In the process of preparing a college application, I discovered some old job applications, and then I remembered...One upon a time I used to work for TWDC (Disney) in China. This is not a definitive reflection on my time there, but simply a trip down memory lane.
After seeing @abbyo’s great post (yes, one of many) in which she laid out all of her roles, duties, responsibilities, passions, I realized that this was something that I needed to follow up with for myself. Despite the fact that we are growing the lexicon to reflect greater distinction between our roles, there’s only so much that a title – like Agile Learning Facilitator – can tell us about what we actually do. I found myself in recent weeks asking myself this very question: what has becoming an ALF meant to me?
Looking back at my time and involvement thus far with the ALC project I found my old bio from before ALF Summer 2014 (the first one!) and that has made something very clear to me: I have come a long way (literally and figuratively), and I am in deep with this project/ALF/ALC/Community/Life.
In this post I intend to reflect on some readings and the insights they have given me into the way we have set up this Agile Readings Club. I will question (briefly) the logic of the initial framework and show how this discouraged the sharing that we were intending to enable. I will conclude with a new set of proposed action-steps/framework based on the concept of a 'learning web' as proposed by Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971). I hope you will stick with me through this, but I also hope to create a shorter post with the proposed new framework.
I’ve been meaning to write my thoughts on how to do this smarter for a while, these thoughts and ideas have been developing as I’ve been avidly reading various things this past couple of months but haven’t written about them.
I've been reading Reality is Broken, a book that Eric Bear (@bear) lent me last time I visited Cloudhouse, and it has inspired me to try to make my own alternate reality game. I guess that's what you would call 'The Compliment me-me'. The intention of this game is to get more practice and experience in giving people compliments and expressing gratitudes.
I responded to a question posed to me by @drew via email: 'what made the Sweetwater offering a success?'. I've taken most of my response to that email, have added a preamble and edits and am posting it here for comment. [Items were added for this blog post, others were edited or rearranged. Yes, @drew - very different - Ed.]
This past week I’ve been spending a lot of time considering how the Offerings process works and what I would do to improve it. This has mostly taken the form of conversations with other ALFs, @abbyo @ryanshollenberger @bear (and now @drew via email).
We have an open process whereby anybody can come to the ALC and offer to lead a class, to make an offering. There are plenty of great examples of how this works well (in ALCnyc there is a regular ‘Go‘ session on Fridays; an acrobalance class on Thursday mornings etc). These activities are supported by those attending them. This is why we can say that ‘the curriculum is our passions’. Nobody is forced to do any of these lessons.
What happens when someone makes an offering that shows promise and real interest but never gets picked up by the students?
I’ve been reading this amazing book for the past few months: James P. Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” (1987). I’ve actually been using it as a sort of meditative go to for that time. I finished the first reading in no time at all, but have been spell bound by some of the insights here. How often do you reread a book? Honestly. Maybe I’m just projecting like crazy into the text, even so, there are plenty of insights.
There is the essential premise of the book: that we can see all of our actions and choices in terms of playing a game and that there are two kinds of games – finite and infinite. I don’t really want to talk about that much here. Nor do I want to talk (too much) about how we ‘control nature for societal reasons’, and that we veil ourselves from the very fact that it is impossible to stand outside of nature (except in the abstract) as we are ourselves a natural thing and thus subject to our own nature.
These are tasty conversations to be sure, which I imagine I may return to with future posts. I want to look more into a personal question I had when starting out with this ALFing thing and that is: if we are going to make a better world and to show others that it is possible, shouldn’t we be on guard for the haters? shouldn’t we at least have conversations about an awareness of danger? if we are convinced by how world changing ALFing can be (and is), are we prepared for the challenge of those whom it threatens?
Or simply – What is Evil?