Who are you? (asked a voice from the past)
Me? I work hard. I play hard. And I am pleased to be me. My 25th High School Reunion is in a month – I… Read More »Who are you? (asked a voice from the past)
Me? I work hard. I play hard. And I am pleased to be me. My 25th High School Reunion is in a month – I… Read More »Who are you? (asked a voice from the past)
Looking back gives an amazing simplicity to things. You know, hindsight – it’s the concept of rear-view mirror culture McLuhan introduced. I am not going… Read More »Amazing Simplicity of Yes: 2021 in Review
Sometimes at dawn I wake up with thought that actually climb out of my mind: At the end of my yoga yesterday, during a gentle… Read More »Shadows
I woke up this morning and my first thought was, well it feels good to sleep until 8am. (it was 6:15) I lay there for… Read More »On Time
My project to learn and perform the Kodaly Solo Sonata is progressing. Yesterday was day 88 of documenting my practice, and writing it all down,… Read More »Learning out Loud, an update
I started reading Stephen Downes’ book Toward Personal Learning quite some time ago, and various projects have interrupted my reading and reflecting on it. This… Read More »Toward Personal Learning: Post 6
I just blinked. Did I miss it? Actually I experienced that blink. I know I think a lot, and with words, their meaning, understanding, and having… Read More »Experience
We’ve been thinking about curriculum in #MUS654, and have jumped ahead a bit to look at and annotate the article that is listed n the… Read More »Curriculum: Prison, garden, or gateway? Annotate with us
Over the years I have gotten far more brave with my own learning and with sharing aspects of the journey. There is no destination in sight, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t arrival points. This post notices one.
Sometimes progress in learning is difficult to see – looking for the wood through the trees is a phrase that comes to mind, and there’s an excellent passage in the book The Forest People by Colin Turnbul where one of the forest dwellers is shown a clearing for the first time. He climbs a mountain and upon coming out of the forest into a clearing this was the scene:
On the plains animals were grazing everywhere; a small herd of elephant to the left, about twenty antelopes stared curiously at us from straight ahead, and way down to the right was a gigantic herd of about a hundred and fifty buffalo. But Kenge did not seem to see them.
Sometimes we cannot simply understand what is before us, even if we are in it. The same holds true for learning. As we progress day by day, today is likely to resemble yesterday, with small changes. It is only when we step back and look at progress over weeks or months that we can see changes clearly.Read More »Learning Out Loud: Finding a Voice
Time for another Summer Book Club post! What? You say summer is over?? I am keen to hold on to every ray of sunshine, and as a slow reader, I’ll be posting well into November. This post covers pages 240-347 of Stephen Downes’ (free) ebook: Toward Personal Learning. I wrote about the earlier sections in these posts:
My method in writing these posts is to gather the bits that stop me in my tracks, make me think, write them down, and then connect the dots around them. Three themes emerged for me in these hundred pages: the students, the measurements that sometimes bind (as in hold fast, like hands tied) us, and connections. Let’s start with the students.Read More »Students, measurement, & connection: Book Club Post 4