| The Fairer Blog - Down the River - Fall 06 |
|
|
|
| Written by Gord Sellar | |||||||
|
Much has been made of how blogs operate using a model of a gift-economy: the most useful blogs out there aren't necessarily blogged in order to make a profit, but to share insights. If you're not swimming, then you're sinking. This is a simple fact of life in our world, which is not the same world as our grandparents lived in, or their grandparents, or those who came before them. If you've read any Alvin Toffler lately, you probably felt the way I felt when I read his book Future Shock half a decade ago, in the thick of the digital revolution (or whatever we're calling it these days). Though a lot of the details in his futurist text ended up being far too 1960ish, there were many ways in which the man was spot on, but in a way that was eerie. He wasn't describing the future, he was describing the present. Future shock is here and now, and, well, for a lot of us, life just goes on. But it goes on in a different way. There's a torrent of attention sinks out there, and the blogosphere is just one of them: complexifying professional knowledge-bases; social change advancing at what sometimes seems like a breakneck pace; Big Media assailing us from all sides. Did you know that according to some researchers, you, on average, watch more than 30,000 television commercials a year? That's just ads on TV. In the clang and bang of living in a consumerist society, it's a wonder anyone gets any thinking or learning done. There's an old Taoist story I half-remember about dealing with torrents bigger and wilder than you think you can handle. If I can remember it right, it's about a young man who saw an old monk fall into a vicious, wild river. He assumed the old man would die, but soon after saw the aging monk make his way out of the waters somewhere further down the river. When he asked the man how he could be strong enough to fight the flow of the waters, the monk laughed and shook his head. "I didn't," he said softly. "I relaxed, and let the flow of the river carry me along safely until I found my way to the bank." This, paradoxically, is the skill that those of us who have adjusted to living in the modern mediascape have learned and mastered—to cool off, not to look at things, but to look at how we're looking at things. The only other way to avoid media burnout in this day and age is to live in a cave or a tent. Sure, this sounds like something out of SF. But look around you: that's precisely what our world is—something out of an SF novel. And it's only just begun. Help, as always, is available. Much has been made of how blogs operate using a model of a gift-economy: the most useful blogs out there aren't necessarily blogged in order to make a profit, though sometimes advertisement does subsidize the blogger's lifestyle or webhosting fees, in any case. But mostly, when people put help out there, it's just to share their insights. They enjoy it, just like you might enjoy advising a friend on personal issues—isn't that what coffee-talk is all about? One of the more interesting bloggers on this subject is Kathy Sierra, who blogs over at Creating Passionate Users (http://headrush.typepad.com). The site is really all about "the brain and metacognition, most especially—how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory." In other words, Kathy basically spends her blogging time looking at how the brain works and how to exploit the way it works to help others, or yourself, to learn and remember more effectively. The great thing about Kathy's writing is how she tackles the subject. The way she translates what scientists say about the brain into plain old English is just about perfect for comprehensibility and clear accessibility. Here is an example taken from the middle of a post back in March on "How to be an expert:" "Most of us want to practice the things we're already good at, and avoid the things we suck at. We stay average or intermediate amateurs forever." Sierra uses the language that we use to communicate to us about how to learn better. She also has a hell of a knack for expressing her ideas in charts and graphs, which are always worth a careful look. Still, beyond her accessible writing and her great visuals, it's her insights that keep me coming back. Whether she's asking questions about how the highly addicting features of computer games could be used constructively in teaching and learning, to why most of us hesitate and are unsure of what to say about an idea that just seems wrong—almost everything she posts about is worthwhile. For instance, who doesn't need advice on dealing with stress? Part of Kathy's take on it, discussed in a post called "Your brain on multitasking," is that people need to stop thinking that multitasking is more efficient than concentrating on one activity at a time. She explains that, like a computer, when we think we're doing two things at once, we're actually switching between the two contexts constantly. With each context switch, say, from the phone conversation to the email, there's a hit. And it's not a subtle hit. One of the things I really like about stress-management expert Jon Kabat-Zinn is that he sometimes offers seminars and workshops on time-management, but when you get there, it turns out his approach isn't about how you manage your file folders, but about mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is like adding more hours to your day. If you're mindful, time slows down. You get more done, enjoy things more, and feel less stress. These are big claims, but anyone who's practiced mindful meditation or, like me, mindfulness-hold-the-meditation-thanks, will swear it's true. So if you're stressed for time, do everything you can to resist the seemingly-intuitive notion that doing several things at once will save time. I know how hard it is to let that go, but study after study proves this wrong. Obviously there are exceptions, especially if you're quite content to let the quality of the work go down, or to be rude to the person you're talking to. But imagine what it would be like if every time your co-worker, friend, spouse, lover, child wanted to say something to you and you turned and gave that person all your attention. End of story. No television sucking you into the event horizon. No glancing at the computer. No talking on the phone or checking your watch or reading a report... just 100% mindful, totally there, perfect eye contact, YOU. If you already do this now, that's awesome. If not, then if you try it—and I mean really try it—your family might think something's wrong with you. One of those, "Who are you and what have you done with my wife?" moments. As a teacher, one of my major concerns is that students very often have a very narrow, concentrated sense of what learning is. I consider it one of my jobs in the classroom to remind them to constantly think about what learning is and should be and to think about how learning and the rest of their lives intersect. But the thing is, I don't think this kind of self-reflection is really just the domain of college students: this is what keeps our minds young, flexible, adaptable. If there's one thing that we're required to do all our lives, that our grandparents were not required to do constantly, it's to learn new things and deal with new situations. Kathy is one of the best bloggers out there talking about how to deal with our brains and how to get the most from them in a practical, no-nonsense, and constantly interesting way. Sources: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/your_brain_on_m.htm Comments (0)
 Write comment
| |||||||
View all articles by this author |
|||||||
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
