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Writers’ Retreat. Sheepwash, Devon
Fig. 1 Retreats for You, Sheepwash, Devon
Day One.
An hour with my tutor yesterday evening. Buzzed, but fell asleep soon after. It was a four hour drive yesterday afternoon/evening and I’d been up since 4.00 am or something. Which is when I woke this morning and rattled off 1 1/2 following guidelines on how to ‘set the scene’.
Armed with a pot of coffee I plan to get another hour in before breakfast.
The goal is to write four completed scenes, each of around 2,500 words this week. I may, a new experience for me, write each of these scenes several times as I try out the approaches I’ve been given.
The premise for my novel got the thumbs up as did my ‘voice’: not so hot were the gaping holes in my scene setting – I leave far too much untold.
On verra.
By the end of the week I will decide either to give up once and for all, or that there’s a future in it and the boxes of manuscripts, scripts, zip drives, discs and flopping discs, hard drives, notebooks and diaries have served a purpose or should go to the skip.
And I’ll rejoin the family for my birthday.
Why you should act it out as a way to learn and do so in a virtual world
We role-play as children to make sense of the world, we take on multiple personas to some degree in real-life as well.. I am particularly taken by the way people with a disability can walk in a virtual world (Peachy) or indeed how any of us can fly and do much more in these environments (die and repeatedly come back to life of course.)
At no cost my dentist, or rather our family dentist, made a set of dentures for me out of dentine that fitted over my teeth. This allowed me to sing. I foolishly sharpened the fangs and promptly punctured my lower lip. I learnt by the way that unless I could have dislocated my jaw biting someone’s neck is impossible. Vampires should bite the wrist or leg, but then all, or at least the obvious sexual innuendos are lost.
REFERENCE
Peachey, A. (2010) ‘Living in immaterial worlds: who are we when we learn and teach in virtual worlds?’ in Sheehy, K., Ferguson, R. and Clough, G. (eds) Virtual Worlds: Controversies at the Frontier of Education (Education in a Competitive and Globalizing World), New York, NY, Nova Science.
Was I living out a fantasy when I played Dracula in my teens? I kept acting into my twenties until I decided that my mental state couldn’t handle the selection process (rejection) and my experience in front of camera and on stage left me bored senseless (I had minor roles).
Do actors, as in role-play, have to overcome or compensate for who they are?
Peachy raises all the points in a common- sense and everyday way. I can imagine or should research where stepping into the role of an avatar has life- saving qualities, for example is not learning to fly a commercial jet-airliner in a simulator not a form of virtual role-play? I believe firemen are trained in virtual set-ups too and believe the nuclear power
industry do so too.
The trouble with doing this in a learning context is the huge development costs. i.e. It has to be better to use a ready made platform. I then ask though, what is wrong with using our imaginations, that improvising and role-play doesn’t require the disguises?
Some thoughts on writing by Norman Mailer
From ‘The Spooky Art’
‘Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing.
It’s a simple rule
If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time.
Count on me
You are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.
The point is that you have to maintain trustworthy relations.
If you wake up in the morning with a hangover can cannot get to literary work, your unconscious, after a few such failures appear, will withdraw.’
He continues:
‘If you are ready to look upon your unconscious as a curious and semi alienated presence in yourself with whom you have to maintain decent relations – if you are able to see yourself as some sort of careless general and picture the unconscious as your often unruly cohort of troops – then, obviously, you wouldn’t dare to keep those troops out in the rain too long; certainly not at the commencement of any serious campaign. On the contrary, you make a pact: “work for me, fight for me, and I will honour and respect you.”’
He continues:
‘To repeat: The rule is that if you say to yourself you are going to write tomorrow, then it doesn’t matter how badly you’re hungover or how promising is a sudden invitation in the morning to do something more enjoyable. No, you go in dutifully, slavishly, and you work.
This injunction is wholly anti-romantic in spirit
But if you subject yourself to this impost upon yourself, this diktat to be dependable, then after a period of time – it an take weeks, or more – the unconscious, nursing its disappointments, may begin to trust you again.’
He continues:
‘On the other hand, you can sometimes say to yourself, “I’m not going to work tomorrow,” and the unconscious may even by now be close enough in accord not to flood your mind with brilliant and all-too-perishable material.
That is also important
Because in the course of going out and having the lively day and night you’re entitled too, you don’t want to keep having ideas about the book you’re on. Indeed, if you are able on your day off to avoid the unpleasant condition of being swarmed with thoughts about a work-in-progress when there is no pen in your hand, then you’ve arrived at one of the disciplines of a real writer. ‘
He wraps it up:
‘The rule in capsule
If you fail to show up in the morning after you vowed that you would be at your desk as you went to sleep last night, then you will walk around with ants in your brain.
Rule of thumb
Restlessness of mind can be measured by the number of promises that remain unkempt.’
Visualisation of the nurturing nature of education as expressed by Vygotsky
Whilst embracing ‘Activity Theory’ I cannot always use the argument lucidly.
Engestrom presents an idea of how people or communities/groups communicate and learn from each other; when two people start to agree with gushing enthusiasm I’d worry, something else is going on.
(Power play of some kind, or love?)
It is the very act of coming from a different stance that we as people begin to form ideas that are beyond our current understanding, literally at arm’s length like a glowing orb in the palm of our hands.
When such ‘objects’ of understanding collide (if I have understood Activity System’, fresh thinking for both parties occurs.
There is a reason in advertising (still I hope) why a copywriter sits with an art director; this is how ideas form.
Sitting in with ‘creatives’ and becoming one myself I came to appreciate such partnership … though it has taken me 30 years to understand what is going in.
It has taken the last year with The OU and a decade online to value the importance of letting go, to share , to collaborate, rather than being that lone author in a garret, hunched shoulders over my work.
Let your baby go …
What I have always needed and thrive on are collaborators in the form of agents, producers, editors, publishers, fellow writers and directors, colleagues who help and enable, fellow bloggers too …
If a blogger blogs, what do you do if you are forever engaged in other social media such as Linkedin or Facebook?
‘e-Commentator’ already feels like a naff ‘noughties’ way to express it.
We’ve had our fill of ‘e-tivities’ and ‘e-learning’ haven’t we? It is just learning; they are just activities.
I return to Engestrom often.
My ability to trace my love hate acceptance path through his thinking attests to the value of doing this, my ‘learning journal’.
This is what initially had me befuddled and angry:
Two people are the easy part.
The interplay between SIX people because yet more complex.
At arm’s length, the objects, the ideas, views or knowledge that they have begins to take on its own identity. In advertising an idea, ‘belongs’ to the creative team of the copywriter and art director; it is they who nurture it through the production process NOT the Account Manager or Client. The creators need to see it through otherwise the idea is rapidly diluted. Think of a set of light bulbs in a row, the first bright, each in term a little more dim. This is a poster Winston Fletcher used on how ideas die; I experience it too often.
‘Expansive learning is based on Vygotsky, though three times removed; it implies that we learn within activity pockets as people and groups. The interplay between these groups are the consequential objects of learning that transmogrify in the presence of other active objects. Solving problems, dealing with contradictions, may come about as these learning systems slide or shift’. Vernon (2011)
I like the way Vygotsky expresses it because it is how I visualised the education I received at the School of Communication Arts. It however lacks the dynamism of Engestrom and rather harks back to an approach to education that whilst admirable is fast being replaced.
As Vygotsky put it:
‘The gardener affects the germination of his flowers by increasing the temperature, regulating the moisture, varying the relative position of neighboring plants, and selecting and mixing soils and fertilizer, i.e. once again, indirectly, by making appropriate changed in the environment. Thus it is that the teacher educates the student by varying the environment’. Vygotsky 1926 (Kindle location 1129)
And further on he says:
‘The basic rule is that before imparting new knowledge to the child and before fostering a new reaction in him, we must be sure to prepare the ground for it i.e. arouse the appropriate interest. For an analogy, just think how we loosen the soil before planting seeds’. (Kindle location 1755, a page reference anyone? What are you supposed to do?)
The challenge when reading papers is how to make the subject matter comprehensible to the non-academic.
Some turn to diagrams, others to metaphors, yet others to cartoons.
I favour the lone speaker free of PowerPoint or even FlipChart.
If they can hold their argument and look into your eyes their conviction can be convincing.
Which has just convinced me of the important of the lecture. Expressed with poignancy by Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (which has 14 million YouTube hits)
My goal as a communicator is to make complex comprehensible.
Academics have a tendency to tie themselves in knots. If they only talk to fellow academics no wonder. I recognise the value of visualising, of animated explanation, of the power of persuasive through discourse, of metaphors, and analogies, of ideas rising out of the confusion to present themselves.
The problem with all things WWW is that it is just trillions of binary Ones and Zeros in the cloud (which is why I like to use the water-cycle as an analogy).
This from Dion Hinchcliffe.
Whereas I would express it, if visualised at all, like this:
REFERENCE
Engeström (2001) article, Expansive learning at work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualisation
Vygotsky, L (1926) Educational Psychology
The Importance of Positivity in the Creative Process
The Importance of Positivity in the Creative Process.
I enjoy coming across someone I am keen to follow. Making the time to read a person’s blog says you are interested in getting to know them, that you feel you may, perhaps, be on the same wavelength.
Repeatedly I return to Engestrom’s idea of activity systems, of the way in which two minds interact and produce as a result a fresh idea.
Need to write an assignment or exam paper?
I bought this in 2000 when I was thinking about an OU course. In February 2001 I signed up for the Masters in Open and Distance Education. We used First Class, it was loaded from a disk I think. Using a Mac might have been a problem, I was rarely online to follow the independent, spasmodic asynchronous threads.
Anyway, a decade later I am heading towards the finish line.
2001 wasn’t a good year for many of us … I did the first TMAs but was made redundant a couple of months before the TMA would have been due and had by then decided that doing less for a couple of years rather than more would be a good idea.
Anyway … despite having successfully negotiated two modules and six-eight TMAs and a couple of ECAs I find myself turning to Chapter 10 of the above.
‘Writing essays and assignments’
I love the way the book is laid out. I reads like is was designed to be web friendly with short sentences and paragraphs and bullet points galore.
We may be floating around in cyberspace 12 years on from the last edition of this book (first edition 1970), but is remains relevant, not just for preparing for an ECA, but for writing at all.
I like lines like this,’ After we’ve read, heard and talked about a topic, our minds are awash with ideas, impressions and chunks of information. But we never really get to grips with this experience until we try to write down our own version of it. Making notes is of some help, of course. But there is nothing like the writing of an essay to make us question our ideas, weigh up our impressions, sort out what information is relevant adn what is not – and, above all, come up with a reasoned viewpoint on the topic that we can feel it our own’. (Rowntrree. 1999:170)
- I will be probing
- I will develop a critical argument
- I will start tonight and write 500 words a night over six nights, then revist/redraft and pull it all together.
- I will have the evidence
- I will have the references in place
- I will plan, weigh up and select from the work that I have done (and that has been done in my tutor group)
- These will back up whatever themes or viewpoints or arguments I am putting forward
- I WILL write and outline and stick to it
- I will not become bling to better approaches that suggest themselves (which happened for one ECA and had me heading towards a 40 mark)
- And I will ‘write like I talk’ (which is what I’ve always done)
(62435)
Might I ?
MIGHT 3
Register here
When
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 from 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM (GMT)
Where
Marwood Coffee Shop
52 Ship St
Brighton BN1 1AF
What is it?
MIGHT 3 is a collaborative workshop for ideas that have an ambition of achieving a turnover of £500k per annum or higher within three years of starting to trade.
Please register here today, as spaces are very limited.
It’s the third event in a series of three. But it’s fine to attend even if you didn’t get along to either of the previous two events.
Why?
Innovative things are sometimes too small to register on the radar for government, or funders, or the media. Sometimes so small that they are only a tiny, neglected idea in the back of someone’s head. But if you cluster together people with little innovative ideas, the clustering can help to magnify them.
MIGHT is an East Sussex and Brighton & Hove Innovation and Growth Team event programme organised by Wired Sussex.
Thankyou.
Why I worry more about Web 4.0 than understanding Web 2.0
I’m on training journey … we left Web 1.0 at the platform, I’ve been through Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. The view from the window is confused and dark. By morning all will be clear and the wonderful world of Web 4.0 will show itself. This is the excitement of the journey, NOT knowing what will come next and not having to care too much went before.
Who saw Google or Facebook coming? Who’d have known it from roots in Netscape and Tripod.
Who saw the rebirth of Apple with the iTouch and iPad?
Where Sony now? Or should I not even ask given the events of the last few days.
Are metaphors relating to oceans, waves and techntonic shifts no longer PC?
For an H800 WK 5 activity I’m contemplating the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.
Meanwhile I’m reading a book that wants to move me on from Web 3.0 to Web 4.0.
Is this akin to the Neanderthal form of teaching that was Modern History at Oxford, ending I think around 1702. My daughter is styding Modern History and takes in the Second World War – this feels like yesterday (though my parents were children during that war).
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is starting to feel ancient.
Web 3.0 is where it’s happening.
Web 4.0 is where it’s going … until and only if we coin a different term to trump it.
Never has my head hurt so much, I feel like all the Dr Who’s in one … a person from each era contained in the same being, loyal to each, while desperate to be embraced by the latest think, very conscious that the religion of tomorrow is of more value that the beliefs of the distant past of … well twenty years ago.
Dion Hinchliffe does it this way:”
I’m uncertain which or what analogy to use, but if you are studying ‘innovations in e-learning’ how can what is going on right now not be far more relevant to the thinking of a decade ago, let alone a few years ago?
It’s as if this is 1911 and we’re style unsure (as they were) if heavy-than-air machines would get off the ground. H.G.Wells had his heroes in dirigibles.