The professor’s popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.

Wesch has spent some time in the classrooms of other teachers observing how they make connections with students.

As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen’s class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: “He’s a lecturer. He’s not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That’s my thing, right? But he’s totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics.”

I believe this to be true of any work relationship – the human connection between people – whether that is teacher/student, manager/worker etc and the quality of that relationship is what create the conditions for learning.  If the respect and interest (and wonder as detailed in this article) doesn’t exist then the conditions for learning cannot exist either.  All this is a way of reinforcing my view that we spend too little time attending to the human elements of organising and too much trying to get technology to do the job for us.  It’s heartening to see someone like Wesch re-evaluate his teaching stance while not abandoning his interest in technology all together.

Oh so much to learn from this sort talk from David Damberger….Organisations defend so rigorously against failure (or admitting it at least).  Its worth speculating about what our systems might be like if we admitted to being ‘ordinary’ rather than aiming for spectacular results which very often fail.  Damberger comes up with some interesting practical suggestions for how failure can be marshalled in the service of learning and cites the Engineers without Borders annual failure report.  I would like to suggest that we need new emotional leadership in organizations.  What do I mean? A type of leadership that sees emotion as a core element of organising.  Emotion is systemically manufactured and individually felt.  It is as much a part of the world of work as the physical or tangible products that are made.  A new type of leadership would put emotion back where it belongs at the hear of organizing and would also challenge the fear that it is personal, irrational, negative and disruptive.

If you feel like reading about failure head over here to Admitting Failure.  The site is full of fascinating stories of ‘failure’ and the learning they inspired.

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.  Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.

Our study shows that the way we view art is not rational, that even when we cannot distinguish between two works, the knowledge that one was painted by a renowned artist makes us respond to it very differently.

The fact that people travel to galleries around the world to see an original painting suggests that this conclusion is reasonable.

Professor Martin Kemp, an Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, reflecting on results showing that the brain signals of the viewers couldn’t distinguish between genuine and fake artworks.

 

This raises all kinds of fascinating questions – like, does it matter if it’s ‘real’ or not if we get enjoyment from it? What is the power of the institution or the curator in determining how we view art? etc etc.  The same can be said of promises made in business or by consultants.  But perhaps more interestingly (for me) it raises questions about any rational only approach to understanding or meaning making.  If we discount the irrational, the emotional and the unconscious then there’s a swathe of intelligence extruded from the conversation…must do more thinking/musing on this.

Hat Tip Culture 24 - the paper will be published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

children are more fun than adults (they are better at getting pleasure out of situations, whereas adults are more defended)

Applying business models to mental health services (and the arts?) doesn’t work – we’re at cross purposes

In psychology none of the generalizations are true

Storytelling is about leaving out – a therapist’s role is to make suggestions about what might be left out

Greed is wanting more than you can have, a self cure for deprivation & pre-empting choice.  It’s also the attempt to destroy one’s pleasure

Politics is entirely about economics.  Capitalism is for children – it engages with appetite at children’s level…

I want less communication, not more…I want to exempt myself…if you have access to somebody or something you can feel excluded by them…the internet gives people the illusion of continual contact..so when it’s down or gone it gives people an experience of what it is like to be abandoned

Hat tip Aid Netherlands

I hereby nominate this video and this song to serve as an invocation to every professional arts conference in 2012. It’s short. It’s to the point. It carries an important message. And it sticks with you (boy, does it stick with you).

Hat tip Andrew Taylor

I don’t think there is ever true “structurelessness” in a group – only an unwillingness or inability to see what structures are there. 

I agree with his point – and more often than not the structures we can’t see are unconscious ones – imposed by assumptions, projections and ideas of what should be going on that isn’t and what is going on that shouldn’t.  Wilfred Bion termed this unconscious ‘group think’ Basic Assumptions.  He maintained that at any given moment in time there are two processes going on in a group.  The first is the actual task that the group has been charged with doing (the work task) and the other is a series of unconscious assumptions that derail the work task (acting out primitive fantasies).  He proposed that groups operate as though the members all subscribe to a series of unconscious fantasies (which in the main are about alleviating the stress and anxiety of being in the group in the first place).  These fantasies are the product of the group – not individuals within it.  The three assumptions Bion developed are fight/flight (the group believes it has to fight or flee from a common enemy either within or without the group); dependency (the group believes that a leader will relieve the anxiety and stress in the group – when (and not if) the leader fails to live up to expectation s/he is attacked and replaced with a new leader;  and pairing (the group believes it can only go on if two members of the group unite and produce a new leader/solution to the crisis.  Groups move between these fantasies at the same time as trying to get the work task completed – is it any wonder that going to work can be a stressful activity sometimes?

Stepping back from the psychology for a moment – it’s interesting to note how these basic assumptions manifest…this week for example we have seen two European leaders removed from office….new leaders have stepped in and are expected to ‘save’ the Euro crisis.  This is a classic example of Dependency as conceived by Bion.  Sarkozy and Merkel are frequently believed to be hatching a plot to also save the Euro crisis – a classic example of Pairing…and as for fight/flight…we need look no further than the degree to which individual European countries take the stage to be the scapegoat du jour.  It used to be Ireland, then Greece and now Italy has moved centre stage.

Bion’s work teaches us that there is always an unconscious component to group relating … most of the time that component is an attempt to manage difficult and primitive feelings that cannot be expressed consciously.  The challenge in organizations is to understand the function of the behavior without immediately trying to dismantle and eliminate it.  Finding a new scapegoat is simply a way of moving anxiety around under the illusion that it has been alleviated.  Anxiety (and fear) are part of relating – we can attempt to embrace them or delude ourselves that a simple solution exists.  Perhaps a more interesting question to consider is – how do we go on while at the same time feeling the anxiety that going on evokes?

BION, W. 1961. Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, London, Tavistock.