Last summer at The Shire, in Nova Scotia, Jon Guilbert and Dianna Dunham from Gandy Dancer Productions brought a camera and filmed us in our work and retreat as we discussed and considered the Art of Hosting community of practice and what it was offering to the world..
The resulting six minute film is a beautiful capture of some of my closest professional friends at a sweet time in our working relationships with one another. It reminds me of the deep gratitude I hold for them and the love and respect that we share with one another. It also reminds me of the great times we have together, which is perhaps the sweetest gift of all.
With the way the world is – connected and interdependant – from time to time disasters from afar touch me from half way around the world. In Australia, around Melbourne, bush fires have ravaged communities this weekend, leaving 83 people dead and untold millions of dollars in damage. Viv McWaters posted a call to action today and I pass it on. Wnatever you can do to help, especially if you know people there, would be good.
A couple of days ago I headed across the northern United States on a Boeing 757 on United airlines – the hungry skies. United is a quirky airline. They have three classes of seating on their domestic flights: executive, economy and then what I call the “hole in the bagel class:” Economy Plus. Economy Plus consists of a third of the rows of the economy cabin with four inches more legroom than the back two thirds of the economy cabin. In practice, Economy Plus seems to offer pretty much the same legroom as every other airline, but the economy cabin is cramped and uncomfortable, esp[ecially if you are penned in and the person in front of you decides to recline. At that point, your tray table becomes unusable and if there is anything under your seat, your legs start to cramp up. They should properly call Economy Plus, plain old economy and refer to the other section as Economy Minus.
To enjoy the stretchy legroom of Economy Plus will cost you $40 extra dollars – ten dollars an inch – and wil almost certainly guarantee you a row to yourself, because it seems on the Vancouver-Chicago and the Vancouver-Denver flights, almost no one is enough of a sucker to pony up for legroom they would get on any other airline.
And then the Starbucks at the G terminal in Chicago won’t take my travel espresso cup because, the barista was worried about “cross-contamination.” When she said that I walked away, for there was little I could to persuade myself that a shot of espresso was worth the risk that Starbucks would contaminate my travel cup. Interesting.
Anyway, I’m in Michigan now meeting with 24 very interesting people from across Native America and Hawai’i engaged in conversation about the nature of native leadership and looking now at places in which that leadership is having an impact in the world. The retreat is being sponsored by Native Americans in Philanthropy and the Fetzer Institute. The weather here is very mild, and a big thaw is on. Snow and ice have been plunging from the roof of the amazing retreat centre here called Seasons. One more half day and then it’s off to Toronto where I get to see my family and my new niece Rebecca.
I was thinking the other day about how to teach kids in school Web 2.0 skills, prompted by my friend Brad Ovenell-Carter’s blog post on figuring out how young is too young,
Now my kids, don’t go to school, but they work actively in non-technological settings with collaboration. They spend a lot of time together co-creating games, scenarios, worlds and activities. My daughter, at 11, is helping out in a friend’s store and she helped train other workers on the inventory system the other day before taking inventory with her new trainees. She has also been working with another friend to start up an Amnesty International group on our home island.
The discussion on Brad’s blog has been about critical skills in reading, learning how to read content that is user produced on the web. To me Web 2.0 is about co-creating, so responsible writing is a key piece of the work, so in thinking more about how to teach this I thought about what a Web 2.0 based exam room would look like.
What if we tested kids on collaboration instead of individual achievement? What if a class of 30 kids was given an exam one day but instead of every student getting a test paper there would only be six papers in the whole room. The class would need to divide into groups of five and complete the exam together. The Pass mark would be 95% and they would be allowed to talk to each other, steal ideas, look in books, phone a friend, whatever. Each team of five would be responsible for the overall quality of their own answers, so they would also have to make quality decisions. If there were several long form questions, essays and the like, they could divide the work up, or have a couple of kids draw up an outline and bring it to the group for polishing.
In most school settings, this would be called “cheating.” In the real world this is how it works.
It’s not just about critical reading or accurate writing…it’s about providing real opportunities to practice collaborating and noticing that when you work together, you get a better result than if you work on your own.
Anyone know any teachers out there that have tried something like this?
Off to Kalamazoo, Michigan to attend a retreat with the Fetzer Institute on Indigenous leadership. We’ll gather together 24 or so folks from around the US who are working with leadership in Indigenous communities, organizations and governments and ask some interesting questions about the kinds of worldviews that drive our current practice of leadership, moving us away from traditional collective leadership capacities and towards individual leadership and scientific management models.
The photo above is the scene I just watched, the sun rising over Mount Baker. My friend Dustin Rivers says that the [e Sḵwxwú7mesh word for this time of day is kwakweya, the moment when the sun peeks up over the mountains.
New day dawning.