Category Archives: Community

Wagon Wheel

Last week, upon my return from an extended holiday in Thailand, I had an urge to sing a song that I had discovered while vacationing. Throughout my break, I had missed my guitar terribly, and the first thing I wanted to do was see if I could strum the chords and sing the lyrics in the same reckless and carefree manner as this amazing band called Old Crow Medicine Show.

Once home, I tuned my guitar and sang it to the best of my ability. It felt good. Natural. Raw, yes, but comfortable. At this point I know that Leslie (@onepercentyello) is always good for a little Ukulele and harmonies that can take my out-of-tune voice and make it sound presentable. I uploaded it to Soundcloud, sent a few tweets and linked it to Facebook, asking anyone to:

Download this file add some banjo, fiddle, harmonica, gazoo, whatever you want, then upload YOUR part to soundcloud and send me the link. The timing should be right, but DO NOT send me a file with your part on top of my part. It will get muddled. Send me your part only. I will layer and arrange what I get back into a song.

A few minutes later @bryanjack from Vancouver sent me a lead guitar track, a few hours after that @joebire from Australia sent me a Mandolin track, a day later @drgarcia from Monterey (Where are you now?) sent me some awesome Patti Smith style backing vocals, Leslie had a crazy weekend, but she did not disappoint, finally @joelbirch from Paris sent me some wicked electric guitar tracks. Every morning I would wake up to a new thread for my sonic tapestry.

Tonight, I played with the sound levels and am ready to present the final piece. Maybe not final, but where it stands now:

Wagon Wheel Collab by intrepidflame

I have only ever met Leslie and only briefly. We have made music together several times in the past. Bryan and I have played together on a few projects too, but I have never met or worked with the others. We are a loose network of learners interested in seeing what these tools can do to bring people together.

image By giulia.forsythe

What does it mean that a group of people spanning the globe find the time to create music just for the sake of it? How are our relationships and connections strengthen by the bound of music, however, splintered and artificial? I understand that this is not a collaborative project, seeing that everything came through me and the others were not able to hear what anyone but me had recorded, but that is not the point. The point is that this was a spontaneous idea that had little to no planning. What could we produce if we explored other tools, planned together, exchanged ideas, or played live. Practiced. Edited. Well you get the idea.

I am a big fan of spontaneous, loose, free flowing projects. They open our ideas to what is possible. Not only for our own enjoyment, but they can help us consider the implications these sessions or ones like it can have for our students. I would love to hear from the participants of this project in the comments. Why is this important? Is it? What did you get out of this? Why did you participate?

I am hoping that the real beauty of what we have done will come out in the ideas we share in the subsequent conversations. Furthermore, I would like to invite anyone reading to help take this project a step further. How about if someone or a group of people created a video for it! I would love to be involved and take direction, but don’t want to lead the video. I love to see how far we can push ideas. The song is public, creative commons, and waiting for anyone to do more with it. Find another group and create something else with it. Please share what you do. I will send this post to the band and see what they think as well.

Thanks everyone for playing along.

The Art of Creation

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I have written several post lately about how happy I am, and how the events of my life are fluidly flowing in some strange spiral direction, but for the last few days I have been weighed down by a nagging angst brought about Google +. I am pretty sure it is not this new social network that is causing me anxiety– that my apprehension is caused by this new digital social arena where we sometimes find ourselves battling for existence as unwilling gladiators.

Who am I? Where am I? What am I sharing? Likeablity versus authenticity. My brain has been buzzing for the last forty eight hours; I just need to shut it down and focus on what matters. For me the main thing has always been creating content I can be proud of. Writing post, creating videos, singing songs, taking photographs that touch people and make them think. Feel. I have only ever wanted to explore my sense of self; if a group of people find what I do, who I am, worthwhile than that is a plus. I cannot concern myself too much, however, with the splintering of this body of work. This self. I am who I am everywhere, all the time. The internet is just a reflection of that.

Networks will come and go, ebbing and flowing within various tools and online spaces. This is our modern consciousness. The trick is to learn how to construct a viable self within the flux. I know the connections that matter to me, and they will find me when I need to be found, the rest is grandstanding. I am trying not to concern myself with circles or groups or lists. I have set roots in these blogs. I have stretched my branches as far as my constitutions allows. I will now focus my energies on keeping my leaves as green as possible and producing fruits that others enjoy. If nothing else fruits that will help me regenerate.

I find value in the act of sharing. The art of giving with no expectation for value returned is a holy act. In an age where commerce rules, I see sharing as an act of transgression, one I have to which I have committed my life. Even as I write this post, I see the paradox of my point: I want to share, but cannot be bothered with worrying about the avenues with which to do so.

One can advertise and use competing networks to connect with as wide an audience as possible, but at some point you have to have faith in your content. You have to believe that what you put out into the world will attract the necessary attention. In the past, artists simply created– unconcerned with feedback or connection; we have lost that somehow. So concern are we with statistics and comments that the art of creation has been replaced with likes, +1s and Re-Tweets.

There is no anxiety about sitting quietly and smearing your thoughts into the blank void. The fear is that no one is listening. No one cares. You don’t exist. I am here to say that I do exist. In the body of my work. In my ideas. In my art. In my body. In my life. If you are seeing this right now, than somehow what I am saying has worked. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or some other nameless avenue has brought you here. For that I am thankful, but what has rid me of my unease is the very act of creation itself.

A Larger Sense

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Social media and in a larger sense the Internet for me is:

a soapbox, a confessional, a journal. It is a stage, a radio station, a blank canvas and a pew. It’s a gallery, summer festival, and a critical friend. It’s a warm embrace and an atta boy. It’s a mirror and a disco ball. A promise made and kept. A vow and a practice squad. The process and the product. It’s spiritual, organic and digital. Real and virtual. It is surreal and three dimensional. Collaborative and selfish. It is a parade, and a long lonesome hike. A drum circle and job interview. It is a mediation hall and recording studio. A resume and field journal filled with scraps of poetry, tweets, and cosmic contemplations. Myself turned inside out and presented to you with open arms. A photo album, a debate and an intimate conversation. The magnification of a drifting thoughts dressed as philosophizes and manifestos. It is the ability to exist outside oneself for all to see. It is open and free and allows me to say these things to you.

Vision 2011

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Exciting things are happening at our school. Big changes. Changing roles. I can feel a big shift on the horizon, and I am lucky enough to be part of a team involved with reshaping how our school views not only technology, but what our school should look like as a learning community in general. For the last few months, we have been busy self-examining what it is we want from IT, but more importantly we have been looking closely at what kind of institution we hope to be in the near future. After all the discussions and meetings, we came up with a draft proposal for our new vision, a statement and subsequent document that would guide the direction of our school. Because it is still in draft form, I will not share it here.

We have identified a few key first steps, but know that we must have a larger more encompassing vision of who we are. Nonetheless at this point, I was asked to present some of the major ideas to our staff in hopes that it would excite them to become more involved and offer their input. Given that task last Wednesday, I hunkered down and got to work!

I will stop here and share the presentation, but if you are interested in my reflection on the process continue reading after the clip. Unfortunately, no one at our school was switched on enough to record it live, so I added some music and did a narration at home. Enjoy:

I am proud of it. Let me get that out there first. Some comments from people around school

That was like a Tedtalk!
That’s as good as any professional presentation I have ever seen.
Loved how you told it like a story.
Great script. You really seemed to know what you were talking about.

Like I said I am proud of it. I worked hard. I learned a lot and it shows. It is this process of working hard, stumbling, learning, sweating, and growing about which I want to talk about further in this post. As I mentioned in the clip, I had never really worked with Keynote before, and all told I must have spent two or three hours a night for about four nights putting this together. That is roughly twelve hours of time on the machine, not to mention the many hours I stayed up at night conceptualizing and thinking about how it would all look!

I can already see the heads shaking, “TWELVE hours on a presentation? Who has that kind of time?” Most teachers have too much on their plate to sit home at night and go through every single build in and build out of a Keynote, or to practice layering slides, or to come up with work-arounds for unforeseeable problems. Most teachers want someone to come in and show them what to do. I see this as a fundamental problem with the concept of teacher training versus professional development.

Learning takes time. It takes energy. Passion. Determination and desire. And most importantly it takes time. Unfortunately time is the one thing teachers have little of, but if we, as professionals really want to learn new things we have to make the time, or demand from our institutions not only to set expectations, but to give us time to learn, grow, play. There are no easy fixes. I am not saying that every teachers needs to sit at home every night and agonize over the perfection of every slide for a presentation, but if we are truly serious about learning how technology can help our teaching, we must make the time to learn something. We must set goals and find people who can help us grow. We can no longer expect to have others show us what buttons to push or what tools to use. I see teachers determining what they want to learn and my job is to help them get there. I am a firm believer in the concept that we learn tech tools to help us learn other things. For example, I did not spend twelve hours learning how to use Keynote. I spent that time learning how to use Keynote to give a presentation- how to tell a story. Next I will spend twelve more hours presenting a Pecha Kucha for Learning 2.011. Which brings me to my next point: the coaching model.

I have been so lucky this year to be working with an amazing grassroots team of teachers determined to push our school into cutting edge territory. We have an extremely supportive and excited administrative team, and we are doing some great things well. I mentioned some of the changes in the presentation, but we are also rethinking the role of the tech facilitator and looking toward a more mentor/coach style of developing teacher confidence. I am sure I will write much more on that soon, but for now let me say that I am learning everyday about what it means to work with others and help them activate and become excited by their learning.

In closing, I wrote this post to share the fruits of not only mine, but our whole team’s labor, with you-our fellow learners, in hopes that it might prove useful to you. I will also share it with our staff in hopes that perhaps it can be a starting point for a bigger conversation about what it means to admit that we are all learners and what to do once we have admitted that.

If you are a member of staff, please take the time to share some thoughts. Remember the point is not all accolades and back patting. I’ve already mentioned that I am proud of what I created. The point is to start conversations and share ideas. What do you think about all of this? What stuck out about the vision? What excites you? What scares you?Let’s begin to have these discussions out here on the open web. Leave a comment. Take the first step.

Feel free to answer these questions even if you are not at our school and are reading and watching from some place else.

Do You Love Me?

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If you blog for long enough, I suppose, you will eventually begin to repeat yourself. It can feel like a never-ending cycle of repetition, but who is to say that revisiting themes is necessarily a bad thing? So I apologize if I have written about this topic before, but my good friend Ari over at We Buy Balloons recently emailed me a link to this article with a request to write on the subject with careful consideration, as the affliction mention in the article is the same from which he claims to suffer. Although, I have linked to the article itself, I will quote it at length below, so please stay with us till then end. In short the post claims:

The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

I used to feel an immediate sense of accomplishment when I wrote an article or came up with a joke that I thought was good. Now that feeling is always delayed until I see how the material does. How many views did my article get? Did it get mentioned the requisite number of times on Twitter and Facebook. I need to see the numbers.

And I define myself by those numbers.

I judge the quality of my writing by looking at the traffic to my articles. I assess the humor of my jokes by counting retweets. My status updates, shared links, and photos of my kids need a certain number of Likes to be a success. How am I doing? That depends on how many friends I have, how many followers, how much traffic.

What David Pell describes in his post, what bothers my friend Ari, and those of us involved in this game called social media is the feeling that our thoughts, our art, our creations, our words, and in turn ourselves are only as valuable as the amount of attention they receive from the network of “friends” we have been able to cull from the web.

Before I try to offer up answers or justifications of why this need for affirmation isn’t as big of a problem as many think, let me first admit that I check my stats. I am pretty stoked to be nearing 3,000 followers on Twitter. I google myself often and enjoy hearing my voice echoed back to me via the web. The question I suppose we are left asking is, is that a problem? Is wanting/needing affirmation a bad thing? Is it vain or needy to place your self-worth in the hands of others? Before we get to that answer, I want to make a claim that this discussion has little to do with the Internet. (*The need for acceptance and identity creation has implications for our students. I will try to touch on this idea at the end of this post.) Sure the Internet has made it easy to see how much attention each pixel of our collective self receives via Re-Tweets, views, Likes and other affirmative statistics, but I claiming that the need to be heard and accepted has always been a part of our human psychology; the Internet has only exacerbated our ability to monitor it.

I think the need to be heard and told we are valued is not only at the core of human psychology, but intricately connected to the very purpose of art. Yes, I understand that much of art is personal and cathartic. Why the artist creates is a question that we will never answer, but we can all agree that while some artists create art for the sake self-healing, many also create art to connect to others. Art is the ultimate act of sharing and openness. Audience is an inherent part of art. It has to be. The dance between creator and observer is what makes art so powerful. Let’s face it most people who create, write, paint, perform are needy. We have a void in our souls that can only be filled when others connect to our creations. We feel alive when our art helps others see who we are.

by Ari Zeiger

I have had this need to share and connect with people for as long as I can remember. Does this make me vain or needy? Lacking in self-confidence? Perhaps. But that is the nature to which I have grown fond. The spaces between a robust self-esteem and crippling anxiety is tenuous at best. The difference between the vain rock star and the nervous introvert can be nothing more than a pair of sunglasses and a bottle of whiskey. What I am trying to say is that, while the Internet magnifies our anxieties about whether or not we matter, most artist have always needed to be told they are relevant. Before the Internet did not authors worry about book sales, artists by number of guests at openings and paintings sold? While stats, numbers, sales, and reviews have always been a part of sharing, statistics have never slowed art down. I am sure the first caveman looked for a round of grunts and nods after he first sketched a picture of the hunt on the cold stonewall.

When I was younger, in my twenties, I would scribble poetry, stories, and other random observations into journals. These thoughts were very similar to my current blog posts, Tweets, and other ideas I share online. Back then I would scatter these journals on coffee table tops and would love when people would flip though them at parties. I would watch them wrinkle their faces in confusion or smile in understanding. I could feel them entering my consciousness through a shared understanding of not only who I was, but who they were. I was just not smart enough to leave a little comment box at the bottom of my journal pages, because I wanted more than anything to hear what they thought.

It is true that the web can enhance our neurosis and self-doubt. It can cripple the act of creation if we allow it to magnify our fears and misgivings. It can force us to place our self-worth in the hands of a fluctuating audience, and yes this can have disastrous effects, but this is not the fault of the web. This neurosis is rooted in our collective human psychology of needing love and acceptance. There are people much smarter than me with more letters after their names, who I am sure can write much more intellectually than me on the subject, but that has never stopped me from offering my opinion.

Each person must decide how their self-worth is derived. Each one of us has to decide what we are worth despite the Internet not because of it. Some days we feel like we can carry the world, while others we need to be told we are special. Understanding this dance and going with the flow is the most important thing an artist can learn to do. This was true before the web and it is even truer now.

It is nice to have a post re-tweeted and shared and “liked” and commented on. It makes us feel like our ideas are important and that others “get” us. It is great to make a film and get a couple thousands hits on Youtube. It feels warm in the heart to watch people connect to you words. It feels great to recieve emails from people who say they get what you are doing. Saying they respect you and your work. It is nice to go to conference and have drunken peers say they admire you. It is great to have fans. It feels good to be loved. How can it not? But the question we must ask ourselves is how much of what we do is for them? How much is for me? And how much is for us?

I could get wrapped up in the numbers, and I admit that I sometimes do, but I am learning that I share and let spill what I cannot hold inside. All I can do is hope that others connect. I have the audacity to write a book about my life and think people will care. That is the biggest cry for attention I can think of and that has nothing to do with the Internet or numbers, but I have found the less I worry about the numbers and focus on creating honest work filled with energy and passion the more the numbers tend to rise; the more comments I receive. Someday this fragile network I have cobbled together could all dry up and I could end up writing a blog no one reads, or scribble back into journals I leave on coffee tables in vacant rooms. A book no one buys. Either way, I know that sometimes I create art to help lighten the load and guide me through the darkness and sometimes I share what I share for you dear reader and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Show me you understand. Show me you love me. Show me I matter. Leave a comment. Re-Tweet. Like me on Facebook. Let this post get a 1000 hits. Let it go viral and get me a book deal. Let it shine a light on all the world and make me a god! Or just skim it, mark it as read, and chalk up to more gibberish coming to you through your informationally overloaded brain. There will be more tomorrow. I am valuable whether you tell me I am or not. How do I know? Just a promise I made to myself as a child. It is not too late make yourself that promise right now….let’s see what you got!

I will save the my thoughts on how young adults deal with the dance between confidence and anxiety and how the new online social reality is affecting their identity creation for another post, or maybe in the comments. But I will say that right now I am listening to the Beatles and this is a great first step to helping young people understand how to deal with the world wide web: