1 - Life is a bit of a roller coaster.
On Tuesday I came home discouraged and seriously considering the human equivalent of spinning a cocoon, abandonning my present life-form identity, turning into crysalis soup, and not emerging again until I had turned into something completely different. Today things have bounced up again.
2 - Lost in a landscape of change
My discomfort was related to how I see the world - and its uncertainties - and our stumbling explorations in this landscape of change. The confusion was about the ongoing dance between connections and disconnections, overlapping interests and apparently shared conceptual spaces - spaces that I hurry towards with optimism but when I get closer they seem full of high, thick, shatterproof, tranparent barriers - not at all connected to the shared reality I hopefully anticipate. I sometimes feel like a thirsty traveller in a desert, always looking for water and repeatedly finding mirages. Hence the appeal of escape into metamorphasis.
3- I haven't got a label - I'm just me
I often go to events that overlap my core intersts, where there are lots of change-makers, social entrepreneurs, consultants, advisers, policy makers, techie people, artists, writers, independent "makers and doers" of all kinds and "people with proper jobs" in organisations so well established that even I have heard of them.
I never know what label to stick on myself. I'm just Pamela McLean and I'm doing all kinds of inter-related things as I explore this fascinating and rapidly changing world.
Obviously I think the things I do are worth doing - I must think so or I wouldn't invest so much of my own time, resources and effort in working at them - but they seem very diverse and as I have never managed to make the work I care about into "my day job", (i.e. connected to sufficienat financial reward to coverf my material needs) that adds to my confusion about how to label mayself.
4 - I'm curious about learning
I'm curious about things - especially learning. I'm intrigued by the kind of exploratory learning-by-doing that we all do in an insatiable way in our early years, but then it tends to get "educated out of us" as we get older and go further through the system. In fact rediscovering the confidence to be an independent exploratory learner in adult life can be quite a challenge. I believe this loss of curiousity and confidence is most likely to happen if formal education has been too much about getting ready for exams, i.e. learning the "right answers" to questions that other people have decided to ask. I think it's important to learn to ask your own questions in response to genuine interests or challenges, and to work with other people to find solutions to questions that are a shared concern. There seem to be plenty of people making that case very persuasively at present.
5 - Internet opportunities
I'm interested in how the internet changes our opportunities to learn. But I'm not thinking of formal courses here - the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) etc. or the use of e-learning in distance learning - I'm thinking about exploratory "free-range" learning.
I'm interested in how the Internet enables us to find (or develop) communities of interest where we can reflect on our experiences "out in the real world", and rub minds about the challengs we are facing. We can have opportunites to learn from each other (and learn about each other). Perhaps even more importantly we can support and encourage each other, through informal conversations, through our questions and consideration of the answers, and through considering each others interests as we go about our very different lives. When people with a shared interest but different perspectives come together all kinds of insights and new knowledge can emerge, as well as practical action (There are some examples at Dadamac Ltd)
6 - Long term outcomes
Not only do I lack a label, but what I do is usually related to with long term outcomes. I have little to show in the way of measureable short term outputs. (Though maybe that's not completely true. Maybe I should go back and see what I might have counted as outputs if I was actually looking for them - perhaps if I collected up some outputs I'd recognise something I could put on my label).
7 - Giving it another go
Despite my feelings on Tuesday I decided to give things one more go on Wednesday - and discoverd that it was worth staying out of my cocoon for a bit longer.
8 - A call for other explorers
It started with a tweet "I'm looking for fellow explorers, map makers, and social media people to help me map out the #LandscapeOfChange Pls RT". Three people responded quite rapidly. (Hmm - is that an output?) I admit it's a very long way off "trending" or "going viral", but it was encouraging to me. I wrote them a follow-up blog Call for help in exploring the landscape of change, and then we exchanged more tweets, so now I feel I have the start of an ongoing conversation online around the Landscape Of Change. I will go back and nurture it when time allows.
9 - An interruption from one of my Dadamac Learners
I was interrupted by a phone call from Julliet Makhapila. She had just come home from Kenya and was full of news about her trip. I persuaded her to go the First Thursday space and share news with me there as part of our project to make her work visible Julliet Makhapila's project - visibility.
We worked together for over four hours. An etherpad seems like the right space for her to use. The chat room setting there is a middle ground between talking and writing. Then the chat can be copied and pasted and edited down into soemthing shareable as a blog. The phone call was needed as a parallel communication channel - for support in develeping a new skill and as an overflow for excess information that couldn't wait for typing. We've been trying for over six monts to find something online that would suit Julliet. This could be our breakthrough.
10 - Encourgement from Fred
I'd sacrificed my usual Wednesday "unplugged" session so I checked for news of it online from the regulars - Tony Hall and Fred Garnett. As a result I came across two of Fred's slide shares: I Am Disruptive - We Are Digital and Everything is a Metaphor. My appreciative comments to both reflect how encouraging they were. Suddenly all the things that had been making me feel such a failure on Tuesday were there on Fred's slides - explaining that the agonising slowness, the need for deep listening, the ways things make more sense afterwards then when you are doing them, the inefficiency of innovation and much more besides is all part of the pattern and to be expected.
11 - First Thursday
I've been doing First Thursday for six or seven years now - and today was the First Thursday session for February. I'm online once a month at a regular time, wondering if any of my friends and contacts will turn up - see First Thursday Updates.
These are the people who were there today
Eight participants, three continents, five countries, four time zones (Hmm - maybe that counts as an output as well.)
Several people were meeting each other for the first time so there was a lot of greeting and getting to know each other. Most people knew more that one other person in the group, some knowing several very well. Everyone knows me on a one-to-one basis, even if we have not met face-to-face, so that is also an easy starting point for conversation.
We are not just some separate people arriving at a meeting. In many ways we are more like a community. People connect up with others in various ways outside of the First Thursday meetings. We have a lot of shared history, some of it going back many years. It includes practcal projects, and deep common experiences, some involving deep trust, high risk and genuine situations of life and death. After the greetings we settled on ICT as the topic of shared interest for today and discussed that for the rest of the session.
12 - Wondering what the rest of the week will bring
So I'm still out of my cocoon, exploring my world, considering the landscape of change, and wondering what the rest of the week will bring.
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