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from NomadWarMachine
Today marks the 13th anniversary of the Daily Create I’ve been participating in this since around 2016, often uploading my responses to a Flickr album. Here they are as a slideshow. Here’s to the next 13 years! You can participate as well – just visit the web page at 5am UTC or follow the @creating@daily.ds106.us on Mastodon.
from NomadWarMachine
“Postcards on Pedagogy” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
It’s a couple of weeks into the UW/UofG collaboration, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to reflect on my experiences so far.
It started out very low-key for me. Mum died on 10th October 2024 (I still can’t type that without having to pause to wipe my eyes). So when the collaboration ‘officially’ began at the beginning of November, I knew that my participation would be interrupted by my need to travel 470 miles south to attend her funeral in early November, and all of the emotional upheaval that would entail. But I thoroughly enjoyed meeting my group (Debs, Alka and Mary) over Zoom and coming up with an asynchronous activity for us all to add to before meeting again on the 18th. On my return from England, after pushing through the mountain of work that had accumulated in my absence, I enjoyed a brief hiatus that I allowed myself in which write. Sending a quick email to Debs, Alka and Mary on Tuesday evening (my time) resulted in three lovely replies in my inbox on Wed morning – that really gave me a boost, and I have found a little more time to plan my next contribution to the collaboration.
I also found time to catch up with a project initiated by Carole, who is sending out prompts asking people to respond with a digital postcard. Carole had sent a card around to the group with a picture of her typical classroom. I have had neither classrooms nor students for years now, so I responded with a postcard remix from the amazing Bryan Mather’s remixer. However, this did get me thinking about my own learning environment, and an idea for my next remix.
Both of these activities have helped me to reflect on what I was hoping to gain from this collaboration, and what I was enjoying. I think that one thing that I have realised from my online communities is to enter experiences like this without rigid expectations, but with high hopes. I hoped to meet good people, to have interesting conversations, to participate in ways that I had not anticipated, and without rigid rules (no facilitators telling me that I am doing it wrong). And I always hope for the opportunity to play with remix.
Well, so far I’ve not been disappointed, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the month.
from NomadWarMachine
My One Little Word for 2024 is bricolage.
Bricolage is a French word which roughly translates as ‘do it yourself’. It is a practice of taking what is available (what is ready to hand, as Heidegger says) and reusing it for the current purpose. I use it to describe the remixing that we do in CLMOOC and DS106 (see this paper by me and Wendy Taleo). I have also used it to talk about to describe my approach to research and scholarship, and to describe a model of learning and assessment that is based on my own online experiences (this is paywalled, but I’ll happily send a draft to anyone who asks for it).
“Lines of Thought” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
from NomadWarMachine
I first did a Daily Create on 19th March 2016, and I’ve been doing it daily for years now. As of this morning I have completed 2465 challenges. Sometimes, when I have a bit of spare time, I look back at ones I missed and fill in the gaps. I had hoped to end 2022 with a final tally of 2500, and I came pretty close.
So what will my challenge be for 2023? To do the TDC every day, of course. My ultimate all time goal is to complete every single daily create, but doing an extra 1541 over the next year might be too much of a challenge. But I will keep chipping away!
Happy 2023 all.
from NomadWarMachine
I first did a Daily Create on 19th March 2016, and I’ve been doing it daily for years now. As of this morning I have completed 2465 challenges. Sometimes, when I have a bit of spare time, I look back at ones I missed and fill in the gaps. I had hoped to end 2022 with a final tally of 2500, and I came pretty close.
So what will my challenge be for 2023? To do the TDC every day, of course. My ultimate all time goal is to complete every single daily create, but doing an extra 1541 over the next year might be too much of a challenge. But I will keep chipping away!
Happy 2023 all.
from NomadWarMachine
Over the last few months Wendy and I have been doing some thinking about the calendars we’ve collaborated over in CLMooc for 2021 and 2022. We’ve written a short report which is published as part of the ASCILITE conference proceedings, and Wendy presented at the conference last weekend. You can see the slides below, and the abstract of the report.
Can collaborative creativity help to connect digital practitioners with each other and enhance their well-being? In order to answer this we undertook a piece of qualitative research. Using bricolage as our methodology, we surveyed participants of a collaborative creative project and used grounded theory in order to categorise the responses. In order to illustrate our findings and better explain the nature of the creative project, we share some of the artwork and music that was created by participants as part of this project. We conclude that as well as enhancing well-being, this creative endeavour also added to the personal learning of these participants.
from NomadWarMachine
Inspired by a Twitter conversion, I added a couple of phases from Heidegger to an AI art generator and this is the result. These are the phrases:
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?
Language remains the master of man.
from NomadWarMachine
Aletheia was a Greek Goddess. The word is often translated into English as truth – and Aletheia’s Roman counterpart is called Veritas. However, as Heidegger and others say, truth is really insufficient as a translation. Truth is a noun in Latin, but in Greek aletheia is an activity. This is not just an exercise in semantics. Heidegger understood the importance of language: it shapes our understanding of our world and constrains what we can say.
Etymologically aletheia means un-forgetting or un-concealing (a- lethe). In Greek mythology the river Lethe was one of the five rivers in Hades, and all those who drank from it forgot everything they knew. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger tells is that art opens up a clearing to disclose meaning – it helps us to un-forget. And further – art is not just a way that we can find out about ourselves and our world – it also creates meanings for us as a community. I might prefer to conceptualise this slightly differently and talk about art as opening up possibilities for different meanings, interpretations or understandings, but the idea is thought provoking.
Wittgenstein makes a similar point in his Tractatus (5.6) when he says that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” – if we can’t describe something in words then in a very real sense it does not exist for us (I am aware that Wittgenstein would have gone further with this thought at the time than I am doing now). And further, in a later work:
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Philosophical Investigations, 115
Art helps us to give us the concepts that we need to understand our world in new ways – it reminds us that there is more than one way of looking at things. Aletheia is stronger than just remembering, it is making a conscious effort to act in a certain way – it is an attitude towards the world. I think that this might well describe the demeanour of a bricoleur. Our ‘what if?’ and ‘yes, and?’ attitudes to life help us to open up the world to ourselves in new ways and discover new ways of being in the world.
from NomadWarMachine
I think I’ve always been a bricoleur – it’s a family trait. But it’s not without danger. When I read this page by Austin Kleon, I remembered happy times messing around with my brother. We were big fans of seeing how things worked. Watches, clocks – anything that had moving parts. We’d prise them apart and put them back together again. Yet, somehow, there was always a small pile of springs and screws left on the floor afterwards.
And the watches and clocks ended up on Dad’s workbench …
from NomadWarMachine
In my earlier post I suggested that Heidegger thought of understanding as being an uncovering of meaning, and I further suggested that this is one of the things that we bricoleurs do when we mix and remix. In this post I want to continue with my interpretation of bricolage through a Heideggerian lens.
In his discussion of constructionism, Seymour Papert contrasts two type of problem solving – the analytical, which take a theoretical approach and the practical, which he calls bricolage. Simon Critchley makes a similar distinction in his book Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, sketching a brief history of philosophy and distinguishing between two types of Western traditions in philosophy: the Anglo-American and the Continental. The difference between these two schools of thought is not a geographical one, it is a difference in approach. The Anglo-American school of philosophy proceeds by logical analysis; the Continental school uses hermeneutics (interpretation) as its method (I am oversimplifying here of course). One way of drawing this distinction would be to think about it in terms of a scientific and a literary approach to understanding (human) nature; another would be to look at in terms of being theoretical on the one hand, and experiential on the other. This latter is the type of approach that I am characterising as bricolage.
My first two degrees in philosophy were taught in the Anglo-American (analytic) tradition, and I think it is fair to say that there was a mistrust of Continental Philosophy as lacking in rigour. However, this is based on a misunderstanding of the phenomenological approach. Phenomenology does not deny the scientific approach (or, it need not), but it does not believe that this is the only, or the best, way to understand the human experience. The analytic approach is theoretical; the phenomenological approach is grounded in the concrete. Critchley suggests that the former approach is looking for knowledge, while the latter hopes to find wisdom. In Being and Time Heidegger suggests that what we need is an existential understanding of science, and suggests that scientific explanation alone cannot explain our practices.1 Papert agrees, and suggests that we can find meaning by playing with concrete objects without the need to move beyond them to abstract truths. Both show ways of being in the world as bricoleur.
1 Merleau-Ponty describes phenomenology as ‘unveiling the pre-theoretical layer’ of human experience on which the theoretical conception of the world is based (in Critchley, p 113). It is something that people have to do, not to theorise about.