(Picture shows a white mailbox almost entirely covered with stickers.)
So I’m resuming week notes a few years after stopping due to time and other pressures while working on an intense work assignment.
I’m aiming to reflect on books, ideas, projects, experiences and interesting things happening in domains of interest to me including education, technology and especially XR and AI, innovation and (social) enterprise, change and transformation, facilitation, and outside interests like art and cycling.
Writing for me to improve the quality of my reflection through a time of change. If you find these notes interesting, I’m pleased, and thank you for reading.
📖 This week I’ve been reading From Contempt to Curiosity: Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling by Caitlin Walker. It tells the story of the evolution and development of systemic modelling from the inspiration of Māori psychotherapist David Grove, to Walker’s early applications of Grove’s Clean Language techniques with groups in schools and a small software company, and the gradual development of a whole applied approach.
At the heart of the approach are metaphors. Walker’s work shows how metaphors and, with them, our ways of thinking, can be made explicit, so that we can appreciate and engage with our own and each other’s ways of thinking; and how, through developing skills of attention, curiosity and non-judgemental questioning, we may move past conflict to change and growth, individually and in groups.
As well as describing the techniques, the book tells a fascinating story of the experimental development of systemic modelling, through various iterations, ups and downs and several failures along the way.
🔊 I was fortunate to attend a talk by Prof Guy Standing on ‘The Education Commons: reviving the soul of lifelong learning’ organised by colleagues at The Open University. It was an intellectually brilliant excoriation of the neoliberalisation of education since the 1970s. Standing spoke of the historical significance of types of knowledge, including situational (or ‘folk’) knowledge, and technical (‘craft’) knowledge, and how these have been elbowed out by the hegemony of scientific knowledge or ‘what passes for scientific knowledge’. The loss of these other forms of knowledge (and two-eyed seeing) is a major cause, Standing argues, of both the environmental crisis and the rise of neofascism. I’ve often reflected on why it is that, in a world where there has never been more freely available learning, we are becoming more and more collectively stupid and impotent. Standing made me see the simplism of my question, that this ‘learning’ is not knowledge, and movement is needed to reclaim other forms of knowledge for the commons.
(Picture shows a somewhat grainy and blurry black and white photo of a person wearing the VIVED virtual reality headset around 1984.)
💾 This week we saw the loooong-awaited launch of the Apple Vision Pro at WWDC23. Obviously I wasn’t there and I haven’t seen or tried it, and there are already plenty enough takes on it out there to which I am not going to add. Instead I have found myself looking back at early VR headsets from the 1980s including this one: the Virtual Visual Environment Display (VIVED) built by Michael McGreevy, a NASA researcher, in 1984. The VIVED used two Sony Watchman LED TVs (!) bought from the Radio Shack store and fitted to a frame shaped from a scuba mask. McGreevy filmed ‘stereo’ video using two cameras for left and right eye display. The device carried a head-tracking sensor which relayed the location/orientation of head movements to a PDP-11/40 computer. Read more from The Complete History of VR – Part 7: To Virtual Space and Beyond.
🧰 At work I am getting to grips with IP rights protection regimes for XR code and assets, and meta-data application, storage and archiving of the same. Also facilitating some sessions with groups where trust, confidence or respect are lacking, or there is a high degree of ambiguity and conflict in play. Increasingly I am draw to this aspect of my work, and it will shape my reading and thinking in future weeks.
🌍 This week the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine was blown up causing devastating flooding and raising fears of an ecological catastrophe. I listen to the BBC World Service radio a lot, and as the week has gone on I have become angry that the BBC allows Russian political spokespeople on air without putting up journalists able to challenge their claims and cross examine them to within an inch of their lives. Allowing these people to speak freely is not news – it is legitimising and abetting war criminals. So I am switching off.
🚴🏼♂️ Ride of the week: Champs-Élysées, Paris in Zwift, just right for a first ride back after several days out of the saddle with a heavy cold last week.
(Picture shows a screenshot from the indoor cycling app Zwift showing a cycling avatar on a virtual Champs-Élysées in Paris with data showing speed, distance covered and the leader board.)
Matthew Moran 