Summary:
Anxiety and thinking clearly are not on friendly terms.
Sometimes it takes misplaced action to help me gain access to the deep purpose that I really want to address. Conclusion: engage in some way with a problem situation, even if confused; while engaged, stay open to alternative insights and take the time/trouble to process them to the point of articulate rational statement.
A major personal weblogging/klogging process in my quest (e.g., to better understand knowledge-making) is writing multiple inductive journals in which reflection is important and for which relationship with a)my original thought and purpose, b)my sources and c) interested colearners needs to be examined and optimized
There are almost as many reasons for blogging/klogging as there are webloggers/kloggers. Weblogging, for me, is a means to enhance my engagement with how people come to know. And, given progress with or problems with knowledge-making, I want to connect with others of similar concern and give/receive support and findings.
This entry began as a report of my recovery from an awkward migration from Mac system 9.2 to Mac 10.2. (Before the migration I had a working, if excessively cluttered, weblog. After going through code contorting brain-based gymnastics, it is now looking alright.) I have learned a few surprising things from my experience, about knowledge-making and about intuition. Maybe writing about what I've learned will help you too.
This is how my entry started:
(1/12/2003) Clearly, I hope you do learn from this; otherwise, why show my frailties. (See my Trophy or Workshop entry). As colearners in a vast electronic yeshiva we participate in a way so that all learn more, and more quickly, only when we show ourselves not just when we have sparkly, complete, learning products but when we are learning (=struggling) as well.As a token of my commitment to this notion, I am writing these notes about my weblog repair efforts, not knowing when, or whether, I will succeed.
I have hopelessly bolloxed up my weblog; only the final straw being my migration from Mac OS 9.2.2 to Mac OS 10.2.3. I went to bed last night a grumpy fellow... but woke up with a plan. The core philosophy: don?t multiply features beyond necessity; complexity is confusing and hard to maintain. Adding, one after another, new features can be destructive. It is, at least for me, a hard-to-remember fact that newness is not, in itself, a good reason for change.
What does destructive mean? Make unreadable by any common browser.
The plan: reinstall on 10.2.3, adding only the features that are central to the way I think and communicate, so far, as a weblogger and part of a weblogging community.
So:Thinking and Communicating
Radio Itself: I want the weblogging, the news aggregation, categories (which I must learn to use with live topics-see below) and basic themes. More , if focused and functional, later.
Tools: There are lots of worthies.. but will focus on two because one has to be handled carefully and the second must be added after the first.
ActiveRenderer: Marc Barrot's tool is still at the core for my more organized thinking and definitely near the core of my teaching technique. This one has to be added carefully.
LiveTopics: Matt Mower's categories on the fly. I've been unhappy with the clutter that accompanies their use.. but the table of contents is a really useful way for my retrospective refocusing as I extend the set of entries; I would guess, also, that a reader, wishing to comb through entries, could use the table of contents too. This tool is added after establishing the first. [there's more but this is the beginning of an effort that was going to be a "template fix-up" effort but which became something else]
[I have changed the nature of this entry, utterly, from what it started out to be. But, before I go on and tell you what it has become, I have to note, for those of you who might have watched the halting, awkward metamorphosis from caterpillar to --- er --- what?, frog? , that the necessary site codes have come to me and the worst of the awkwardness has, at least for me, been brought under control]
As for what this item has become? Well, first it's a song in praise of well organized actions of any sort. I'm sorry to say, though, that when I'm learning anything for the first time, particularly when I'm doing it independently, well-organized is not the first phrase that comes to mind. Finding structure from multiple contesting themes is no easy quest. But eventually, eventually, the bag of fighting cats segues, with my help, into form and structure, process and purpose, sylph-like in its beauty.
In chasing down code that would make my weblog work again I also had to chase down, refine is more exact, what my purpose in weblogging is. And that has changed in the 8 months that I have been doing it. By engaging in weblogging I have come to change my conception of weblogging. And, with this different conception, I have different specifications in my list for a great weblogging tool.
Key Thoughts, so far :
Anxiety and thinking clearly are not on friendly terms;
How many times over a lifetime have I come to learn that worry and fixing a problem are not compatible activities. If you want to come up with a fix you have to let go of the worry.Sometimes it takes misplaced action to help me gain access to the deep purpose that I really want to address;
In the midst of rewriting my template to solve the formatting problems of my weblog I realized that my deeper concern was with what weblogging was accomplishing for my thinking and understanding. That thought, in turn, led to some useful and satisfying rethinking of what I am doing.Because of this experience (and others like it over the years) I'm reminded that we have multiple, parallel thought processes going on, only 2 or 3 of which are accessible, conscious. There are tenuous connections between the conscious and subconscious processes which work better when allowed to work in the background. I've found that taking some action and busying myself with it can often allow access to the subconscious processing--at least to the extent of receiving post-it-sized sudden insights. Moral of the story: engage in some way with a problem situation, even if confused; while engaged, stay open to alternative insights and take the time/trouble to process them to the point of articulate rational statement.
A major personal weblogging/klogging process in my quest is writing multiple inductive journals in which reflection is important and for which relationship with a)my original thought and purpose, b)my sources and c) interested colearners needs to be examined and optimized;
Note that I slipped inductionin there. Induction is, for me, a rational [i.e., there are pattern-finding routines which can be explained and justified] and intuitive process which aims at finding patterns that are presently inaccessible through logical manipulation of present theory. (I've heard, sometime in the past, the parallel made between interpolate/extrapolate and deduction/induction. In this analogy induction would be the process of reaching beyond the commonly understood pattern of data to explain an outlier.) Anyway, I'm hoping to extend my ability to understand and explain knowledge-making through inductive processing of human experience.There are almost as many reasons for blogging/klogging as there are webloggers/kloggers. Weblogging, for me, is a means to enhance my engagement with how people come to know. And, given progress with or problems with knowledge-making, I want to connect with others of similar concern and give/receive support and findings. Having understood this, I'm hopeful that I can assemble routines and subroutines that magnify my ability to question, to communicate, to formulate, to study and to learn. Additionally, I'm hopeful that this understanding will enable me to avoid being distracted by new routines, java script etc., php and perl routines, etc., that have unproven purpose-related pay-off . (I will be better able to examine look at costs and benefits because just the "what" that endures cost or receives benefit is better defined).Not that I'm an enemy of deduction, mind you, it is more that I am constitutionally set up to be drawn to understand those ideas that are outliers, i.e., not yet understood (i.e., explained within boundaries of present theory) . Thus I need to work on inductive processes
