Power-Free

In order to understand I am not alone in feeling unique among seven billion people, I read books and stories from different cultures and different time periods. I accept the fact that my subculture is not the best or brightest all the time.

I stopped watching television regularly a long time ago because most of what I needed from the television screen I can find in my daily walks and hikes or in scanning websites. However, I hear a television right now because in a nearby room my mother in-law has the volume turned up so she can watch television without using her hearing aids. I am exposed to the hot news topics of the day, which bounces around my brain while I concentrate on what to write today.

Three topics I meant to cover in this blog entry: OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching. Maybe I will.

Instead, I'm going to lean on you for a moment and take a breath. Just press your shoulder against the computer screen and I'll press my back against you to prop us both up. There. Thanks, that feels better.

Can you see where we sit? I see us on a large rock outcropping, overlooking the eastern ridges of the Appalachian Mountain chain. A few buzzards fly in a thermal a couple of miles away. Some boats and other watercraft write white lines and carve V-shaped troughs in a lake down below. Here's an apple I brought for you. I've got a bottle of wine if you aren't too dehydrated from our morning hike.

I'm glad you're here with me. I'm more of a hiker than a runner and kinda figured you are, too, since we met here. Who would have thought that two people who enjoy the outdoors are the same two people who also enjoy using technology?

Yeah, I know what you mean. I wonder what our technology side is doing to the environment. I just heard an ABC news report on global warming and its extinction effect on cool/cold weather species ranging from butterflies to frogs to orchids. That's why I needed to lean on you for a moment. I feel tired. Worn out. Wisdom is a heavier burden to bear than I thought it would be when I was child admiring the elders I wanted to be.

The world I knew as a child is gone but human social development has always gone that way, changing from one generation to the next, with the definition of what "generation" means also changing.

In a dream last night, I saw the human species as a giant organizational chart on a website, where we could trace the location and daily occupations of every person on the planet, showing us exactly how many people similar to us exist, and see how many people are performing tasks just like us at any one moment (either at the same time (say, at 15:00 in each time zone) or literally at the same moment, no matter what the local time is). We could see people practicing the same religious ceremonies, people speaking the same language and people buying the same clothes/food/houses as us. We could categorize our habits in generic terms and see people doing the same things as us but in different cultural contexts. And in this future website, our bodies are connected to the Internet more directly than the way we send/receive external stimuli now so that we can see each other's brain patterns and hormonal changes, too, if we want. We also can figure out who is not directly connecting to this future network and determine who has handlers that manipulate images of people like celebrities, politicians and business leaders. Urban legends pass through our cultures instantaneously and become basic forms of population control for commercialization and political purposes.

I know that my dream is just the fluff-and-stuff of material I read, flowing through my nighttime thoughts and hanging out during the day, waiting for my attention. To get to that dream, I want to focus on my three topics, OpenCourseWare, Project Management, and Interactive Teaching, but in reverse order.

First, Interactive Teaching. I am a result of a childhood spent in front of professional educators, people who earned their livelihood giving young people lessons in assembling cultures from the basic building blocks of language and mathematics. The best teachers I remember were the ones who chose the emotionally stable and mature students to aid in the education process, thus getting students in one age level to recruit other students to join them in the joy of learning. Barriers prevented the completely free flow of information, including class bullying and stereotyping (often reinforced by the worst type of teacher, the tenured "lifer" who was just doing his/her job to get a paycheck and reach retirement age, happy to keep a class from collapsing into chaos, much less create a learning environment). From this, I believe the ideal learning environment is one where teachers work with the exceptionally gifted/focused students to help train those students in the classroom who are not as gifted academically or not focused on classroom learning so that both social skills and academic learning are enhanced. Difficulty lies in coordinating learning activities outside the classroom with those in the home where parental goals may not match the goals of public/private professional educators (in a separate subject, I hope that home-schooled children have parents/guardians who align their home activities with their learning activities and from what I've seen, many or most of them do).

Of course, at the institute where I instruct, students/customers are older than the state-mandated education age level but many of the same aspects of teaching still apply and which I saw demonstrated in college-level professors/instructors of mine. Every class I taught last quarter allowed me the flexibility to apply this technique and except for a few cases, I think I succeeded. One thing I learned, this technique requires a level of commitment from me that I wouldn't ask of every instructor. Equality is essential - every student enters my class with the same level of skills which means I don't/won't engage conversations with other instructors about students'/customers' learning abilities. I don't have a solution for the students/customers who show me their cheating habits other than to assign them to teams with students who do not cheat and hope they see the joy of learning while they're not able to easily cheat because I give different assignments to each team.

Which leads me to the next topic: Project Management. A project manager and a teacher have the same goals - improvising magic tricks with unknown resources. In business, I have managed more successful projects than ones that failed (or rather, in PMA terms (PMA = Positive Mental Attitude), I never had a project that failed, only ones that showed me how to succeed with unusual circumstances such as too much time, too much money, too few resources or not enough customers).

I am not a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I am a human being and live with other humans in daily living. Therefore, I do not worry about how to operate a computer, a tractor, an automobile, a robot, a widget, or a stack of money. I only focus on the one resource I understand: human beings.

Humans are not numbers. Humans are not satisfaction surveys. Humans are not the products they buy or the complaints they make. Humans are me and I them. I don't care about their broken items or their inadequate training. I do care about what makes them human, their special traits, their dreams, their wishes, their desires, their disappointments and their losses.

Success is a big word with a lot of meaning that falls outside of a dictionary's precise definition. I'll let you define what success means to you. To me, success is just another word for you. You are the successful output/conclusion of you. Thus, you are the unknown resource with whom I want to perform the magic trick (i.e., project) of your learning.

And now I reach the final topic: OpenCourseWare. Life is an open classroom with no syllabus and no assigned textbook but with plenty of homework and lots of pop quizzes and tests. How do you prepare for a situation like that? What else but constant learning! If you want to get serious about having fun learning, you start by unplugging yourself from unfettered entertainment, including over-the-air television, DVRs, video games, texting, or any other passive resource which artificially stimulates you such as drug abuse or obsessively shopping. You learn by doing, including reading, writing, and interacting. Learning also means paying attention to your body, feeding yourself good food and exercising yourself to have a relatively healthy body to provide an open mindset for learning.

I happen to instruct a small set of students/customers at one technical institute. They have busy lives that at this point barely gives them the time they need to eat, exercise their bodies, absorb the course material and spend time with their kids and families. However, they, like me, will complete their formal education and go on to new careers. To be successful, though, we/they keep learning.

That's where OpenCourseWare comes in. It used to be that I listened to audiobooks on my way back and forth to work because I had about a 30-minute drive each way, matching the length of an audiotape. With CDs, audiobook learning stretched into my lunchtime driving at times. Now, with the Internet, I can listen to podcasts anywhere I go, downloading them to my iPod or listening to them when I'm on the computer. The advent of OpenCourseWare has opened up a new world to me. Instead of spending time reading lots of old books (I'm still working my way through "Melmoth the Wanderer" that I bought how many weeks ago?), I spend time picking and choosing OpenCourseWare courses to read or listen to. We should inculcate this habit in our web-connected youth so that they are prepared for college courses before they take them, an idea that goes with the nontraditional training track that Maya Frost proposes.

Everything in moderation, including moderation. Don't spend too much time alone learning. After all, we really only learn by sharing. In our lives, let's learn with our kids and families so that we see a subject from more than one perspective. Next time, put away the DVD player and turn a summer vacation into an interactive learning session - you'll be surprised how much fun it will be.

And remember, you don't have to use electronic technology to learn - take a bird, tree, or plant identification book on a road trip and reward one another for first identifying a bird and or reciting a tree's uses. We humans are part of this planet so spend some computer downtime together and have a power-free evening, eating grilled food by candlelight under a moonlit sky in the backyard. There's nothing like beer, shish kebab (vegetable and/or meat) and some shooting stars to say it's summertime! Which means I better go shopping before it gets dark. See you later, alligator.