Thursday, October 27, 2011

Scintillating chat about CMC11 in Second Life

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Madhupak/14/24/65





 Meeting place with Tellmea Story and Couki  Clary after the Wednesday Live Session in Blackboard


      The NewPosts on the wall is an active object ... click on the blog and it will reveal the contents!

Thursday afternoon, following the Live Session with Stavros Michailidis, I met with Tellmea Story at Conviviality Corners.  While we started out speaking about our various schedules and shifting priorities, we ended up discussing Connectivism and Grounded Theory ... this is often how the SL meetings end up ... a bit of basic chatter and then, a deeper discussion of some topic of mutual interest.
This next week, Glen Gatin aka Tellmea Story will be holding "office hours" there,  so feel free to drop in and say hello.  He suggested he would post his hours in the CMC11 template .. so look for them there (maybe even on Week 8 page).

You might notice the Thursday edition of NewPosts on the wall ... it is a webpage and active ... feel free to enter the links and read the posts when you re in the area.  The "screen" is your browser window and you may put different urls in the bar to venture around the web.  Try a You Tube video, sit down at the table and enjoy your beverage  while you watch (the one you have near your personal work area ... we have not yet sorted out serving virtual coffee to any degree of satisfaction!)

Hope to see you there sometime before the Thursday, Week 8,  Live Session





Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Monday, October 24, 2011

CMC11 Week 7

                                     


                                                                

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Thoughts from Aristotle ...


Do the quotes below relate to creativity and creative problem solving ? You decide ...


“The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”

“We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence is then not an act, but a habit.”

“There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.”

“Anaxagoras avails himself of Mind as an artificial device for producing order, and drags it in whenever he is at a loss to explain some necessary result; but otherwise he makes anything rather than Mind the cause of what happens.”

“Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.”

“Thinking is sometimes injurious to health.”

“Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.”

                                   Aristotle, right, speaking with his mentor, Plato.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Where are we? Where are you?

As we end week 6 and venture on to week 7 we would seem to be midway through this Learning Journey, or course, as highlighted in the acronym MOOC.  This defines where we are in the time continuum.  How do we define where we are in the connectivist learning and PLE continuum?

The MOOCCreativity and Multicultural Communication is a community of learners.  As such, we are responsible for our own learning as well as the interaction among the community of learners.  How do we access the knowledge and how do we develop our own responsibility for learning.  In what ways can we become autonomous learners and further build a community of learning?

The first 4 weeks of CMC11 offered live synchronist broadcast sessions which were recorded and then posted for viewing asynchronously around the theory of the MOOC (connectivist learning, personal learning environments and then, metaliteracy underpinnings for the conversations and community building exchanges.

We are now moving into more thematic sessions surrounding Creativity, what it is and how to find and further develop our own creativity as well as that of the community of learners.  We are a diverse lot and have multiple channels for experimentation and discovery of thinking preferences, learning styles, old and new modes of electronic communication.  And, we have  ... the hangouts in Google + which replicate, as near as possible, the Face to Face development of visual and aural exchanges. 

So far, photography, music, writing, and hangout meetings have been the modes for communication.  We have used twitter as a means to highlight broader information locations, blogs to reflect upon personal learning experiences and discussions within the MOOC template for more specific inquiries and commentary.  Are we a community of learners?  Are we reflecting and connecting?  Are we still waiting for a sign, a guide to direct us?  Who are we and what do we want to do? Where do we want to go and how? Are we interacting?  Are we having fun yet?

Are we building a community of autonomous learners?  How might we enhance the community and foster more intrinsic building upon what we know, what we want to know and how to go about knowing?

There will be another hangout in Google + on Sunday, 23 October, 13:00 New York time.  Hope to see you there.  Perhaps we can toss about some ideas that have come to mind surrounding these questions.  Perhaps ... BYOB  (bring your own brain)  :-)

Check under Carol Yeager's Google + Home page for the hangout happening ... make sure you check out your audio and video capabilities and download whatever you might need, a bit before 13:00.

                                                      



Wednesday, October 19, 2011

As Creativity Ages

We seem to be reading a lot about Creativity lately ... and well beyond this MOOC.  Creativity and the word innovation, appear in so many contexts, in so many places.  Is this a new desire of the socially connected and mobile societies we encounter on the internet?  Is the use of the terminology wishful thinking or a new approach to finding solutions to age old problems? Are these contemporary buzz words to describe an utopian aspiration?  I am often perplexed by the use of the terminology and wonder if the users understand the underlying contexts. 

In order to put some perspective on the topics, I dug back into history a wee bit to see what some earlier folks had to say on the matters of creativity.  

Plato:


Life must be lived as play.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Science is nothing but perception.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
 
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

What I really am impressed by is the use of play ... it makes all else more enjoyable, and thus, maybe easier when we have obstacles facing us.
What do you think?  I am going to check in with Aristotle next and discover what he has said ...




 

Monday, October 10, 2011

A Sampling of Creative Skills

Before we look at the various facets of creativity, it will be helpful to pick up a few tips for thinking and working creatively ... or at the very least, set up some ideas for developing a mindset for creativity.

Find a place in which you can be comfortable and have your surroundings to your liking ... conducive to putting yourself in a different mental framework.  Maybe a little music to soothe the soul ?  maybe complete silence to help you concentrate ?  The choice is yours ... take some time to think about each of the suggestions in the photograph below ... and think about what each one really means to you.


  Are you all set?  Ready to get on with delving into Creativity and Creative Problem Solving?  OK.


Now you are ready to learn more about thinking and working creatively!
CMC11

Friday, October 7, 2011

Passion for Learning ...

Some one asked earlier about the meaning of passion.  I have been thinking about what passion means to me and while it has many shades of meanings in my mind, I thought I would share what passion in education means to someone who not only tells us about his passion, he lets us hear it ...

                                       PASSION AND CREATIVITY ON THE SILK ROAD


What do you think passion might be?





                                  

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Making a Greek Culinary Connection

For those of you who may be anywhere near Albany, NY ... here is a wonderfully blissful treat for any day of the week.  American friends, of Italian descent, took me out to dinner to an authentic Greek restaurant a few weeks ago ... oh, my ... I had the Moussaka and it was fabulous,  as was the Tzatziki.  Some of the ingredients were recently brought back from Greece by one of the owners.  This does make a difference in authentic cultural dishes.  The place from whence it came generally has the best earth, climate and farmers for certain ingredients ... which is why the food tends to taste so much better there, than when away from the area.  The authentic Greek yogurt tastes like no other and that made the Tzatziki so amazing, it almost seemed like I was in my favorite restaurants of Cyprus and the other Greek Isles.

If one wishes to bridge the cultural divide, I think food is a magnificent way to do so ... languages aside, the stomach is a fine test of taste for cultural exchanges.  Last week I returned with some friends (from Germany, India and the US) to celebrate Life, Fine Food and Good Friendships.  I selected a dish I had not tried before and was ready to return to the shores where fresh shrimp and fish are the very best.  One of the keys to the fine fare I was smitten by, was that the shrimp had been cooked in a clay pot on top of fresh tomatoes and veggies with a splash of ouzo ... what's not to like?

My Garides Grekolimano ...






For those who might have a clay cook pot and some fresh caught jumbo shrimp the following link will take you to a recipe tat is similar and I suggest you exercise some creative culinary cooking ... followed by a sumptuous feast with fine friends.

Then tell us all about the experiences .. of the cooking, the tasting, and the friendships.  Oh, top with a wine of your choice, or, as in my case,  imported ouzo on the rocks (straight up might be too much competition for the splash of ouzo in the clay pot cooking).

Garides Gekolimano , as sent to me by a friend who was there ... and I did not share even one morsel!