Automate and Simplify

I have some idea, but not a lot. Everything I present here is from my first experience and the few things I had been told before going to my first class.

What’s the value of a beginners description?

The reason I think it is valuable to hear about something from a beginner, is that they haven’t yet had time to categorise anything. They haven’t  formed strong opinions, and haven’t been exposed to the accepted idea of what something is. In the case of Feldenkrais my mind is hopefully open enough to present a really clean impression of what I experienced. I hope to be able to approach the topic of Feldenkrais with a sense of joy at its newness to me and a lack of rigidity or preconceived ideas about what it is.

A Theory and Practice of Movement

Feldenkrais was developed by an Israeli doctor called Moshe Feldenkrais. Among other things he was a black belt in Judo, an engineer and some have said a genius. Feldenkrais spent a long time studying the way that he moved his body, and developed a number of theories on how we move. He suggested that we fall into habitual ways of moving that are detrimental. He suggested that we end up using excess energy, neglecting parts of our bodies, and overusing others. We fall into these ways of moving because of small injuries, favouring ways of moving due to handedness, and because movement is largely unconscious.

I don’t need to tell my hand to reach out and grab a cup. In fact, and this seems to be a big part of Feldenkrais, the movement begins in my hip, or my chest, or my shoulder. And then it propagates out to my arm and hand, so that the real movement is not coming from my hand at all. Perhaps this is another way that we fall into inefficient patterns of movement, a lack of true investigation and understanding of how we move.

Non-prescriptive self investigation

The cool thing is that everyone has habitual and unique ways of moving. I have a friend who surfs, and when watching him surf one day I noticed I could pick him out from all the other surfers when he caught a wave. All because he had such a distinct body language and way of moving. It’s the idiosyncrases in our bodies and manner of movement that make Feldenkrais a non prescriptive investigation of the way we move, and of our physical mind.

Brain Investigation at Home

A Feldenkrais class is full of people, often lying on the ground, moving in slow motion. The idea is that you move your body very slowly, often through slightly unusual movements. Breaking things down, and making them unusual helps you start to learn how you move. In this class we just moved our arms in a semi-circular motion in front of ourselves. We also moved our necks a bit, and tried to investigate how these movements are related to our pelvis, chest, shoulders and back. What really appealed to me during the class was that most of this investigation was done in our heads. Externally it looks like not much is going on. But I felt a real sense of revealing to myself how I think. Each little movement was special, and the key was to focus on the bits that were hard or strange. And to embrace this strangeness and just run with it, and then take the strangeness back to your normal movements and see what had changed.

In terms of brain anatomy, just under our scalps we have a representation of our own bodies, totally mapped out. It’s called the Homunculus, which means ‘little man’. This map corresponds to our physical body. What’s interesting is that some bits are bigger, because the map represents how many nerves go to that area. So for example, our lips which are very sensitive, are enlarged on the Homunculus, and so are our hands and fingertips. I likened this class to spending a bit of time hanging out with Mr Homunculus, and getting to know how he moves and what he’s up to.

The little movements are a way of taking you out of your normal habits, so that when you put them all back together again you’re able to change the way you do things. I think of it as moving from unconscious competence back to conscious competence, where we are aware of our competence in moving.

In truth I’m not sure what happened to me at the class. But it was good. We finished off by walking backwards around the room, and I was left with a stupid grin on my face. Anything that does that to you is worth your undivided attention.

I’ve been thinking recently about going back to university and studying for a masters degree. Why? Because I like learning, I’m interested in new things and I want that intellectual rigeur that you can get from formal study. And of course having a masters degree would set me up with some great career options.

But, I’m increasingly not seeing the link between further university study and better career options. I have seen the argument posed against the ’scrap of paper’ a number of times. I don’t think that is true. University education is hugely valuable. But there are several arguments against it, and some new models for learning (suggested and emerging) that I find interesting.

Professors moving away from University model

After attending the e-Learning Guild Annual Gathering in Ontario Catherine Lombardozzi of Learning Journal suggests that perhaps the future will feature people gathering a portfolio of experiences, and short course education under certain experts in their respective fields. This certainly is applicable in fields where one needs a wide range of expertise to operate.

So does this herald an era of professors moving away from the brand of their university, and using an increasingly connected world to personally brand themselves and sell their expertise directly?

It is already possible to attend a range of short courses run by experts, hosted by well known universities. This is a possible path I could take in lieu of a full on masters.

Incidentally here is the story of the Professor that rebelled, giving all his students A+s. He asks the question, who am I to assess the value or not of these people’s ideas? Is this a sign of the shift away from formal education towards experiences?

Experience over Education

The suggestion here is that it is better to have a range of experiences, than a formal structured education. I think it relates to the whole concept of wicked problems. These problems have no real substance to them, and you define the problem while you search for some form of solution. One key factor to wicked problems is that they are totally specific to the situation. You can’t generalise a solution for one wicked problem, to solve a similar one. So aren’t our working lives full of wicked probems? The world is constantly changing and so no situation is the same. Unless perhaps you are a specialist in a medical profession, but even then nothing is cut and dry.

Yet we continue to go to universities where we learn a structured curriculum with our peers. Sure, the social side is good but think about what you learn. The same thing as everyone else in your class. But would you imagine working the exact same job as everyone else in your class?

A story from Einstein

Einstein developed his greatest theories when he was young, and didn’t have as strongly developed mathematics compared with when he was older. Einstein was a bit of an outlier at first, but as he developed his ideas he was much more accepted into the academic community. He further developed his mathematics later in his career, and some have suggested that this constrained his thinking in some way. You’ve probably heard the story of the development of the theory of relativity, when Einstein imagined himself riding on a light beam.

On a lighter note

I’ve heard it said that specialisation is learning more and more, about less and less, until we know everything about nothing.

Where does this take me in my search for an exciting masters degree? I’m not sure,  I certainly will keep asking questions.

I went to a talk last Friday by a Canadian called Mark Cabaj from the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. He was speaking with Vaughan Payne, CEO Opotiki District Council, on the topic of community involvement in economic development. To explain the problems facing communities trying to develop their own economic resources Mark used that good old saying

‘Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime’.

Imagine a community based by the sea that wants to develop its fisheries for economic gain. There can be a range of different problems when they start to learn to fish, perhaps:

• There is a boat offshore already catching all the fish (Other people taking the resources)
• They don’t have the equipment to catch the fish (Don’t have the resources to benefit from their environment)
• They don’t know how to catch the fish (Lack the knowledge or skills)
• Having caught the fish, they have to send them away somewhere else to get processed (Not enough infrastructure to get full benefit)

It is these difficulties that Mark and Vaughn were working to overcome. Vaughn is working at the coalface, developing New Zealand’s biggest mussel farm off the East coast of NZ. It will create 900 jobs and bring $27 million to the community.

I’m excited to find that communities are starting get more involved in their environment, and are wanting to use it for their own economic benefit. People aren’t happy to sit back and let other people take all the benefit from a resource that impacts on the community. It’s nice to see that people still have a connection to the land in this way, and I suspect that it extends to a respect for that environment, and a sense of guardianship over it.

This hints at my belief that on a wider scale people are starting to question why some people in society can develop incredible wealth for themselves, while others have very little. I don’t want to touch on the argument of what people deserve, and don’t deserve. But you must question things when you see that there was huge wealth locked up in the banking industry, and it has all fallen apart due to greed and arrogance. By working together communities can spread some of that wealth around. Environmental resources can be turned into economic value, and also be looked after by those who have the biggest vested interest in their survival.

What interested me the most was the process that communities go through when working on these types of projects. It takes a lot of conversation, and a lot of working together. It’s the shift in thinking, from corporations developing resources, to communities developing them with the help of corporations. And the way that those conversations can be brought about and developed. I had a chat to Mark after the talk and he pointed me in the direction of a huge suite of tools that can be used in community dialogue.

Check it out, they are all free and are simple but deceptively powerful.

www.sas2.net

This is my first post on my first blog. I feel like I’ve joined the revolution. Last night I went in to town and spent $36 on a round of drinks. Tonight I went online and spent the same on setting up Automate and Simplify. Only time will tell what was the better investment. I had a damn good time last night.

The goals for this blog are to provide a place where I can reflect and muse on my thinking about where the world is going. Most likely I will come at it through a variety of lenses which relate to learning and development, the human brain and social systems. In reality these are such broad categories I suspect I will be able to meld any and all topics into one of them.  The aim is to give myself some guiding light to structure my thoughts.

Having mused and reflected it will be nice to have a record of where all that musing came from and also provoke me to get deeper into subjects and enter into further dialogue with people in the various fields. I hope to link to other people who I find interesting and establish a community of filters for myself to operate with and in.

Finally, and this is the most instrumental goal of them all, I am working on what I call the expert tactic, where one establishes themself as an expert on a topic or range of topics. I’ve never really found it easy to define what it is I actually do or want to do, so let this be a beginning.