Penny Arcade - The Longing Lasts Longer (Feb 14th, 2016)

“Turns contemporary stand-up on its head” – yep. I’ve never seen or experienced anything quite like this. The promo continues: “you will never be the same.” Big call. Not quite true, but The Longing Lasts Longer made my brain work overtime. “Thinking is hard people” Penny Arcade said as she implored us to stay with her while she expounded on her unique take of the universe. You will likely be confronted with phrases you’ve never heard, and ideas you’ve never thought about. This is performance art. Intellectual comedy. And it’s been a long time coming.

Initially using New York City, her home of 50 years, as a metaphor for all Western society she tells us how it’s changed. How it has become gentrified and commodified. She tracks through the decades from the 60s onwards with reference to the friendship and work she’s done with famous friends, and then devotes a lot of time explaining how anyone born post 1980 was born into the fog of consumerism. It would be hard for anyone under 35 not to feel targeted, but Penny Arcade is not blaming then. She blames their parents.

Essentially this is a 75 minute monologue on how one intelligent, articulate and entertaining person who dares to take risks, sees the world.  It’s all done against a soundtrack of instrumental segments of very familiar tunes from “four decades of pop culture”. Occasionally lyrics are left in so Penny can inject her own commentary into the lyrics as she does with a couple of songs from Van Morrison and it feels like she was rapping with him – to great effect.

How much you enjoy this show is going to depend very much on whether you are prepared to think, really think, and whether or not you agree with her view of the world. I agreed with most of what she was saying – it was revelatory and refreshing – so I loved it.  Cherish individuality and authenticity. Never lose your sense of adventure, and above all, love yourself. If you’re listening you may end up loving Ms Penny Arcade.

(Also published on The Clothesline)

Did virtual learning ever take off?

Today over on Facebook a former TAFE colleague, Kate Wise, wrote:

"Thinking of our virtual learning Michael. Did it ever take off? Missed those wonderful sessions with the rest of the world.

Did virtual learning ever take off?"

 It certainly did. Virtual learning can mean different things but Kate is referring to those international events hosted by the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector where scores of people, and sometimes hundreds, joined live virtual classroom (webinar) sessions from across the world to discuss educational issues. They were enormously popular and most everyone who joined those sessions would testify to their effectiveness. The model worked brilliantly for professional development.

I always found it frustrating that the same model never really worked for classroom delivery in the VET sector. It got some traction in higher education, but even there the predominant model turned out to be the one way non-collaborative lecture style webinar offered by tools like Echo 360.

It seems that there were too many hurdles and ideological leaps for the average teacher to teach their classes this way. What’s interesting is that the corporate word adopted this model with gusto and today virtual meetings for companies with a distributed workforce is commonplace.

Virtual learning is also used as a synonym for online learning. Online learning is everywhere these days, but the model that has been widely adopted is essentially the set and forget model that offers little real interaction and almost no real time virtual sessions. Many people who were employed as e- or online learning specialists in professional development (ie people like me) have been discarded and deemed unnecessary. The prevailing model is still static content plus quizzes. It was decided that nothing more was necessary.

So people like myself who were encouraging a richer form of elearning that emphasised collaborative approaches with a synchronous real time component are left bemused that we spent so much of our professional lives promoting a model we knew was powerful and effective but in the end was deemed superfluous. It still sits uneasily with me. It feels sometimes as if I wasted my time; that my belief in this richer model was misguided and naïve. But I’m left with the memory, like Kate, that some remarkable and deep learning occurred in those virtual sessions sponsored by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. But we failed to in our quest to have that model become part of standard delivery.

Making Meaning

I read today – I think on the ubiquitous Facebook – that if you don’t write about what you think then no one knows what you think. That seems particularly pertinent to me now in the ‘post permanent job - pre-retirement’ phase of my life. I was an educator. I didn’t appreciate till it was all over how much I enjoyed talking to groups of people. Classes. Of course the purpose of the classes was not for me to talk, but teachers do. Inevitably at regular intervals you got to talk about what you believed and thought. It’s part of the bonding process that needs to happen between educator and students. Students need to get to know you and trust you before they accept what you say as having value. So they ask you questions. That doesn’t happen to me much anymore J

My life now has long gaps where I can’t talk to groups of people. I rarely now have classes. And I find myself wanting to say things when I don’t have a ready-made audience. So it’s a good time to start writing again. There have been multiple occasions over the last 18 months where I’ve wanted to say things about all manner of topics: the state of the Australian VET system, the whole sorry Islamist phenomenon, the continuing role of the Internet in upending life as we know it, the state of Australian political life and its corruption by the major parties, the secrets to effective management (I have just been reading Fullan on change), the drift towards the public disclosure of every facet of life in social media, why I don’t want to do that, how social media has become mainstream and has consequently lost its sense of innovation and challenge….I could go on.

I used to write a lot. I used to write dutifully for about 30 minutes each day. That’s how these pieces came into being. It used to be called journalling, or keeping a diary. As someone once commented, I blogged, as many others did, before blogging was a thing. Along the way I got waylaid by images. I became entranced by the daily posting of photos on Flickr – a disease I caught from, and am eternally grateful to, Alan Levine. The 365 project he suggested – posting a photo for each day of the year – changed my life. I became a person who preferred to express and share their life with images. It has been a joy and a revelation about the power of random serendipity. (see more here). I’ve come to realise that what I have been doing with the posting of images of my daily life is in some sense trying to make meaning of my world.

Making meaning is a common concept in many disciplines. Humans by default try and make meaning of what is happening around them, and if for whatever reason that ability or opportunity to make meaning is denied us we are not at peace. It is not a conscious process; it is just what we do if we are a healthy functioning citizen. Apart from the field of linguistics and language learning I always struggled with this concept of making meaning. I wasn’t sure what it was or if it was even necessary. It’s one of the many insights that appear to accompany the process of getting older and contemplating one’s own life coming to an end. (No I'm not dying!) I do now try and make meaning out of things; for me now it is occasionally a conscious process. I’m no longer just satisfied to just do or experience something. I want to explore why I am doing it; I want to know what it means.

It crystallised for me very clearly when I watched the Lazarus video from David Bowie on the day he died. It was inspiring to watch this work from someone who, though dying, was intent on making meaning of existence and what was happening to him for the entertainment and cultural enrichment of others. Through art. Reinterpreting the last days of his life to make it more powerful and leave us all with an instructive culture artefact rather than just tears and sadness.

I could go on…..

..... but before I go I just want to acknowledge and thank my dear friend and colleague Stephan Ridgway for the amazing work he did in the Australian elearning arena over the last 15 years. Stephan today became another casualty of an Australian VET system that is methodically disposing of anyone with a sense of innovation and who might dare to do things differently. Today was Stephan's last day at work for Sydney Institute of TAFE. As Robyn Jay wrote, "with grace he goes."