080919

Sept 19, 2008, begun at 13:43

(Note: Moodle is not displaying the indentations properly, so some of the structure of my thought is not conveyed. I'll see if I can find a workaround.)

Yesterday I read the latter half of Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (1992, by Daniel Quinn), and this morning I read the preface and part of the first chapter of The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986, by Langdon Winner).

Winner writes about two things that I'll address here: 1) the fact that there was (at the time of his writing in 1986) no firm academic field of philosophy of technology, and 2) that, in mainstream thought, people are thought to be interested in either making or using technology, not both.

Quinn writes about the difference between Taker culture (those who know good and evil) and Leaver culture (those who live in the hands of the gods). Taker culture is focused on conquering and ruling the world so that when the gods send a drought, the humans can scoff at the will of the gods by using their technology to continue living -- and their technique is to kill off any beings or species that compete with humans for food, waging war on the entire community of life.

WHEREAS: Also, during the past week I have been part of an email conversation focused on switching the Gaia University E-Learning website (a.k.a. the GEL site) to a different software. Specifically, the most basic disagreement is that the software proposed by an associate is not licensed under a recognized free open source software license (Dolphin is under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which Creative Commons itself dis-recommends for software licensing). As far as I know, Gaia University is committed to using only free/libre open source software (FLOSS). I am committed to it since I see that there are important positive effects on social systems and power relations when FLOSS is used instead of proprietary closed source software or something in between.

WHEREAS: I find it relevant to discuss the term hacker. From my readings, I've found that one of the most widely-accepted meanings of hacker in the early days was "someone who is very good at what they do," and there was an accompanying sense that a hacker is someone consistently engaged in action learning and consistently engaged in modifying their technology to meet their needs (this modification bit is very important). We can see this meaning of hacker used today in the Lifehacker.com website (and many other places).

So, it seems that this sort of hacker is engaged in both the making and the using of a technology (i.e. tool), bridging the making/using divide that Langdon Winner wrote about. This is one of the most important principles of FLOSS -- it is a community of users that work together to improve the tool that they all use. This is also the way action learning is implemented in Gaia University -- the learner reflects on past methods of learning and -- using that self-awareness and consciousness -- designs her next process of learning. In this way, the learning process is engaged in as a computer hacker engages in computing (i.e. with an eye towards reflective modification of the tool/learning process/computer program), and I can say that Gaia University associates (a.k.a. students) are hackers of the university world (or maybe Gaia University is a hacker institution).

Related thoughts are presented in The Art of Free Cooperation (2007, edited by Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz), in an essay and chart by Howard Rheingold (editor of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog) entitled "Technologies of Cooperation." In the chart, in the space where "knowledge collectives" and "rules" intersect, Rheingold uses the title "from gatekeeping to content update and repair," and writes, "mutual monitoring: doing one's own work requires checking another's work; ease of repairing and updating the commons." Here I see the explicit unification of making and using, just as with FLOSS. Earlier I mentioned action learning as learning with consciousness and iterative design cycles, and here we see action working (for lack of a better term) as work that explicitly requires review and editing of another person's work.

Side note: Rheingold was also a participant in the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, known as the WELL, which is known as one of the first and longest-lasting virtual communities (started in 1985), and in 1998 he wrote The Heart of the WELL. The original servers that the WELL ran on were housed and maintained at The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, USA, where Gaia University meets each fall.

As I mentioned, FLOSS succeeds and evolves in communities of maker/users. However, as FLOSS gains popularity among mainstream computer consumer/users, conflicts are arising, and some are calling it a crisis. The recent case of KDE 4.0 is often cited as a telling example, as in this article by Bruce Byfield http://www.linux.com/feature/141769 . The disconnect is that FLOSS is based on participation of all maker/users (even those who don't write software code participate in the project by testing software, filing bug reports, and helping other users, often in online forums), whereas proprietary software is based on consumers paying for a product and not maintaining any communication with the software engineers who created it. In the consumer model, some users find it necessary to act angry and indignant when software has a glitch, because they think that nice quiet people don't get good service. When KDE 4.0 was released, it was clearly labeled as a testing release with many bugs, but users new to the FLOSS system ignored those labels and started insulting the people that contribute to KDE.

So, what happens when I look at our educational systems through that lens? I see that in almost all schools (from pre-k through doctoral programs) learners are not asked to participate in the design of their institutions or give any feedback to their teachers, and (based on my thoughts and on conversations with teachers) a primary reason is that the learning processes are closed source in the sense that learners are not taught about the process of learning itself. When I don't know how learning works, and I've never been given the encouragement or techniques to reflect on how I learn, then I cannot give very meaningful feedback to my teachers.

Some schools are different. I don't know much about elementary schooling, though I've heard that Montessori methods and free school methods engage the learners in the learning process -- I'll say they use an open source, hacker mentality. My first college, Hampshire College, went halfway. I was asked to put together my learning pathway, and I had minimal support in learning how to craft my learning pathway. In courses, we were given evaluations to fill out at the end of each semester, giving feedback about the course and the professor. In a few courses, professors engaged students in creating the syllabus. In general, I found Hampshire to function from a background thought that making/usingmaker/users. is useful, but the college provided very little support for the process, and spent pretty much no energy to teach students how to act as

Gaia University has been a rather sincere application of hacker mentality to learning (and I think I'm the first to name it as such), and there is still much potential to realize and much to be learned by delving deeper into a hacker mentality. In my experience, I am receiving the support that I need to shift from a consumer/learner system to a designer/learner system. I also work for Gaia University as the GEL site steward (I use the term steward instead of the term administrator), and in that capacity I've helped Gaia U use FLOSS.

Who else is hacking learning? One project I just came across is the JW Foundation Book Program: Josh Waitzkin -- popularly known as the child chess prodigy portrayed in the film Searching for Bobby Fisher -- is now pushing for educational changes that help learners follow their passions , and has written a book entitled The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (2008) and started the JW Foundation to spread the ideas. The book program gives copies of the book to schools, non-profits, and community groups for free, and asks that in return, those readers send in a progress report after six months. This feedback from readers (especially readers who are applying the ideas in learning situations) will soon be used to create a free online learning space that explains the ideas in the book. (Also, they've set up a nifty financial loop: the JW Foundation purchases copies of the book, then the royalties from those purchases go to Josh Waitzkin, who then gives those royalties back to the JW Foundation.) Here's an excerpt from the JW Foundation website:

"If I have learned anything in a lifetime of world-class competition, it is that learners and performers thrive when their growth process is uniquely tailored to their own personal nuance of character. Teachers must listen first. Students should gain a keen introspective awareness of their natural strengths and weaknesses, and build a game, a career, a way of life around that awareness."

- http://www.jwfoundation.com/the_art_of_learning.html

Here I am reminded of a method that Ed Hallowell describes in Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder (2005): a five step process for promoting strengths: connection --> play --> practice --> mastery --> recognition (which renews connection, and the cycle begins again). From the little I've read about Waitzkin's philosophy, connection and play are huge pieces of it. And then there's the shirt that alpha lo created for Gaia University that says, "passion initiated, project based, process oriented, peer supported." Bam! Wow! This all points in the same direction!

So, how can can we use design processes to improve our lives while living in the hands of the gods? Another approach to the question is, How can we live in accordance with the peace-keeping law of limited competition? The latter question is somewhat answered for us: don't wage war. So now how do I interpret that?

In what practice does the human take only what the human needs and foster other life while doing so? Perhaps permaculture is a piece of it... I think that integrative eco-social design (IESD) is certainly a piece (permaculture is a field within IESD). I think that hacking is a design process... it's a way of approaching design. Maybe permaculture is ecosystem hacking?

Quinn's characters say that when we apply the peace-keeping law, then creation goes on forever (in the form of evolution through natural selection)... and they say that if we look around, we can see that other species are show signs of self-awareness, and if life on earth continues evolving then eventually many species will achieve self-awareness and intelligence. Looking at it this way, the characters arrive at the thought that human destiny is to learn from our mistake (arrogantly ignoring the gods and the peace-keeping law) so that creation goes on (instead of us destroying it) and so that other species may learn from our mistake as they evolve self-awareness, and eventually the garden of the world will be full of self-aware animals.

Quinn's characters say that Leavers pass on information about what works well for them (as humans wishing to thrive), whereas the Takers only pass on information about production. I see the Leavers as hackers of life, and the Takers as people who firmly separate making from using, production from consumption, consumption from the consequences of production. As we strive for wisdom of what works well for us humans in a particular place, we are approaching life with a mind-set of action learning, hacking, and free/libre open source knowledge, and guided by our passion and the wisdom of our culture.

Human design in the hands of the gods. That's what I'm getting at!!

The Best Place to Store My Catch is In My Neighbor's Belly (http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/robert-link/460-the-literacy-of-cooperation-video-1-entry-2)

Note: The peace-keeping law is called the Law of Limited Competition in later books by Quinn. It is articulated most clearly in Ishmael in this way:

"You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food."

APPENDIX: an extra draft paragraph

To return to "living in the hands of the gods"... In Ishmael, the characters come to an understanding that the Takers (those who know good and evil) abandon the gods (i.e. Gaia, the ecosystem, evolution by natural selection, etc.) by taking control of food production through exterminating competitors, and by seeking to take control of every single aspect of life on earth. Langdon Winner is interested in "Searching for Limits" on technology, specifically by articulating principles and sticking to them. This seems akin to the way the Leavers (those who live in the hands of the gods) recognize "the peace-keeping law" (limited competition, no warfare allowed) and use it as a design constraint as they create their cultures. (The peace-keeping law is seen to be as permanent and unchanging as the law of gravity, so any community that disobeys it will inevitably die, just as one who ignores gravity will walk off a cliff, mistakenly think she is flying, and die upon hitting the ground.)

* * * * * * *

On the process of writing the above text...

Last night I finished reading Ishmael, and after breakfast/lunch (I arose at 11:30) I read the preface and the first half of the first chapter of The Whale and the Reactor, and then I began writing. Last night, when I finished reading Ishmael I laughed for about 30 minutes. I laughed about all the amazing connections and implications of the ideas I had just read. I laughed in the way I do when the connectedness of life flows up and imbues everything around me and within me. And the piece I wrote today is an expression of some of those connections, and I laughed deeply for a while after writing it.

Then, as I was laughing, I returned to thinking about what it might be like if Josh Waitzkin became involved with Gaia University. I pictured myself telling a story, and the story began... This story begins in 1982. A mother and her son were walking through Washington Square Park in New York City, and the boy, who was 6 years old, saw people playing chess. The boy's name is Josh Waitzkin. That week a few friends showed him more about chess, and seven years later he was a National Master in chess, and three years after that he was an International Master -- he was 16. That year, when Josh was 16, a movie about his life as a child chess prodigy was released, titled Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Josh's relationship to chess began to be ruined by the distracting fame brought by the movie. Five years later Josh began learning Tai Chi, and six years after that he won the World Championship of Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands. That was the year 2004.

That year, 2004, was the year that Gaia University began to come into being. While Josh was preparing for the World Championship of Tai Chi, two people met while visiting Findhorn community (which is in Scotland). Those two people are Liora Adler and Andy Langford, and two years after they met, Gaia University accepted its first associates (Gaia's term for students).

Now it is 2008. More precisely, I am sitting at my house in Amherst, MA, USA, where it is 12:39 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, September 20, 2008.Then the story skips ahead into the future, and Josh and Gaia University connect, and Josh brings his thoughts about the Art of Learning. Maybe he hears about the Art of Mentoring from Ethan. Maybe he decides to participate in an orientation.

Now it has been a few hours since I wrote the hacker-learning-life piece... I went out to a potluck and had long conversations with two people. The first was Matt, asking me for advice and guidance on creating a non-profit, basically me speaking my advice on how to design and implement a collaborative project (Matt's vision is a green belt of productive trees around every city). The second conversation was with someone I'd just met, a man named Cole. I asked what he studies... psychology... and I asked what he is most excited about... epigenetics!!! That IS exciting! So we had a conversation about that for a while, and about how amazing it is, and related things. Then a friend of his, Eliza, joined the conversation.

What am I studying? I began explaining without being sure what I would say. I am studying Integrative EcoSocial Design, and I get to make up what it means. With my hands, I indicated a sphere to my right to represent anti-racism and, more broadly, social healing. To my left, I created a space for knowledge flow in societies, across societies, and in individual lives.

She's studying children's literature, just started her Masters program. I thought, Hmmmm, how can I tie that to what we were talking about... hmmm. So I explained what I had written earlier, the hacker-learning-life piece. And my point of connection was the things I'd read about Josh Waitzkin and his ideas about the Art of Learning. So I explained most of my writing, then I asked Eliza and Cole if they'd see the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, and they both paused for a few seconds in thought, and then Cole said YES, we were JUST talking about how he just won another Push Hands championship, and I just started a Push Hands class. And that was another moment of fantastic connection for me, and this time I noticed it more calmly, since I was already rather excited, and it just seemed right that everything would keep connecting to everything.

So, I said a few things about the Art of Learning, and connecting to Gaia U and such... And our conversation wandered around a bit...

And then I remembered that I wanted to connect epigenetics with the idea I'd read on Enoch Page's home page (http://people.umass.edu/hepage/), "Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology." So I asked, Have you heard of the professor at UMass named Enoch Page? Quiet seconds. And now Eliza burst with YES, Yes, oh, I took a class with him, and it was an amazing class. Eliza took Spiritual Anthropology with Enoch Page during her first year at UMass. What was it? What's Spiritual Anthropology? Well, we did many things, we wrote a letter to death, we watched a film about the World Bank, and so many other things, and he told us "You, you're connected to all this! You might not think so, you might not see it, but you're connected to all of it!" It was eye opening, and so much more, opening my view and... well... my spirit. It definitely had an impact on me, and I wonder what impact it had on the other students.

I told Eliza that I was now even more excited about Enoch Page. I pondered aloud if I might spend my capstone year hanging out with Enoch Page. I will see what I can arrange.

And now, just before I wrote this bit about my evening, I read the Introduction to Josh Waitzkin's book, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=526819&agid=2). And as I read it, I realized three things: 1) Josh wrote that he kept a journal of his chess learning and, later, of his tai chi learning, so he was using some action learning methods without knowing it, and was probably far more self-aware than most people his age. 2) With chess, Josh went through the stages that Ed Hallowell describes for promoting strengths -- he was intrigued by the game and sought connection with it (this step might have been a bit less present than the others), then he played and had fun, then he practiced a whole lot and thus gained mastery, and then he gained recognition by winning championships. When he gained the hollow fame from the movie, this was a different sort of recognition, and it led to his disconnection from chess, and the cycle of learning stopped. 3) The process of learning with passion and transferring knowledge from one field to another, and the experience of seemingly unrelated things teaching him... his description of that sounded like a description of my own day today. I have had days and moments and weeks like this before, when the connectedness of life flows up and imbues everything around me and within me, and I am stunned with awe... and I quietly float or burst into deep laughter and dancing, and life is amazing.

Ah, yes, Nicholas and I spoke of that in July. Nicholas was Sarah Marshall's boyfriend, and he stayed at 41 Carriage Lane with us for a few weeks. On his last day, he told me about the day that he came to a bottomless well of joy within himself, and I told him about my experience during the True Heart True Mind intensive. That feeling, the state of being I was in at the end of the last dyad on Sunday night when I felt fireworks blossoming all around me as they gave me warm hugs, that was a more intense expression of this feeling of all-connection.

In his introduction, Josh writes that: "I discovered some interesting foundations for my experience in ancient Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek texts -- Upanishadic essence, Taoist receptivity, Neo-Confucian principle, Buddhist nonduality, and the Platonic forms all seemed to be a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for." This is how I felt today while writing the hacker-learning-life-Gaia U piece... there was a common thread that wove together the thread of each idea I explored.

And now I come to another connection: self-awareness.

Josh developed self-awareness while learning chess.

During the True Heart True Mind intensive, Paul Weiss spoke of the importance of self-awareness and consciousness for the creation of a world of reciprocity (and as he gave that talk I felt the unity of all things burst through me and fill everything), and I connected it to the self-awareness that Brittney asked of the white people during the ARC training in January.

During my recent output advising with Jennifer, she has walked me through a design process to create a self-management system that cultivates my self-awareness (especially the periodic reviews).

On Wednesday night I wrote a list of things I have learned that help with the process of working to undo racism, and I included this point: "Find ways to be more self-aware and self-reflective. The aim here is to be able to recognize the thoughts I have that come from a racist society. Only by being aware of myself can I begin to heal myself."

And on Thursday, after a conversation with Brittni about her course with Enoch Page, I looked at his home page, where he writes that: "[...] his upcoming work extends the combination of these concerns into the most recent development of what he calls 'Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology.' He coins this term and would like it to be known as a form of anthropological research, scholarly discipline and pedagogical practice dedicated to fostering social change through an understanding and pursuit of what may best be understood, for lack of a better term, as 'higher consciousness.'"

And tonight Eliza told me that Enoch Page's approach to Spiritual Anthropology is to say something to the effect of, Look, you must be more aware of yourself and everything in the world, you must cultivate your consciousness because you are connected to everything, everything is connected to everything.

And I asked Eliza if perhaps this Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology is a way of bringing love (as I call it) into the effort to heal racism, and in my case speaking about love and spirit so that white people don't get bogged down with shame and guilt, but rather recognize the love of life in every being, including themselves, and work from there to heal ourselves and the world from racism.

Okay, now I need to go ask Enoch Page... no, I need to do my Year In Review output, and then I need to create a project proposal or a "legitimate question" (as SDaS would call it) with which to approach my capstone year and Enoch Page.

How amazing. How awesome.

I am reminded of what I wrote years ago on my facebook profile:

I do my best to live in the present. I am searching, looking, listening, on a journey to understand the neighboring strands of the universal spider web. Where you are depends on how you got there.

That last sentence can be read as a statement about self-awareness.

Ah, another connection... I probably wrote that bit on my facebook profile around the same time that I wrote the following, in spring 2006:

"Tal vez sería que el universo es una telaraña; una telaraña que abarca el tiempo y el espacio, cuyas hilos y hebras son compuestos del significado y la influencia."

I think that's a good summation of all of this, and I suspect that relates to what Josh calls "a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for."

Oh, another connection: Theory U. I'm watching a video of Otto Scharmer explaining Theory U right now, and it's definitely akin to Hallowell's five steps, and to Waitzkin's Art of Learning, and more tangentially to Paul Weiss and True Heart True Mind.

So I want to get the Theory U book. And I want to get it before I go to Tennessee, so that I can create my capstone year from my passions. Theory U, Art of Learning.

Scharmer keeps saying "connecting to a deeper source of knowing," which sounds like the threads of the universal spider web and the "cross-cultural trace." He's also talking about opening the source.

Ah, and a connection for Cole: Heylighen and the Global Brain.