Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure: Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined …
Have a listen to Sir Ken Robinson, from the TED conference, on creativity and education. It’s a great talk filled with humour and deep insight about how the public education system does not serve creativity, children or our collective future. Some quotes: All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them. Creativity is as important as literacy and we should teach it with the same status. Kids will take a chance…if they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong…If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original…We …
I’m preparing to teach at an Art of Hosting gathering in Nova Scotia in a few weeks and as part of the conversations on design, we have been talking a little about what is required in order to confidently step into chaotic and unknown spaces. This morning, my friend and other co-host Toke Paludan Moeller sent a short poem from an Aikido master that sums it up nicely: When you step up, claim the mat as your own. Everybody you encounter and everything that happens is there by your invitation and your invitation alone, even the unexpected ones. Your job …
David, a friend of mine, and I were having a conversation the other day about religion, We were both trying to understand our present day connection to Christianity. For him, he was trying to reconcile faith with his humanist upbringing and I related how I was very interested for a time in becoming a Minister when I was a teenager, and since then drifted away from mainstream Christianity although I have had an enduring, although somewhat academic, interest in Christian spirituality. It only creeps into practice through music: I sing in a Christian Evensong chorale and that experience has brought …
I am a very mindful driver. For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice. So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls. “One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic …