Global Networks...

It was so great to meet and connect with our MAPP community at our Skype on Sunday, and what a big one it was! I think Skype served us well. Particularly on the level of supporting each other, sharing thoughts and questions as we embark on our individual modules. It always amazes me how easy it is to connect and also how addictive it is at times. There are new forms appearing at a fast pace. Technologies changing rapidly and connections growing. Ken Robinson who writes on the subject of creativity, touches on how we are in the process of great change and our communication methods have gained rapid momentum; “Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil points out that evolution of biological life and of technology have followed the same pattern. They both take a long time to get going but advances build on one another and progress erupts at an increasingly furious pace” Robinson (2001p.27) So I guess we may be at the point in time of the Dinosaurs now that analogue technologies are dying and we have reached a sort of amphibian stage. Who knows we might have Skype set in our reading glasses soon as we go about our business. I don’t think it’s far off. With Spotify (with which I have only just begun to understand) I can connect with 111,625 followers who also firstly want to ‘chill’ then acutely want to ‘chill with ‘tranquility with a beat’ what a crazy idea if you were to tell the fourteen year old me alone with my Sony Walkman! I find it exciting how our experiences have led us all to this one place. This mostly virtual place, and how our learning community of the ‘now’ is so fruitful to us. Our global network includes students that have connected with us from Dubai, The States and all over the UK. Giving us all the opportunity to develop ourselves our thinking and our pedagogies. We have discussed our commonalities; our dance, our module handbooks, our anxiety’s and our excitement as we move forward in time with the development of our research journeys or mapping out of whom we are and where our past learning occurred. I expect our passages to this point are diverse. I would like to see our journeys painted on a map of the world visually and colourfully drawn with zig zaggy lines all meeting at a final point, demonstrating our journeys from our first dance ever (where it took place) to the dance… our last dance or representation of our dance at the University theatre for our final viva’s. It may have been a slow drip urging you or a seed planted; a conversation with a colleague, an article in a journal or a search on the web that led us here to MAPP DTP at Middlesex University. Who knows, but somehow we have all arrived at this virtual place within and belonging to our ‘global network’ Decades ago we would have all had to physically have met in a classroom, Possibly moved city or town. I feel lucky… and wish us all a great term.