this is a quick post, because it’s late. consider this more of a place holder.

i had a good time at the open education conference this past week. i made some nice connections with people, expand my own ideas, and had some ideas confirmed. it was nice to know that i’m not the only one thinking about the things i’m thinking about.

during one presentation the idea of being messy came up. social networks are messy – and thusly the social networks we hope to grow around educational content are going to be messy as well. my thought about that idea is – that when it comes to learning we really aren’t given permission to be messy. in educational settings, to be messy is to fail. to be messy is to get the grade we don’t want to get. it is the rare classroom that the messy are the top students, those that are the top students are the neat ones.

this neatness is encouraged, at least from what i’ve seen, in our formal institutions of learning. from pre-k through the phd, cleanliness is encouraged, and expected. i was talking to a friend after the presentation and i told her that the one place i felt i could be messy was in my relationship with the chair of my phd committee, but as i’m writing this, while i can be messy in that relationship, i try not to be. i try to follow the system. i try to make sure that everything i give to my chair to review is as neat as possible, is clean and doesn’t need much fixing.

so what are we to do? how are we to encourage mess in learning? how do we let people that yes, it is okay to be messy? well. then there’s the whole discussion of changing our own thought patterns about learning, which will eventually begin to change our institutions of learning. i know that there are people who are already doing this, and it needs to become more wide spread. i need to accept that i can be messy in my learning.

as i’m writing this i’m watching a documentary on the whirling dervishes. very very cool. she says at one point that at the beginning of silence is chaos. i think there may be something we can learn from this chaos, from this chaotic meditation, the trance of the dervishes. the mess that this meditation looks like. through this chaos they are able to reach a place of complete peace. this chaos leads them to a place of great knowledge and understanding. pretty cool, eh?

i’ll leave you with this final, not at all related thought, just because it is so beautiful:

i discovered that the roots of hate and destruction emanate from the human mind, not from god. with the power of faith, no force or tyrant can stop anyone from following their hearts. ~ the narrator of the documentary ‘the mystic iran’

hmm. maybe this wasn’t just a place holder, eh?