Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Composing Across Time

Last night, Chris Berthlsen (a_small_lab) tweeted the following:


The link led me to the  W. Ross Ashby digital archive which contain 25 volumes of Ashby's journals.  They are most fascinating. I spent a few hours looking through different volumes and was moved to begin to collage bits of what I was reading. Making alongside the reading helped me to understand.

Collage: W. Ross Ashby (M.A. Reilly, 2012)
We live in wondrous times when a man in Japan can tweet a link to journals that an Englishman kept for 40 years during the last century and pages from these can serve as seeds for a collage that a woman in New Jersey makes. 

The intersections among our lives offer a rich source of learning, of wonder, of notice.

It is this that some of us have been going on about for some time when we conceive of schools as community-based,  open beyond walls and borders, where curriculum is complicated conversations that learners generate.  How we occasion learning matters.

The random, happenstance that may occur--the juxtaposition of one thing alongside another: these are the ways in which we learn.  How welcome is the random, the distant neighbor you've yet to meet, the collision with other in your life? In your workplace? In your classroom?


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