the sector. For a decade, companies have simply copied the AOL or Yahoo model, by mimicking their plain HTML front-end and aggregated content approach. DLAs pick up where portals left off, and take it up a level to “Web 2.0.”

Everyone’s going to do it: media companies, consumer electronics makers, portals, ISPs, wireless services… Can you really afford to miss out?

The DLA bandwagon is unstoppable because the power of DLAs comes from combining these five essentials: social networking, personal publishing, communications, media and device management, and mobility. We’ve enjoyed each of these for ages but, until now, no-one has combined them all into a DLA powerhouse.

DLAs give our clients the means to provide differentiated services, content, and capabilities because with the right architecture, Digital Lifestyle Aggregators become a revenue machine for our clients, serving their increasingly happy customers, all the while reducing costs.

See how each of these fundamental capabilities is essential… and learn why DLAs are greater than the sum of these parts." .....end of post from site

The open-standards on their site pointed in interesting new directions. I share a future vision of the Internet where the consumer/citizen/god-head is in control of their own data (more or less). I would love to integrate FOAF with a beautiful customizable animated identity symbol for myself. Not sure exactly where they are with their open dialogue standards. You can see where i am headed if you just read the tagline to this blog:))

Jeff Bezos at Web 2.0 on "What are the unique assets you have that others can enjoy?".

Just listened to Jeff Bezos discuss his ideas on what Web 2.0 means. He tells us that if Web 1.0 was making the user interface of the Internet better for humans than Web 2.0 is making the Internet useful for computers. Amazon's webservices don't show up on the Amazon site at all. 65,000 registered developers are using Amazon web services. It was started 2 years ago. Use of their APIs gives developers access to every piece of content in the catalogue of Amazon.com, customer reviews, product images, sales rank, product attributes. They don't charge for this use, they have a business model that allows them to pay developers for their use. See some experiments: www.musicplasma.com, www.scoutpal.com.
Further he discusses: A9, Search-Inside-The-Book, One-Click, multiple category search, the need to find business models for these services.

Craig of Craigllist talks about loss of trust in US news providers

Craig of Craigslist discusses this with Internet News while being asked about his own classified advertising empire. You can also hear an him talk about his background and his service Craigslist.