Your meditation on the value of fully inhabiting the now of one’s education and the downside of too much future orientation/planning reminds me of one of my favorite poems:
Traveler, your footprints are the path, and nothing more;
Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.
By walking, you make the path, and when you look back
You see the trail that you will never walk again.
Traveler, there is no path, only wake trails on the sea.
Thank you for writing this. So much of it resonates with my own experience and the research I am doing around value creation in learning environments. My research population are small business owners and operators. Although they are being educated for future tense success, the formula of get an education and get a job doesn't apply to so many of them, because they are the job.
I have found that a lot of evaluation and assessment of university delivered courses are all future based, yet I am finding the immediate value of being in a classroom full of other practitioners as something of immediate value and the data on that is rich and exciting.
I didn't read, but "met" this post at the right moment. It actually helped me put together some previous understandings concerning AI in education, but, more importantly about my love of learning.
I'm an advisor for ethical integration of AI in high schools, and I've experienced the most fecundity when I don't have a linear structure for my talks. Thus they become an "essay".
Precisely, the essay's original intent as a literary form was to draw and share an intellectual honesty to an edge of personal understanding. It wasn't meant to be the evidence of a skill or a finished work.
Beyond the recommendation of creating more open, exploration-based form of assessment showing the finger prints of a person, it finally clicked for me that loving to lear implies not forcing.
I understand now why, for instance, it feels better for me to "meet" languages where they are to be enacted, instead of apps. Through my travels in Italy, not only did I feel more stimulated, but I also felt I was truly building myself through a new identity and a new outlook.
In that light, the 15-minutes-a-day and the soft addiction to streaks and notifications that language apps sell are not only ineffective, but miss the sweet spot where you are long-lastingly transformed into the speaker of that language through a situational and inner resonance with people and places.
With it's huge capacity for output, and our immature understanding of our own nature, AI has the potential of displacing or distracting us out of learning by promising to "be" a perfect tutor.
Thank you for being a nexus to all these theories and views so I can dare to connect my own.
Ps: as I wrote this, sitting at the Starbucks of Milano Malpensa airport, an Italian family struck a joking conversation with the Starbucks barista, who took her time to complain outloud about the fact she has to work tomorrow.
I saw the beauty of it, and no app is even close to replicating that. Plus, this moment made me see I most admire but still don't understand Italian.
Many thanks Jonathan. The resonance is deep on this one and the timing is welcome. I work in health and safety and a lot of my engagement with people is within a workplace educational space. Often workplace training is focused on future competence, and for good reason. However, work as imagined is also future focused yet work as done is inevitably future focused. For my reading and application of your essay is to think of the same gaps and focus on HE as the same gaps and focus in the workplace.
Lovely post. Jonathan, I wonder if observation-based and creation-based learning activities in education, to be done well, fully, are moments of 'encounter'.
You draw from such a wonderful variety of thinkers and texts in these posts. Would you ever consider including a reference list at the end? That might be helpful for readers who aren't immediately familiar with a citation like (Mercer, 2000).
Brilliant, Jonathan. Truly. 👏
Your meditation on the value of fully inhabiting the now of one’s education and the downside of too much future orientation/planning reminds me of one of my favorite poems:
Traveler, your footprints are the path, and nothing more;
Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.
By walking, you make the path, and when you look back
You see the trail that you will never walk again.
Traveler, there is no path, only wake trails on the sea.
— Antonio Machado
Thank you Baird, I love that poem as well!
Thank you for writing this. So much of it resonates with my own experience and the research I am doing around value creation in learning environments. My research population are small business owners and operators. Although they are being educated for future tense success, the formula of get an education and get a job doesn't apply to so many of them, because they are the job.
I have found that a lot of evaluation and assessment of university delivered courses are all future based, yet I am finding the immediate value of being in a classroom full of other practitioners as something of immediate value and the data on that is rich and exciting.
What a beautiful essay. Touched me deep being an educator for almost 20 years.
Thank you, Jonathan. This opened up some profound insights for me, in a language and a way of seeing that I can grapple with.
I didn't read, but "met" this post at the right moment. It actually helped me put together some previous understandings concerning AI in education, but, more importantly about my love of learning.
I'm an advisor for ethical integration of AI in high schools, and I've experienced the most fecundity when I don't have a linear structure for my talks. Thus they become an "essay".
Precisely, the essay's original intent as a literary form was to draw and share an intellectual honesty to an edge of personal understanding. It wasn't meant to be the evidence of a skill or a finished work.
Beyond the recommendation of creating more open, exploration-based form of assessment showing the finger prints of a person, it finally clicked for me that loving to lear implies not forcing.
I understand now why, for instance, it feels better for me to "meet" languages where they are to be enacted, instead of apps. Through my travels in Italy, not only did I feel more stimulated, but I also felt I was truly building myself through a new identity and a new outlook.
In that light, the 15-minutes-a-day and the soft addiction to streaks and notifications that language apps sell are not only ineffective, but miss the sweet spot where you are long-lastingly transformed into the speaker of that language through a situational and inner resonance with people and places.
With it's huge capacity for output, and our immature understanding of our own nature, AI has the potential of displacing or distracting us out of learning by promising to "be" a perfect tutor.
Thank you for being a nexus to all these theories and views so I can dare to connect my own.
Ps: as I wrote this, sitting at the Starbucks of Milano Malpensa airport, an Italian family struck a joking conversation with the Starbucks barista, who took her time to complain outloud about the fact she has to work tomorrow.
I saw the beauty of it, and no app is even close to replicating that. Plus, this moment made me see I most admire but still don't understand Italian.
Many thanks Jonathan. The resonance is deep on this one and the timing is welcome. I work in health and safety and a lot of my engagement with people is within a workplace educational space. Often workplace training is focused on future competence, and for good reason. However, work as imagined is also future focused yet work as done is inevitably future focused. For my reading and application of your essay is to think of the same gaps and focus on HE as the same gaps and focus in the workplace.
Lovely post. Jonathan, I wonder if observation-based and creation-based learning activities in education, to be done well, fully, are moments of 'encounter'.
You draw from such a wonderful variety of thinkers and texts in these posts. Would you ever consider including a reference list at the end? That might be helpful for readers who aren't immediately familiar with a citation like (Mercer, 2000).
Thanks Jonathan, enjoyed your piece - thought you might interested in work being done on human anticipatory systems and processes - with direct implications for learning as not-knowing. See: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375273888_Liberating_the_Human_Imagination_Futures_Literacy_and_the_Diversification_of_Anticipation_Riel_Miller