Re-defining – Learning in Other Worlds

What are we re-defining? From my vantage point, learning fuels the economy and social networks are empowering us to connect in ways that support new paradigms and possibilities. I’ve compiled a few snippets that reveal what myself and my sources may be mulling. The basic idea is that there are “other worlds” where networked learners can solve global issues and form back-up plans while earning alternate currencies.

Re-defining money

monopoly money (Photo credit: guerrillaguru)

The DYNDY project encourages us to re-consider how we deal with and create money in our present world where financial, banking, and economic crises result from faulty top-down decision-making processes that serve the few and not the many.

“We are in a situation whereby the incapacity to re-define how we deal with money could resolve in an a severe damage to society as we commonly refer to it: contrary to what happens with information systems, there are no backups with money systems.”

Rhetorics of Survivance

You may not be who you think you are.

“how am I not myself?”

Enter the trickster, Gerald Vizenor, the originator of “survivance”.

Deborah L. Madsen writes in Understanding Gerald Vizenor:

In opposition to terminal creeds, Vizenor seeks in his writing to promote the concept of “survivance.” He tells Isernhagen: “if we have dominance — in other words, a condition that’s recognizable as a world view — then surely we have survivance, we have a condition of not being a victim.”55 Like his understanding of postmodernism, survivance is for Vizenor a condition and not an object. It is a way of thinking and acting in the world that refuses domination and the position of the victim. In Fugitive Poses (1998) Vizenor writes: “[S]urvivance, in the sense of native survivance, is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence… .”56 Survivance is not passive survival but active resistance as well; it is the refusal of the insistence upon tribal people as “Vanished,” or as tragic victims, or as ig/noble savages caught in an unchanging past, or as the vanguard of an idealized New Age future. Chris Lalonde points out that “with his fictions [Vizenor] does what Foucault argues is what makes one insane in the eyes of the community: he crosses the boundaries of the dominant bourgeois culture in order to reveal the lies upon which it is based.”57

If it is to be, it’s up to we…

Sean Grainger (@graingered) tells me “the world we all share is one big story written by history.”  I agree with him, our collective story is summed up by each one of our individual stories.  He says, “Teachers are in the story-writing business” and that our fundamental purpose is to be what we want education to be.

I’ve had the pleasure to occasionally exchange tweets with Sean, and in many ways he’s influenced me to think of myself as a teacher. Maybe not the certified-type who commands a classroom, but the sort who plays a necessary role in the future of education.  My contacts have dealt me enough insight to understand what kind of lessons the next generation will need in order to lead society through the transition ahead.  I’d like to play my part.

Narrative Templates

‎”Narrative templates” came to mind, so I searched and found the idea already exists.  Helpful, no?

I’m seeing “schematic narrative templates” as nTubes of identity (roles) that can be accessed through one’s personal nSphere of meaning/experience. Memories are the nemes, in this instance. When memory nemes are patterned between agents to create context, a nString is formed (relationship) wherein they exchange (nemex) their experiences of the nSphere(s) which surround them. Together through their entangled nemiStrings, they can begin to create new memories which send ripples outward.  These are the ecwaves which trigger cascades of nemex from the surrounding nSphere(s). Essentially, I’m seeing an “empowering feedback loop”.

via Collective Memory Project: Collective memory: narrative templates as cultural tools

www.collectivememory.net

 · January 5, 2012 at 6:39am (edited August 29, 2012)

How do we Thrive in the Age of Hyperconnectivity?

Wildcat2030 suggests that information overload is destabilizing our minds allowing for the emergence of the hyperconnected mind.  He speaks of our increase in fluid intelligence: “the ability to find meaning in confusion … solve new problems … draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge” ( wikipedia). More importantly, we can “find meaning in confusion”.

A “hyperconnected narrative” is needed, Wildcat2030 adds, “to re-appraise the context of our worldviews”.  Our states of minds shaped by narratives which contain “stories within stories”.  Through these stories our minds intertwine into “larger framework of co-adaptive consensual adhocracies”.   We experience freedom when enmeshed in the coherent and integrated flow space  of hyperconnectivity.  Our hyper-intelligence helps us think more critically, denying the “rigidity of the Neolitihic mind system”, yet with empathy.

via spacecollective