I dedicate this post to John Donne, PJ Harvey and Daniel Bassill.
I posted yesterday in a fit of confusion. I think that was my point. I wanted to share how fine the line is between noise and signal. Once the balance has been tipped toward noise it can be overwhelming to pull back from that event horizon. Similar to finding a signal on a crystal radio with a cat’s whisker. Unfortunately, I forgot to make clear to my audience that this was a purposeful step into the madness and that I had Ariadne’s thread attached to me as I descended into the Labyrinth to meet the bull. My safety line was poetry. It has always been a powerful connecting force for me in the struggle to fine tune the noise into a signal. Daniel’s response was so honest, so true, so generous.
Well, you’ve certainly made my Friday afternoon pretty depressing.
I am sorry to have done so. What follows, however, in his continuing comment is an object lesson in filtering the chaos and standing up straight in the face of the approaching storm.
I met with a man in Chicago yesterday, who has been successful in business, and has started one successful mentoring program and is launching a new one. As we talked and I described how we can show program design on web sites and educate potential donors and partners, he tuned me out saying “CEOs won’t take time to look at that. It’s one-on-one relationships and salesmanship that will generate their support.” Previous to that meeting I’d tuned into this conversation on Linked in, talking about how “conversation” with donors needs to replace the “Pitch, or elevator speech”. You can see my comments.
Then yesterday afternoon 3o-40 people were gathered at a meeting talking about building a “STEM program ecosystem” in Chicago. The person paid to facilitate the project spoke about goals and vision for about 30 minutes, and pointed to work being done to build similar ecosystems in other cities. She ended that part of her presentation, saying, “None of us has the time to dig into that web site, but it’s pretty informative” .
Instead of encouraging people to find time to dig through the information she pretty much said “don’t try”.
Thus, your illustrations of how much noise is flooding our on-line lives, just reinforces how difficult it is to build an on-line community of learners focused on solving difficult problems.
Thanks. Just to add to your clutter, here’s a blog article I posted earlier today focusing on building on-line communities.https://tutormentorexchange.wordpress.com/2016/06/24/supporting-communities-of-purpose/
It pretty much says, “I know it’s difficult, but if we don’t try we’ll never find a way.”
I’m overwhelmed that you can look at so much, and find time to create your videos and share them on your blog. I think you have a full time job, a farm, a family.
We still only have 24 hours in each day.
Keep adding your drops of observation into this ocean of ideas and distractions.
Indeed, none of us is or can be alone. Which brings me to one of my favorite metaphysical writers, John Donne, and favorite performer, PJ Harvey. In the video below we see her coming to terms with the British exit from the European Union just like I did with my own chaos–with poetry
And here is my small ‘response’ to what I viewed as a ‘call’ from her:
If you want to follow the lyrics and annotate them try here on Genius. It is fun to be a part of the main.
And just to give props to PJ Harvey I think she addresses the issue of immigration, of striving to join the “main” here in her song “The Wheel”
And again, the lyrics on Genius embedded below:
(An aside: I am working on a tech pedagogy screencast that is an argument for repertoire as a meta-techtool.)