Tomorrow Makers

Pangea Day - A Cross-Cultural Celebration

gail taylor — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:44:25 +0000

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." Albert Einstein

I forwarded part of a email about Pangea Day to a friend...

...Take a look at these films. They are each just one minute long. They feature a choir in one country singing another country's national anthem: a simple idea that packs surprising emotional power.
France sings for USA
K enya sings for India
Japan sings for Turkey

They were shot by film directors looking to support the landmark TED project Pangea Day....

After reading the email and listening to the singing, my friend wrote back:

"OK, you've got my attention - the idea is absolutely amazing (something about the simplest things)"

In deed! Pangea Day will be a remarkable day because people all over the world will come together, physically in communities, and virtually around the world, to celebrate together what is working. As of last count there were more than 1000 communities organizing events to gather the local energies, hearts and spirits to watch and sing and be inspired enough to continue the dialogs well past May 10, 2008.

The idea is simple really. Create a large vision. Share it. Create a self-organizing ecosystem of doers and like-minded people. Inspire networks to pass the word and create more self-organizing events. Many years ago we had simple market places where good ideas fermented and took root:

"In the market, language grew. Became bolder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up." The Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000

Today we have a global marketplace called the Internet. It is a remarkable tool.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

gail taylor — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:45:49 +0000

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the...universe." R. Buckminister Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969

I met Matt in 1976. He had created Renascence Library and was teaching a course called Redesigning the Future. It was there that I was introduced to Buckminister Fuller by reading his book, Intuition. Matt had a long list of books, more than 500 that he believed necessary to read and understand if one was to successfully navigate the future and thrive well into the 21st Century. His course brought the contents of these books alive and always he gave credit and recognition to the authors and their bodies of knowledge. Some of the books explored ancient histories and others forecast futures. The list recognized every field and every religion. Some were fiction, others non-fiction.

While my field was education, I had come to know that as a teacher, I should be reading a vast variety of books outside of my field. Through the Learning Exchange, I was introducing teachers and children to a world of ideas and linking these ideas to their work, showing how ideas build upon each other. Nothing came from nothing, but rather through the assimilation of a collection of thoughts and ideas perturbing our minds and catalyzing new ideas... perhaps higher order ideas. I take much joy in this reality.

Spark Card: Finding New Search Images

Tomorrow Makers — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:16:10 +0000

We are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors that we each possess are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels. - Douglas Hofstadter

Hofstadter's 'perceptual attractors' are what we call search images. These images are the perceptual cues we look for to identify and assess the systems that make up our world. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, Chapter 4: Assembling Complexity, provides a great example by telling the story of what ecologist Steve Packard learned over numerous attempts to grow a prairie from scratch. He has some of the necessary search images going into his exploration, but they proved insufficient:

... He felt yet another ingredient must be missing which prevented a living system from snapping together. He started reading the botanical history of the area and studying the oddball species...
"What the heck is this?" he'd asked the botanist. "It's not in the books, it's not listed in the state catalogue of species. What is it?" The botanist had said, "I don't know. It could be a savanna blazing star, but there aren't any savannas here, so it couldn't be that. Don't know what is." What one is not looking for, one does not see.
... An epiphany of sorts overtook Packard when he watched the piles of his seed accumulate in his garage. The prairie seed mix was dry and fluffy-like grass seed. The emerging savanna seed collection, on the other hand, was "multicolored handfuls of lumpy, oozy, glop," ripe with pulpy seeds and dried fruits. Not by wind, but by animals and birds did these seeds disperse. The thing -- the system of coevolved, interlocking organisms -- he was seeking to restore was not a mere prairie, but a prairie with trees: a savanna... once Packard got a "search image" of the savanna in his mind, he began to see evidence of it everywhere.

What search images are you using to identify the key ingredients and instructions for assembling the project or venture you're working on?

Spark Card: Build A Model

Tomorrow Makers — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Words - whether exchanged through conversation or composed into a written document - can get us only so far in expressing ideas. Our words are abstractions that live purely in our heads, and rely upon shared, implicit assumptions of what they mean and represent.

Get out of your heads and put your hands to work!

Use any physical materials you have available and build a three-dimensional model of your idea. Make it as detailed and explicit as you can - bring the idea that lives in your head to life in the space where your working.

Our are typically outfitted with “modeling kits” for just this purpose. These may include items such as clay, foam, wire, string, construction paper, popsickle sticks, egg cartons, wooden dowels, straws, sacks, glue, tape, and all sorts of other odds and ends. In our view, no social or group meeting space is complete without resources and tools that enable 3-dimensional model building.

This is the fourth in a series of Spark Cards being published to the Tomorrow Makers Journal.

Spark Card: Why It Won't Work

Todd Johnston — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Having doubts about an idea? Do you see gaps, oversights, unsound assumptions? Is there an elephant in the room that no one is talking about?

Take 10 minutes and storm a WorkWall (or whatever whiteboard you have available) with all the reasons the idea in front of you just won’t work. Don’t try to refute or defend your reasons - just let them all pour forth.

After you’ve exhausted your selves of why it won’t work, step back and take a look at all the reasons you've listed.

Cluster them into groups of likeness & similarity. For each cluster, what are the underlying assumptions and reasonings?

Which are rooted in fear - fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of what other people may think or do? Which of these clusters are within your power to change? This is where to focus your energy - turn these ‘reasons for failure’ into design specifications for success!

This is the third in a series of Spark Cards being published to the Tomorrow Makers Journal.

Spark Card: Humor Yourselves

Todd Johnston — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:29:39 +0000

“If you can’t have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.”
- MG Taylor Axiom
"No ha-ha, no ah-ha."
- My version of the same

Humor plays a huge role in our ability to solve problems. When two or more ideas come together in an unexpected way, they can cause surprise and delight -- our minds reframe. Humor can help us realize totally new emergent ideas.

Jokes are a good example of this, where two seemingly conflicting ideas come together and are resolved by "getting the joke." At the moment you get the joke, the tension from the initial conflict dissolves in laughter.

Take a few minutes and share some jokes with each other.

Now, take a few minutes and create some jokes about the ideas you are playing with.

This is the second in a series of Spark Cards being published to the Tomorrow Makers Journal.

Spark Card: The Big World of Possibilities

Todd Johnston — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:21:01 +0000

First, to answer the question, "What is a Spark Card?"

A Spark Card is a tool for perturbing imagination, furthering ideas, and seeing with fresh eyes.

Gail and I began developing them for our Collaboratory at Sonoma Mountain Village that we share with the Livability Project. We have a set of 12 and have sketched out as many more. Spark Cards are part of the Collaboratory’s way of working. With this post, we'll begin publishing them in journal form. Look for a downloadable deck in the near future.

These cards can help you facilitate yourselves -- a task which is often very difficult. Even high performance teams and groups get so focused on immediate tasks at hand that they forget to reach out, to explore an idea from different vantage points. Think of Spark Cards as a Creative Whack Pack for collaboration. Use them to begin your meeting, or at a point where you feel stuck or stale. They can also help you take a last look at your work. They serve as a check to what really matters about your enterprise and the immediate next steps.

In our haste to succeed with deliverables and goals, we tend to race to the finish line. These Spark Cards are meant to entice you to “make haste slowly”. They have been proven to save time and enrich the products and services being developed.

Happy perturbing! May you have meaningful, rich, worthy conversations!

Without further adieu, our first card...

THE BIG WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

From the Inside-Out...

gail taylor — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:43:05 +0000

"I never teach my pupils;
I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." Albert Einstein

I have been listening to an interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book, Musicophilia. He mentions that much more of the brain is recruited for music than for language. There is no one spot where a neuroscientists goes to access music from the brain. Music pulls from many, many parts. Music, Sacks asserts is innate, even for those who like myself, are musically challenged.

I recall hearing about a prisoner who kept himself sane by understanding the idea that "Once one gets deeply into a subject, he discovers that it relates to everything else in the universe." In deed, this soldier's mind was able to take untold learning journeys that kept him not only sane, but enlightened under the most awful of external realities. No one told him what to learn next, or how to connect. His mind took him on these explorations.

Both of these stories reveal the awesome innate abilities that each of us have inside us. Yet, almost all schooling assumes that learning comes from the outside and fights its way into our brains so that we can grow up knowing what we need to know...

One Laptop Per Child

gail taylor — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:37:08 +0000

"Beginning with Seymour Papert's simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So, working together with teams from Pentagram and Red Hat, we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities." From the One Laptop Per Child website, 2007

I have my own OLPC computer now. It sits on my desk beside my MacBook. It looks like an interesting toy ... something that you might get at Toys R Us. And yet, it is extremely sophisticated in its simplicity. It is indeed a disruptive technology, not because of its design and power (which is powerfully advanced) but because of how it is designed to be used. Right from the start, the designers of the laptop assumed that children know how to learn and they learn best from each other or by emulating others. They learn because they are curious, playful, and interested in life. The OLPC does not assume that learning is a scarce commodity ... that only the wealthy can afford to be well educated. In fact, it is distinctly against the model that says children learn by being taught by a teacher. To me, it is a wonderful experiment, and if it can scale, I am betting that it makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of how and why learning happens.

If I Could Do It Again....

gail taylor — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:05:22 +0000

“To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner... Learning involves interaction between the learner and his environment, and its effectiveness relates to the frequency, variety and intensity of the interaction. Education, at best is ecstatic.” George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy, 1976

I read Leonard's book in 1976 and knew it would become a classic. He made strong points about what education could and should be. I was considered a forerunner in education having opened one of the most creative and innovative Teacher Center's in the country. I was given awards and invited to speak at large teacher associations and conferences. The Learning Exchange that I helped to create engaged with exemplary teachers throughout the greater Kansas City Area to create curriculum that the cummunity felt was lacking in the area schools. I thought a lot about the 21st century and wondered what young people would need to learn in the 20th century that would help them be fit in the 21st century. I regaled against the "sit-and-get" way of learning and the LX became well known for project-based learning and for making collaboration, design, and exploration seem natural ways of learning, even for adults.

In 1978, my husband, Matt, and I started teaching a course together for students and adults called TOOLS (Time of Our Life Seminars). We created an outline curriculum for the 21st Century. Our course was intense explorations into the future, engaging the personal, organizational, and world views of each participant. And yet, and yet, as I now live in the 21st century ... as I see the changes that have occurred in just one generation -- 30 years or so -- there is so much I wish I had offered that I did not even think about then. I took so many things for granted.