Rainbow that set the sky on fire:
In a breathtaking blaze of glory, Nature puts on one of its most spectacular sky shows.
Reds, oranges, blues and greens create a flaming rainbow that stretches above the clouds.
But this circumhorizon arc, as it is known, owes more to ice than fire. It occurs when sunlight passes through ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. It is one of 15 types of ice halos formed only when the most specific of factors dovetail precisely together.
This blanket of fire, covering hundreds of square miles, is the rarest phenomenon of them all. It was spotted in the US on the Washington-Idaho border around midday last Saturday.
I am a sucker for atmospheric phenomena, and this one takes the cake. It’s raining here on Bowen Island today, so it seemed appropriate to post this instead.
[tags]circumhorizon arc, rainbow, atmosphere[/tags]
Rare that I completely reproduce a full post from someone else’s blog, but Doug Germann did a masterful job today of capturing the terror of dialogue:
There is deadly risk in dialogue. We are imperiled. If we are born in conversation, we die there, too. We die when we leave it; we die when we meet another, for we cannot long remain other, and yet we must. Both people must be willing to let shields down, the shields which keep us inside our images of ourselves. Our plans may not be accepted, they might be tossed aside, worthless. We might be tossed aside worthless. Our very being might be killed and it is not for sure that someone new will rise from the ashes, or that if such a one does we will want it. We might not recognize ourselves, indeed we might not survive in any form. This is why we hold back, not willing to lose who we are. We are afraid we die. This is why we argue for our position. Yet this is our test of faith: we put forth what reality beyond truth we see, not knowing whether it will bear any fruit. Have we done good or ill we cannot know. Ours is but to offer, trembling to offer. This is a test of faith for despite our past experience that something better arises from the ashes of dialogue, we can never be sure about this time. We risk it all.
So if you do not wish to risk, I will understand. I will not hold it against you. Great courage is not mine, either. I shrink from dialogue. I shrink from revealing myself and from receiving your revealings. I fear that I may have to give up myself and my pet plans and my comfortable ways of living. I may have to learn something new, change my way of working and living, meet new people, become a new person myself.
There is risk here: what else goes with it? A responsibility not just to accept what the others say and go along, but to meet what they say, to throw my offering into the mix, see where the similarities and dissimilarities and correlates are. How are we related, how are our ideas and our dreams related? Perhaps tonight the conversations will turn away from what I think will work into something else: it is my duty to listen; it is also my duty to share my vision; then it is my duty to bend so we can weave a new pattern. There might be a better form. I wrote that like I do not believe those words, but indeed there might be a clue to a fuller measure beyond this half measure, there might be indeed something grandly better. Prepare to be surprised.
It’s a near impossible task to describe to someone what will happen in a skillfully conducted dialogue where the participants agree to stray from their well manicured positions and enter into a world of complexity and difficulty that produces emergent learning. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of your perspective shifting and new insights streaming in. But it is scary, and we do well as facilitators when we remember that the best work is done when people agree to take themselves to that edge. We can meet them there, carefully and with compassion and invite that next step. So can we be that big?
It’s around this time of year when people all over North America are graduating from school and starting their new lives. If I were to offer one piece of advice it would come straight from this post about learning in networks.
We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.
The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment…is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.
My advice would go something like this: forget everything school has taught you about what it means to learn. From now on you will grow and learn and acquire new skills and knowledge from the most unlikely places. Don’t look at the people at the front of the room for the answers, look at the four people sitting around you and engage them in a deep conversation. The answer lies there. Or if not the answer, the next question, and it is finding the next question that is going to keep you going for the next 70 years.
And never forget those four people. You will see them again. This is because contrary to what school tells you about questions and answers, the truth is that the world is an oracle waiting to be consulted. You must take time to frame the good questions and then pose them to the world and then you must wait to see what result you have made with those questions.
And for those of you who are starting to think about sending your kids to school, I have two pieces of advice. First, if you can help it, don’t. Unschool them instead. Second, if you can’t do that, ban homework from your house and give your kids opportunities to use that free time to learn in networks, pursuing whatever interests them in what ever way they can and don’t, I repeat, DON’T mark them on it. That is the literacy – channelling their passions into finding the teachers that can bring richness and purpose to their lives with no one worried about performance measures or how good they are. They will need this skill set and they aren’t going to get it anywhere else.
[tags]unschooling[/tags]
Many of the circles I travel in instersect in many intimate ways. People I meet here on the west coast of Canada months apart turn out to be co-authors of papers and books. Folks I hear about from others turn out to be partners in crome later on.
The Art of Hosting world is a little like that, touching as it does on many many different networks. And through these serendipitous connections, it turns out that I am personally acquainted with two of the three authors of a great little free e-book called Mapping Dialogue. I met Zaid Hassan last year as he was travelling through BC on business with Generon. Marianne Knuth, I haven’t met yet, but she is an amazing woman, a close friend of my friend Toke Moeller and we are hoping to have her join us for the Art of Hosting here in September.
So while I am relishing these connections, I want to put a strong plug in for this book on dialogue. It essentially suammarizes what we know and do with the Art of Hosting and is a great primer to using these processes and approaching this work no matter what context you find yourself in.
[tags]mapping dialogue, Toke Moeller, Zaid Hassan, Marianne Knuth, Art of Hosting[/tags]
I’m fond of saying that I’m the last consultant in the world without a cell phone. While that is true for business, my partner and I have one that we use for personal purposes. And because we use it so infrequently (mostly for emergencies or urban logistics when we’re in the big city) we have it hooked on to a prepaid plan from fido.
Now fido offers you a couple of ways to handle prepayment. You can either buy vouchers or use a credit card. A credit card is preferable for us. So because we are running low on our initial minutes, we called the handy prepayment number to refill our prepaid account …or not.
This evening we have been stuck in voice mail jail trying to register to have our fido mobile phone account refilled by Visa. It has taken quite a while and we still haven’t gotten any help. Here’s what happens:
- Dial 611 (or *46 or any of the other numbers fido says to call…they all take you to the same robot. She says her name is “Andrea.” Nice.)
- Follow the robot’s directions patiently to register for instant prepayment, so that we can use our credit card to refill. Optionally don’t be patient and just say “representative” into the phone. It will take you to the same place anyway.
- One of two things will happen. You might get an English speaking representative who will tell you politely that he can’t do this manually, and that you have to speak to the robot about it. If this happens, the robot takes you through the same logic chain that delivers you into the lap of an English speaking representative, who will breezily deny that this reality even happened. We had several very nice young people speak with us this evening, and we think we actually even witnessed a shift change down at the old call centre.
- Once in a while Andrea will not direct you to a friendly but useless English speaking representative, but instead will forward you to another robot who, in French, politely informs you that the French customer service office is now closed and will reopen at 8am. She then terminates the call, leaving you flummoxed and with no recourse but to blog the whole experience.
So that’s it. If anyone can help us figure out how to get credit card refilling authorized and then done, that would be nice. If you fido guys are reading this, give us a call, but don’t mince your words, we only have two precious minutes remaining in our account!. Your robot has the number. Her name is Andrea.
In the meantime I guess we’re thinking about switching to Telus or something. The bottom line for fido: crap customer services trumps friendly robots. The French twist on the whole thing was pretty funny though, so the evening’s entertainment was not a total loss.
[tags]fido, bad+customer+service, voice+mail, cell+phone, help![/tags]