rosslaird's blog

These videos were created by George Passmore and Richard Dubras at a recent technology addictions presentation sponsored by Richmond Addictions Services.

In September I will be teaching three courses and facilitating various workshops. The courses are focused on creativity, culture, and personal development. The workshops are focused on the growing issues surrounding technology use among youth (and adults). Some of the workshops are private events (for specific organizations, or in particular schools). If you are interested in attending or sponsoring a workshop, please let me know.

The courses I will be teaching at Kwantlen are for those interested in educational experiences that are purposeful, engaging, fun, and useful. My goal with these courses is to help students rediscover the authentic joy of learning. Here are the course descriptions:

Mythological Narratives

Creative writing is a powerful, ancient, and yet delicate practice. We write -- quietly, often in isolation, in tentative and mercurial moods. We revise, and turn back upon our own narratives, and wonder about the reception our work might meet in the world. Sometimes we hide manuscripts in drawers, or take deliberate action -- as did Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi -- to prevent our words from making their way to an audience. Kafka and Gandhi were both unsuccessful in preventing their writings from being destroyed; but their impulse to do so, to keep hooded the hawk of their creativity, is common among writers of all stripes. We're not sure that we have, really, anything to say; or we are afraid that if our words are not well met we might ourselves be wounded. Or we believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that words have their own life, for good or for ill, and that writing is a means of seizing the power of the gods. This course attempts to explore this conversation -- between the writer and the wider world -- and to find ways of bringing our writing safely out of hiding.

We will be exploring myth, and writing craft, and method, and the strategic practices every writer must learn in wrestling with narrative. Each of us will examine our strengths -- the ways in which the natural mood and flavour of our writing makes itself known -- and our vulnerabilities as well: how we get stuck, or lazy, how we lost confidence and gain doubt. How we learn to shut down and hope the whole thing will go away.

This course is about writing, and reading, and making a claim for the fundamental right of storytelling. Within that context, we will explore the ancient practices of myth-making (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of writing (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers of writers and myth-makers).

The threshold between fact and fiction (which is not the same as that between truth and lie) is one of the territories of myth. In this course we stake out that territory, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Myth involves the search for truth, and fidelity to fact, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

For more information, feel free to review the course page.
The course is offered Tuesdays, beginning September 7, from 10:00am to 12:50pm, at Kwantlen's Surrey campus.
The prerequisites for this course are minimal: 30 credits of 1100 or higher courses, or permission from the instructor. If you are interested in the course but unsure about your suitability, please let me know.

Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts 3100

This course is about creativity, about making a claim for the fundamental right of intentional creative action. Within that context, we will explore the ancient and modern practices of creative endeavor (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of creativity (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers, poets, sculptors, dancers, craftspeople of all stripes, musicians, myth-makers, and so on). Throughout this process, our guiding archetype will be that of the trickster.

The goal of the course (from my point of view, at least), is to have fun: to preserve and nurture the creative and imaginative spirit that is the foundation of all the arts and sciences. The course will include a variety of learning experiences contingent upon regular attendance and dedicated participation. Because creativity is an interactive process, much of the class time will be devoted to group experiential exercises, individual reflective tasks, collaborative endeavors, and practical assignments.

For more information, feel free to review the course page.
The course is offered Thursdays, beginning September 9, from 10:00am to 12:50pm, at Kwantlen's Surrey campus.
The prerequisites for this course are minimal: 30 credits of 1100 or higher courses, or permission from the instructor. If you are interested in the course but unsure about your suitability, please let me know.

Social media, online technologies, mobile devices, and many other recent developments have transformed our social and educational landscape. Laptops and handhelds have replaced pads and pencils. The utility of digital text has surpassed that of the written word. Attention spans have shortened while cognitive plasticity has increased. In the midst of this sea-change, educators have tended to hunker down, freak out, and yearn for the good old days.

And yet, these recent technological developments (along with their social and educational consequences) offer the greatest opportunities for education since the invention of writing itself. This new environment offer educators greater access to learners, improved potential for innovative and immersive learning experiences, enhanced efficiency (which translates, among other things, into reduced marking loads), and many other benefits available with minimal effort. New media, social networking, and online teaching tools offer educators a means of shaping their teaching within digital culture. Here are a few tips and suggestions about how to leverage the digital environment in service of classroom excellence:

Understand Technologies as Cultures

Recognize that the psychological development of anyone born after 1990 is different from those born prior. Technology cultures are foundational to childhood and adolescent development today. The solution is not to avoid technologies but rather to understand them, to participate in them. Be an informed educator (and parent).

Find and Follow the Meme

Technology cultures function by way of memes (and temes); patterns of interest and behavior that spread across the web in unpredictable ways. Follow the memes of technology cultures (such as the Stop Motion T-shirt War and Charlie the Unicorn) and you find the pathways to learner engagement.

Embrace the Geek

Learn and use smart tools, such as the capability of modern websites to distribute your content through the social media environment (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Safeguard your documents using cloud storage (Dropbox, GitHub, etc.). Use browser-based website software (ideally, free and open source software). Drupal, MediaWiki, WordPress, Moveable Type, Meetup, Ning, Delicious, and many other tools offer outstanding possibilities for education. Take the time to experiment, explore, and learn.

Don't Use Word and PowerPoint (gasp!)

Instead, use tools designed for collaboration, interaction, ergonomics, and multiple formats. PowerPoint is evil.

Use Social Media Tools in the Classroom

Contemporary students spend more than 40 hours each week in front of computer and television screens (which leads to a host of associated developmental risks). Contemporary educators compete with an avalanche of information, process, and social activity. Rather than struggle upstream against the momentum of these forces, use them to promote learner engagement. Don't ban social media; find ways that social media can improve the quality of the educational services you provide.

Advocate for Free Access to Online Content

In the online sphere, free is a term with many nuanced meanings. Essentially, learners today have access to information in ways that are fundamentally new and dynamic. Text books are obsolete. Research has become an online (and finely-grained) activity. Blogs are a legitimate form of scholarship. Copyright and information licensing are being transformed. Slowly but irrevocably, we are moving toward an educational system based on the digital. And digital information wants to be free.

Be Creative

Teaching (in its various forms) is one of the most influential roles in society. After parenting, it is perhaps the most crucial, for all ages. And yet, teaching — whether to children or adults — is a profession in which few practitioners have any substantial training. Some instructors have certificates or degrees in teaching, but there’s so much to know about the subject that most good instructors pick up their best skills after training, in the field, thinking on their feet and trying to keep students awake.

Many of the things educators do (learners sitting in chairs for long periods, then writing exams; instructors droning on to massive groups of disinterested students) are precisely the opposite to what is known to work better (learners involved actively, encouraged to make substantive commitments to the process, evaluated by way of collaborative assessment). Most good instructors eventually learn to turn the system around, to craft an environment that is both more holistic and effective. The web provides innumerable means of accomplishing this aim.

Running, more than any other single human activity, is consistently correlated with health, healing, and well-being. Running is generally more effective than therapy for psychological challenges, is generally more effective than medicine in treating all kinds of ailments, and is the closest thing we have ever found to a panacea. Running works. And yet, the vast majority of people who take up running become quickly injured. Accordingly, they lose heart and stop running.

This need not be the case. Much is now known scientifically about the running stride which evolution has designed for us, and which was, at one time, the central reason for our success as a species. Here are the basics:

• Get out of the shoes. Our ancestors did not wear shoes, and our bodies were not designed for shoes. The rates of running injury and muscle imbalance have risen in step with the use of running shoes. The evolutionary process which led to modern humans involves barefoot running, across diverse surfaces, probably while hungry.
• Run barefoot, or as close to it as you can get (i.e. Vibram Five Fingers), on soft surfaces such as trails.
• Recognize that while the cardiovascular system responds to training within a few weeks, and the muscle system responds within about a month, the tendon and ligament systems require about six months to respond. The bones require ten months. Accordingly, almost a full year is required to train the body. Go slow and be cautious.
• Run about an hour a day, four or five days a week (but not at the beginning! — work up to it over about three months).
• One day a week, do strength training instead of running.
• Rest one day a week.
• About once a week, run for two hours or more. Pace is (almost) irrelevant, and will increase naturally over time.
• Focus entirely on the running form, which is also known as running economy. With mindfulness to signals from the body, barefoot running is reasonably good at suggesting aspects of the ideal form (though, more attention is required).
• Never wear a music device while running. Instead, listen and respond to your body.
• Focus on your feet. First, try to land with each foot flat or bent slightly downward, so that the majority of your weight is on the forefoot. Touch the heel with every stride, but touch lightly.
• On each stride, land with the foot directly below your center of gravity. Allow the foot to touch the ground with minimal impact. The ideal is to touch with no sound.
• The Achilles tendon provides as much as 25 percent of forward thrust in running. Allow this tendon to stretch as your forefoot touches the ground lightly, then allow the stretched tendon to release as you raise your leg at the end of the stride. Try to sense the tendon bounce. Direct the momentum of this bounce forward. (This is easiest to sense on hills, but also most likely to lead to injury on hills. Be cautious.)
• Avoid the tendency of the tendon bounce of the Achilles to become a bounce of the whole body. The head (stabilized by the nuchal ligament) should be still, and the body should not oscillate too much vertically. In the upper body, your movement forward should be as though you are sliding on a stable platform. (A famous running story involving Alberto Salazar describes Salazar running across a bridge during a race. The bridge had a solid fence, at about chest height, which prevented observers from seeing Salazar’s lower body. It looked to the observers as though Salazar was standing on a platform pulled by an unseen vehicle.)
• When raising the leg at the end of the stride, lift and bend the leg with your hip muscles and hamstrings. This reduces the length of the bent leg, reduces the lever length of the movement, and increases the speed at which the leg returns to a forward position.
• Avoid all braking action as the feet touch the ground. The movement of the feet should precisely match the movement of the ground beneath you. There should be no friction, slapping, or shuddering. It helps to think of this as a rolling motion, as though your legs and feet are like the spokes of a wheel rolling across the surface of the ground.
• Aim for 180 steps per minute.
• Keep the forearms level and lightly swinging. Never cross the center-line of the body with the forearms.
• Keep the head elevated, with the gaze forward at a spot about 20 metres ahead.
• Try to breathe through the nose (with your mouth closed) as often as possible.
• Aim for a running style that is completely relaxed and effortless. (This takes time.)
• Run with joy. This is the key to it all.

In springtime, snow melt from the surrounding mountains gathers in streams, cascades down verdant slopes, and swirls across the surface of the lake. The waters rise, nudging ever closer to the stones first laid down by Tony and his children. A wheelbarrow full of stones for each of them to haul, before breakfast, from the forest out back with its birch trees and singing frogs and moose that sometimes came to drink at the water’s edge. This was long ago, during languid summers when the cabin was young, the kids were small, their parents new to the rush and tumble of family life. Everyone was young then.

Together they built a low wall, with stones and slabs of shale hefted into the station wagon from alongside the highway that brought them across the Rocky Mountains in summer. The wall grew larger and stronger. Over several summers it was widened and made more secure. It became a breakwater, a perch, a resting place. It offered sure footing to a generation of children who walked upon its stones, smoothed by the highest of the spring waters and warmed in the summer sun. Then another generation came, and they too walked upon it. My own children walk upon that wall, and they do not forget who built it.

The wall now stretches most of the way across the beachfront. It divides in the middle to offer a walkway to the shore. On the west side, it borders and provides space for the plum trees that feed bears at the end of summer. On the east side it edges a grassy slope casually dotted with armchairs — a place for gathering. The wall continues to shape, and to provide space for, the activities of all who visit that family summer home. It has held.

Some years ago, when my kids were small and Tony and I worked on repairs to the wall, I came to understand that these stones are a perfect expression of his life. For he brought them all together — the stones, the children, the family — and he held them. He gave both containment and room for growth. He held fast when the waters rose and when they fell back. He was smoothed, over time. He was purposeful. He did not talk about this. He persisted, he held fast.

On the day that I married Elizabeth, Tony seized my hand firmly and looked me in the eye. With one direct glance, he conveyed that I too should hold fast, that I must persist through the rising and falling waters, that I would be made stronger by family and time and the persistence of purpose. He welcomed me into that space, invited me to find sustenance as a wandering bear finds the summer plums.

This summer I will repair the wall again. The masonry of the eastern edge has begun to fray, and the stones there are loose. A few have fallen shoreward and now lie upon the soft sand. Once again, the waters will cover them this spring and smooth them, but will not move them from beneath the wall that is their home. I came to Tony and his family as a loose stone, drifting and wayward. I was brought forward into a place of belonging. I was lifted into place. That was his way. He knew — without speaking or cajoling — how to find the fit of things, of people, of moments. He knew how to hold fast, to let the waters rise and fall, to persist in quietness and purpose until all was fashioned, tight and true.

The wall parts, and grants access to the shore. Sand gathers here, washed up by the restless waters of spring. Soft, white sand, warm underfoot in summer. At the shoreward end lies the largest of the stones: flat, tinged with blue and gray, situated at the perfect height for Tony to sit and gaze, as he often did, out upon the ruffled waters of the lake. This is how I see him: the capstone, watching the waters rise and fall, finding for each thing its place among the enduring stones.