Week 1

 Week One

I’ve found that over the course of the week that we are not only a group of diverse individuals seeking to expand our knowledge and understanding of the educational and learning process, but that we are also a group of self-stimulating neurons—making up a working nervous system, a brain, if you will—that is capable of forming new paths for our learning and thoughts to travel. Individually we are all capable of producing, to some degree, small action potentials, little sparks of neuronal activity that have the potential to become something bigger.

But together, as a working, communicating group of individual cells, we are capable of even greater potential energies than we would be able to generate on our own. By bouncing ideas off of one another, to get feedback and loop our conscious/ unconscious/ subconscious selves through our strengthening network, we can open new doors and create new paths that we had never conceived of before.

I’ve also discovered that, after watching everyone start their own journeys with Sudoku, I’ve gathered some of the old energy that I had to start again, myself. I had grown disenchanted with this logic puzzle, lost my mojo so to speak, and had abandoned the game. While I still haven’t played it very much at this point online (I don’t have internet in my apartment), I have been using my Sudoku puzzle book at home and have been enjoying it as I once had.

I think my mind revolted at the idea of it being an assignment, rather than something that I do for fun.

Both of these thoughts link back to the idea of creating a distributed system not only in a classroom, but in ourselves. As all of us act as different neurons in our metaphoric “brain,” we all have different “selves” in our literal brain, all ones that we have to learn to communicate with each other as we’ve learned to communicate with others in the Institute.

I have to admit that I’ve found that I am very uncomfortable with the idea of “Truth” in anything. My story, my perception of the world, while slightly different from someone else’s, is just as legitimate and real. I don’t understand why it would be scary or uncomfortable for someone else for nothing to be real, why there could be no reality. I find it comforting to know that there are no real concrete answers—just really good stories that work well depending on the situation (flat Earth, round Earth, pear Earth).

I guess that where others find comfort in religion, the “no Truth” concept is a salve on my burning mind.

A lot of the teachers in the Institute are clinging to value judgments regarding different labels and categories. I think it is important to highlight the idea that those values are socially and culturally constructed—that the only value they have is constructed, and that they are not necessarily the “correct” judgment call.