Johnnie Moore had an interesting thought this morning:
Jeff Jarvis talks about the Gutenberg Parenthesis. Those who bemoan the supposed short attention spans of the networked generation, typically measure this by the capacity or willingness to read a book cover-to-cover. This assumes that reading books is normal; but what about the vast span of human history before books? Perhaps we’re seeing a reversion to ways of knowing that were diminished by the printed word… to a more oral culture in which remixing is natural.
This reminds me of the book, The Alphabet and the Goddess which also suggests that reading had a powerful and not always positive effect on how we think and behave.
I left him my own thoughts…and I say this as a guy that loves books.
I think the issue is not attention spans so much as it is a breadth of attention. Before there was text humans needed to be incredibly aware of context, of everything that surrounded them of how things worked and what initial conditions led to certain kinds of results. This is important in agrarian societies, hunting societies, transoceanic travelling cultures and other kinds of indigenous land based ways of being.
What we have lost during the Gutenberg parenthesis I think is the ability to think systemically. Book reading has taught us to be linear and to expect a beginning a middle and an end. That is not the way the world works and I think we ignore it at our peril.
This is a little bit I think of what we will taste in our module at the ALIA Summer Institute this year.
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An email from a participant in a recent Art of Hosting-type workshop where I brought my juggling balls and taught juggling. One of the participants, a teacher, picked up the skill and left with my three balls in hand to evangelize play!
This may end up sounding like the silliest email ever but thanks for showing me how to juggle. I am really enjoying it. I have never found something that I am not hard on myself to perfect until now. I go outside, or inside and practice for a few minutes and if the balls drop, I just pick them up. Very cool. And I love feeling that I am improving. Yesterday I was showing my boss what I learned and I almost had to stop juggling because it was the longest I had gone. Then the balls fell and solved that problem! But one of the students as he got off the bus yesterday asked me what I learned at school and I told him I’d show him. I have never seen this child so enthusiastic about anything and when I was finally able to show the class, they all applauded! That was cool. But it was fun to be able to show the class something they could understand. Except there was another child who after my juggling display says, “what else did you learn”. So I go on to tell the class we learned a lot of what we are learning in preschool such as how to calm your body down. Then the same boy, “then what did you learn”, so I continue by saying I could host a world cafe. And again, “what did you learn”. I think this child has a future being a lawyer!
Far from the silliest email I have ever received. This is what makes teaching worth it, and why play matters so much.
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I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies.
The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key points:
Experiences build brain architecture. What happens is that neural circuits develop to reinforce behaviours, emotions, motor skills and so on. Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that. For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second. Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off. So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse. To promote healthy brian architecture you need language rich environments, supportive relationships and “serve and return” interactions with adults are the three things that promote health brain architecture. Prolonged stress and reduced exposure to supportive relationships – in other words, what are known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – create the conditions for heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases that are a result of disrupted development of organ systems.
Toxic stress derails healthy development. In babies, stress is alleviated by contact with a caring adult. If a child is exposed to stress in large amounts, the brain loses the ability to turn off the stress responses, and the stress becomes toxic. Nurturing, stable and engaging environments are the antidote to stress. It’s interesting that in North America we don’t treat stress with much compassion – “get over it” is a common response. In the USA especially, a hyper individualistic culture diminishes the importance of stress.
Some positive stress is a good thing however – what we call in the facilitation world “The Groan Zone” which helps learning and helps healthy development. There is always stress associated with learning new things or doing things for the first time. In healthy development, adults help kids with this kind of stress and the kids learn strategies for dealing with stress, which amps up the heart rate and blodd pressure and then reduces it. Supportive relationships help children to learn adaptive and coping skills.
Tolerable stress is serious and temporary – death of a family member, natural disasters, war and violence, an experience of extreme despair and other things that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. This kind of stress is also buffered by supportive relationships. Families, extended families, friends, neighbours, supported programs need to step in and provide the buffering that reduces stress to baseline levels.
Toxic stress however is prolonged activation of the stress response in the absence of protective relationships. This includes living alone in violence, or with adults that neglect children or who are unable to care for children because the are sick or depressed. If you don’t have access to caring adults, the stress becomes toxic and the stress system is built into your brain architecture, placing hardship on your organs, your nervous system and your hormones. This is the kind of stress that leads to long term health and development issues.
Neglect can be as powerful as abuse. It doesn’t matter to the baby’s brain whether your lack of relationships come from neglect or abuse. It has the same effect on the brain, and it keeps the stress levels high. Seven hundred synapses a second don’t care what an adult is doing if there are no compassionate relationships. Reducing stress by reducing the numbers and severity of adverse early childhood experiences results in better outcomes. This doesn’t mean that we have to solve poverty and subsistence abuse overnight before we get better outcomes – it means we need to make policy decisions that ask the question about whether we are supporting healthy and supportive relationships. In other words, the social safety net needs to work both at the systemic level to reduce inequalities, and at the acute level to create spaces where people can learn and experience healthy supportive relationships at every age.
I’ve been listening here thinking about the implications for this in organizations and communities. To sacrifice relationships at the alter of work or learning is to not only inhibit the sustainability of what is going on, but also creates the conditions for unhealthy families, groups, communities and organizations.
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Three very interesting resources on a new form of evaluation to me, developmental evaluation, created by Michael Quinn Patton:
- A Developmental Evaluation Primer
- Patton’s own slides on developmental evaluation
- A practitioner’s guide to developmental evaluation
This is the first thing I have seen on evaluation that has got me excited about the connection between complexity, systems thinking and change.
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This amazing video is significant on a couple of fronts. First it shows how much other stuff we share our solar system with. Second it is a lovely visualization of seeing, learning and becoming aware. It is the sum total of what humans know about asteroids in our solar system, and like all good learning it gets better over time as we perfect patterns and then ways of seeing and understanding. And like all good learning, it takes and becomes memory, knowledge and then part of our everyday experience.
Over 30 years of constant and repeated practice with constant improvement and inquiry, this is the kind of discovery tat can be wrought. The purest form of discovery: finding things that have always been there.
And here is a more technical explanation of what you are seeing here:
Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You’ll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.
As the video moves into the mid 1990’s we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you’ll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.
At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that’s tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.
Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we’re running out of undiscovered objects.