rebarbarised

Robert Fripp's aims in keeping a diary

The Aims Of The Diaries.

Public Aims:

1.    To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available.
2.    To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process.
3.    To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.

 

Private Aims:

1.    To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience.
2.    To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick.
3.    To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.

Comments:

1.    We continue to have a Romantic notion of the artist: a special creature set apart from common humanity, one favoured by the Muse.

These Diaries indicate the mundane nature of the lives of artists: their simple, human and practical concerns. These Diaries remove the mystification that we project onto the artists, their lives and activities. The creative process is shown as being straightforward, ordinary and practical.

At this point, with the commonplace nature of the artists’ work revealed, the creative process may appear more remarkable than before: how can ordinary people like these give rise to work which moves and touches us?

Then, we find a new and deeper respect for the benevolence of the creative impulse: it succeeds despite these people, not because of them.

2.    Much commentary on the lives and work of artists is projection: unfounded, uninformed, without data, without direct experience, based on what we believe the lives of artists to be. Most commentary by “fans” is based on ignorance, rooted in personal prejudice, like and dislike. This is commentary from The Basement.

The enthusiast is better informed, able to engage with the process in the moment, and suspend the immediate rush to judgement. This is the view from the garden floor.

The connoisseur understands: they know, feel and sense the currents at work in the creative process. They have themselves undergone a training, but in listening and “appreciation” rather than in performance. This is the view from the floor above the garden room.

3.    The recapitulation of experience, in the form of diarism, is a way to digest the impressions that life, and our living of it, naturally provides. The Diarist reviews th

via www.dgmlive.com

...and in the continuation from this (which my Typepad plugin has unhelpfully truncated) "Maintaining a diary is a process of engagement with oneself... that invites the Diarists to move beyond their natural lassitude, to go further than the merely comfortable"

Please could you give me feedback on this draft

If you could give me any comments or other feedback on this draft article by Thursday, I'd be very grateful! I've written it for the newsletter of the Association for Learning and Technology, so the audience is mostly learning technology professionals in Higher Education and Further Education.

Comments welcome either in the comments field below or by email to me, david at alchemi-dot-co-dot-uk. Many thanks!

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Like the future, the impact of a colder climate is not evenly distributed. I guess there must be some areas where current economic challenges are experienced as business-as-usual, plus some pressure to trim a bit of excess fat. But many of the people I speak to have a sense that we are going through — or just heading into — a period that is qualitatively different from the cyclical ebbs and flows that education has gone through over the past decades.

My sample is in no way balanced of representative but last year I interviewed people involved in learning from a home educator to a university professors, and from a social software entrepreneur to a photographer who is committed to helping people learn yet refuses to see this as teaching (recorded on my blog, and collated in abridged form in a self-published newspaper). I was trying to do two things: to get a sense of what might be common across these different contexts, and to get a sense of the longer sweep of change, beyond the horizon of recent funding cuts.

Changes bred of necessity and opportunity

This article is a reflection on what I am calling "agile learning", drawing on some of the themes that emerged from these interviews. Hopefully this term is fairly self-explanatory: agility involves letting learners manage, direct and adapt their learning with minimum constraint. It is not intended as another packaged solution, with proprietary paraphernalia of trademarks and methodologies; more an umbrella term to allude to the particular kinds of invention that are bred of necessity in a challenging climate.

Over the space of 10-20 years, learning activities that were once marginal and supplementary will move into the mainstream as institutions lose their historical monopoly on the capability to process and share resources. We are already seeing what self-organising groups can accomplish with powerful tools but without formal lines of command.

What happens if and when the resources in the commons outstrip those controlled by gatekeepers as a matter of course? If Wikipedia is seen in some quarters as an irritant — its use to be cautioned and policed – imagine how learning might feel if the wiki model were to pass a tipping point, and classrooms to be seen as rare and peripheral events.

Neil Young's manager to fan blogger: Do you have a life?

Elliot: You need to lighten up. You guys take this stuff way too seriously. It's only music.

Neil's just a musician. He's not an economist. Or a politician. Or a CEO.

Your musical hero can't be the solution to your problems.

So let me ask you a question. Do you have a life? What's the deal?

TW: Oh yeah. I'm happily married man and all that stuff. We feel quite fortunate and lucky to do what we do. To give back to the Neil community all the love and affection they've given to us over the years.

Thankful for all that we've learned from our fellow fans that have helped to try and make us us all better people.

You know. Celebrate the music. The passion. The community.

It's actually a lot of fun. That whole "keep on bloggin' 'til the power goes out. Battery's dead. Twist & shout."

That sort of idea.

Elliot: No, really. Seriously. C'mon. Why?

TW: Well, in a way, Neil changed our lives.

I've never really discussed this before. But long ago, someone broke my heart. I found a lot of solace and comfort in his music. His songs helped me make it through a difficult time.

I know this sounds corny. I just kept searching for a heart of gold. I truly believed she was out there and that I could be happy the rest of my life with her once I found her.

And I did find my heart of gold one day. And I've never been happier since. Love and only love.

Elliot: Well, good for you both.

So, are you recording this and going to bootleg this also? (bemusedly)

TW: No, probably just put it up on my little bloggie thingie...

via neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org

Fascinating exchange between Neil Young's manager and best known fan blogger. It starts off with a detailed discussion of ticketing issues on Neil Young tours: the proportion of tickets that are priced highly, what impact this has on touts, and on audience attention. Then the manager turns the tables...