Mountain Paths is a personal guide to discovering our potential with practical tips and powerful self-reflective questions to spark new possibilities in your life and work. It presents a strengths-based approach to creating passion, confidence, connectedness, and agility in our life, career, and work.
First of all, I learned today in Second Life where to get free clothes, to change into a new outfit, get rid of my tale, change the day-time…and then I went for the Trinity College Dublin “Education in SL” conference:
(click on picture to enlarge)
It was a bit crowded and my poor little laptop was really working hard on the graphics.
It was doing well for the intro: a speaker that I wasn’t seeing introduced the process. It got worse when they started with a video about the Harvard Law School: they use wikis and blogs to support their virtual classes in SL.
After that they turned off the voice that I was hearing clearly but others not and started to explain everything through chatting, which I missed completely. And chaos started when we were supposed to split up into two groups: I did not get the questions, I did not know where to go and my system was slowing down stopping me from going anywhere and cutting into receiving chat messages.
So I flew to a corner and was “listening” into some chat conversations around me and at the same time watching a video about “Global Kids in Second Life” a New York-based educational organization that is running an online leadership program in SL Teens.
And then that was it for my graphic card: I could neither move nor listen to a conversation properly and I left SL a bit frustrated with these qustions on my mind:
How is learning in SL different to learning in RL?
What can you learn in SL?
How can you create a learning experience in a chat room?
Well thank you Stefan to last week’s hosting..and to Frauke’s solid posting trail here I take the batton and start a week of blog hosting.
You know the idea was that each person would simply commit to one entry a week. And yet the hosts so far have posted more than one.
Funny how, often when the the first step in any venture is not too big, it is likely you will overshoot and do more. Isn’t that so much more effective than aiming too high, and being demotivated to continue. A trick I use to start a task that I am avoiding is to set the first step to be really small and tell myself I can stop after this point if I should wish, or take a break. This really works for me and chances are I will keep going.
SHORT VIDEO ANIMATION
Well I wanted to introduce you this week to The Wombat. He is in this very short video clip, and comes with a strong and simple message that is relevant to every concerned citizen. Amongst my colleagues we have also used the video in training purposes to lighten the topic of sustainability and ecology. You may want to do the same.
This is how it is described at Global Mindshift’s website:
“The Wombat speaks, and he’s smarter than you so, so listen up!. In less than a minute, this rapid-fire animation tells you everything you need to know about how to get along on earth for the next million years.”
Kaospilots is a new school that aims to educate young entrepreneurs and social innovators. Young adults will learn to create starting from their passion and dreams, finding balance with social and environmental needs and keeping eye on the global context. During the course of the three years that the program lasts, they will gain nuanced knowledge, practical experience, and a cultural understanding of the school’s three core disciplines: project design, process design, and business design.
In the workshop, we experienced some of the Kaospilots values:
- Playful - It has to be motivational, creative and constructive to be at the KaosPilots.
- Real World - We have to work with authentic projects.
- Streetwise - We should always think about young people and be aware of what’s going on out there - at street level.
- Risk-taking - There has to be courage and a willingness to take risks.
- Balance - There has to be harmony between body and soul, form and content and between economic, human and time resources.
- Compassion - There always has to be empathy and social responsibility.
In the risk-taking part, I had the opportunity to get views on the We Are What We Do developments in Holland by other participants and new questions evolved to develop WAWWD Holland further:
Do I want to be in the driver’s seat of WAWWD Holland? Or do I want to be the engine?
Does the project coordinator for WAWWD Holland need to be Dutch?
How to balance leadership and unconditional leadership?
Furthermore, we discussed possibilities of finding 150 applicants for Kaospilots NL Team 1 to start flying in September 2007. Maybe you are interested to join?
Here are some stories of people who have been involved with Kaospilots:
Maria, Team 11 KP Denmark, Internship with KP NL Guus, Merel, and Lena have already applied for Team 1 Nike and Morten are Graduates from KP Denmark Henrique is an AIESEC alumni and has just joined Team 13 in Denmark
SEED founder Lynne Franks is currently working alongside the Tribal Group to launch a new education and training programme for women to unleash their potential in business. Here’s an extract from a recent interview with Lynne in Tribal’s magazine, IQ.”More women than ever before want to start their own enterprise,” says Lynne Franks. “And they have a wealth of natural attributes and values-led principles at their disposal, not least of which are integrity, creativity, inclusivity, and the ability to multi-task and to nurture those around them.”
“But they also face many barriers not usually applicable to men. Many have low self-confidence in a traditionally male-dominated business world where the language is about survival of the fittest and focus is on spreadsheets, competition and confrontation. They often have additional life constraints such as looking after children and other family members, and therefore need flexibility of hours and location.”
The story of Marianne Knuth is a story of achieving a unique perspective and following the passion of conviction.
Perspective. When Marianne’s family moved from Denmark to Zimbabwe during her childhood, a new reality confronted her. Many modern Western amenities were absent, yet she found a love of nature and a sense of community that had not been present in the West. With family still in Europe and Africa, Marianne spent time in both environments growing up. She went to school during the year in Denmark but returned to Zimbabwe in the summers. Her schooling continued in Denmark after her high school years as she advanced on to her undergraduate and master’s degree. The perspective that her experiences had given her precluded Marianne from settling for a Western corporate job. Rather, she felt called to embrace the conviction of her passion.
It was this passion that led Marianne to establish a learning center in Zimbabwe to contribute to the creation of healthy, vibrant communities. Kufunda Village is a small learning village. Kufunda has model compost toilets, herbal remedy projects, day care centers for AIDS orphans, and more initiatives underway in several rural communities.
With this blog entry my week as a host for the Imagine Blog ends and I hand over to the next host in the list. I hope you enjoyed the topics I brought to the table and had a good time here on this blog.
I’ll still be watching closely what happens here and in the Xing community, and I’m also looking forward to start some closely related projects like nCourage with you.
At Imagine 2007 you’ve seen two videos “What’s Your Tree” and “The Question Movie” from Dropping Knowledge. There are lots of other great movies in the films gallery.
In the Open Space session about networking I mentioned Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that uses current laws to overcome copyright’s limitations in a legal way. With Creative Commons licenses you can make your writings, songs, videos available for free and allow others to legally share, reuse and remix your content.
Here’s a video that explains what Creative Commons is all about:
Creative Commons was founded by Lawrence Lessig. Have a look at this blog entry to see him explain his ‘baby’. He has a remarkable presentation style and really knows how to explain complex ‘legalese’ to standard people.
Wow, 3 days into Second Life and we had our first circle discussion (actually, the meeting was another outcome of the OpenSpace session at Imagine) in SL!
We, that is Sofia, Mark (from the Pioneers of Change Cultivation Unit), Andrew from Learning House in London and myself.
Absolutely amazing: we started off with a warm-up drumming session on Better World Island:
(click on picture to enlarge)
We then moved into a cirlce conversation in the Peace and Justice Center exploring questions like:
What has brought us here into SL today?
How are we all connected to Sofia? (Sofia says: ”only as a starting point cos we didnt all know each other but I did. It was our way of introducing each other. We realise even a check-in is a new type of experience in SL- when you see the avatar but dont quite know the person behind it yet..we are learning.. come learn with us!”)
What have been our experiences so far in SL?
How can we create a hub for social innovation and change in SL?
What would we like 1 million people to do to change the world?
How can we continue our explorations in SL together?
(click on picture to enlarge)
I actually was the first one to ask about dancing possibilities in SL (I am the last one to do that in real life ) and we ended up in a techno rave festival: me dancing flying in midair (sorry, forgot to take a picture there but I have witnesses!)
We casually meet Friday late afternoons now, so if you would like to join in just drop Sofia or me a line!
By the way, anyone up for the SL Socrates Café on early Wednesday morning next week? Let’s see, if I can drag myself out of bed for this
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Posted by fraukegodat
here I take the batton and start a week of blog hosting.
A trick I use to start a task that I am avoiding is to set the first step to be really small and tell myself I can stop after this point if I should wish, or take a break. This really works for me and chances are I will keep going.
