Saturday, September 13, 2008

Mourning Michael

My good friend Michael Wellings passed away on August 28. There is a memorium page at the University of Washington. He and I were the same age. He was a person I looked up to for his technical knowledge and his love of sharing his knowledge to help make the world a better place. I'm coming out of a depression about it, and am finally able to talk more about it. He will be missed.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Remember Back When You Were One?

Do you remember back to when you were one year old?

One reason it is hard to remember back that far is that most children learn to speak after that time. And most children learn to read between age four and seven.

Media - speaking and reading - change the way we think. Once we have learned to read, it is difficult for us to put pre-verbal memories into a post-literate frame-of-context.

Do you remember the time before the World Wide Web? If a 1960 television broadcast, newspaper article or book instructed viewers or readers to go to www.whitehouse.gov, they would have had no idea what the words meant. Further, pre-Internet brains think differently.

This change in thinking is the reason that we have a hard time imagining a culture based on partnership thinking and an ecology of joy.

Fighting Bob?

Fighting Bob Fest
Fighting Bob Fest is an annual Chautauqua featuring progressive speakers, networking opportunities, and entertainment. Fighting Bob Fest carries on the tradition of Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette by providing a forum for progressive ideas on issues facing Wisconsin and the nation.
I like progressive thinking.

But the word fighting in La Follette's nickname is one of those words of war to which I referred earlier.

Would I suggest that the nickname be avoided? No! Just that we are careful when using words of war, and take opportunities like this to create Ecojoy learning experiences.