“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” -Helen Keller
Hi, I'm Pippa, an Australian living in Berlin, Germany.
I'm passionate about learning, particularly lifelong and self-organised learning styles. I currently work as an educator and developer of learning related technologies.
I make things such as clothes and at least one small boat and cook, eat and read. I like stories. I also like maps, hot cups of tea with milk, Arnott's Western Australian gingernut biscuits, well written songs and plants.
A couple of months ago I mentioned that I’d been accepted into a graduate program to learn more about adult learning. To try and keep my thoughts straight I’ve setup a separate blog about in+formal learning and teaching over at http://learninglearning.wordpress.com/
Maybe it’s just because there was a bunch of smoke, but I actually enjoyed tonight’s interpretation of John Cage’s Variations VII. Apart from the smell of some really hideous perfume on a woman standing nearby, the room smelt like melting plastic and burnt out motors. It was a bit like guitar strings breaking, but still not quite rock and roll.
I’m probably still suffering the negative associations of a past relationship, but my back gets incredibly tense at the thought of much noise related art practice. Then again, don’t even get me started on the terrible things that can be done with visualisations.
It would be easier to say that I just don’t get some types of media art , but something must fascinate me about it, because I keep on thinking about it and what I want to do as a practice within the greater new media field. Nothing elaborate, but damn it, if I am to do anything I at least want to do it well.
Maybe one day I’ll actually work on one of my ideas.
from on .
My latest vodcast – as recorded on May 29th, 2009.
I only just realised that I could have included links to bands, projects and friends using the amazing power of titles.
Oh well.
My friend Marc, is the writer behind http://www.un-understand.co.uk.
The Australian band I mentioned was Brillig http://www.brillig.com.au.
And my friend Andy Gibson http://sociability.org.uk is the founder of Mindapples http://mindapples.org!
As part of my 100 Things I Want To Learn list I’ve made my first video blog post. I learnt how to export from iMovie and how to wait patiently while videos compress, get uploaded and then converted by Vimeo. So I guess I did learn more about 64. Video recording and editing to the level required for good vodcasting
from on .
Self-centered personal blogging ahoy!
I’m playing with my gifted video camera and the idea of different levels of honesty, intimacy and immediacy afforded by edited text and unedited video.
Also, I’m in the middle of trying to work out what happens next in my crazy life. Writing hasn’t worked so far. Maybe talking to an inanimate object will help?
So anyway the challenge is to know (with more certainty) by August, what I do next in my life. I’m not sure if I make much sense in the video.
I am having a marvellous time.
This week I’m overwhelmed with visits by half a dozen lovely people primarily from Adelaide band . It’s an absolute pleasure to be showing the first arrivals, Matt and Elizabeth around my new city.
I’m almost shaking with excitement for Thursday when some of my most absolute favourite people in the entire world come to visit. I think I’ll need to visit some more fotoautomats so that I can record their visits too!
One of the things that motivated me to start learning more about friendship is the modern and instant types of “friend” as represented by social networks. I sometimes feel that the meaning[s] of ‘friend’ are somewhat weakened by the more binary Yes / No labelling of friendship prompted by “Do you want to add person x as a friend?” *
As part of this learning I’ve started listening to a series of short lectures by Mark Vernon, author of , recounting and responding to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship.
In Lecture 3, Vernon elaborates on Aristotle’s idea of 3 types of friendship: Useful,Pleasant and Good friends. A lovely Australian friend, the zinestress extraordinaire Maddy Phelan, describes these relationships as Situational (school / work), Activity (music, hobby) and Excellent (life long friends) friendships. You meet most of your friends at work, school or in situations around your hobbies and passions, but not all of those friendships will last once those situations change. The friends who last despite life changes, are your Good or Excellent friends.
Before listening to these lectures, I’d already begun thinking of people I know as belonging to those categories. It prompts a series of questions: Why do some people stay friends while others drift away? Is this drifting something you can predict? How do you know when someone’s become an Excellent friend? Do you need a life change (new employment, travel) to really find out which friendships will survive? Do you need to share specific experiences / spend a certain amount of time with someone to strengthen and form a long-lasting friendship?
Mark Vernon describes Aristotle’s Good / Excellent friends as people you love for what they are or who they are in themselves. They’re the people you are friends with because of their “depth of character, goodness, passion or joie de vivre”.
As a personal exercise as part of 150 Things I asked myself to write a list of my most Excellent friends. I ended up with 7 people who I feel are my truest soul friends – people who I’ll continue to be friends with for the rest of my life, even if I only see them every few years. These are the friends I know intimately and who refresh my sense of self and personal energy whenever I see them.
I also made a list of about 15-20 people who might be in that Excellent friend category if I could have enough chances to spend time / communicate with them and develop a friendship further. Luckily several of those people live here in Berlin. After only five months living in this town I feel very happy and lucky knowing that I have potential Excellent friends.
“The better these friends are as people, the better the quality of the friendship. This friendship is therefore also the rarest. And it takes time to grow: they must savour salt together, Aristotle says, and trust one another…
…What is quick to arrive is a wish for friendship – what is not quick to rise is friendship itself.”
Mark Vernon,
*To tangent away from friendship itself, I want to add that the social networking sites I feel most comfortable with and trust more as brands are those which are more honest about the type of connection / relationship that is being made: Do you want to follow person x? (Twitter) or Do you want to add this person as a Conact? Are they a Friend or Family member? (Flickr)
For me, the phrasing of the questions also encourages me to think more about the type of information I’ll share with members of those social networks. Facebook seems to encourages people to share far more information online by the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe contact: “of course I’ll share my home address with this person who I’ve met once – they’re my ‘friend’”.
As part of the greater DIY Masters / self-organised learning project I’m attending LIWOLI 09 in Linz, Austria.
LIWOLI is an event exploring the crossovers between art and the FLOSS community. I’ll be recording a series of interviews with participants about self-organised education and how DIY / autodidactism intersects with university education. As many people in both fields have self taught skills I’m looking forward to the responses.
I’ll be asking my interviewees to explore ideas like these:
Get in touch if you’re heading along to LIWOLI or if you have any suggestions of what I should check out in Linz.
One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands, The Van Pelt, is called “Let’s Make A List”. I love Chris Leo’s vocal delivery and the guitar line, but it’s the lyrics about frustrated teachers that really get me:
let’s make a list so we can feel like we’re accomplishing something, so we can feel like we’re working together…
I’m a big fan of making lists, especially as a creativity and brainstorming technique. List-making also has a tendency to come out as part of my writing style and has been a method for one of my 150 Things About Friendship. I often wonder whether I get more or less things done as a result of list-writing, but the act of making them is somewhat satisfying and meditative.
Usually I just list my most immediate thoughts and ideas, rather than pushing through to a specific target amount. Recently, a friend added the article “Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100” to their delicious feed and it started me thinking about “extreme “listing. I’ve been meaning to write a Learning list for a while as part of the DIY Masters project, so I decided to attempt a list of 100 things I want to learn.
Day 092/366 - To Do List, by
I think my question was very general which resulted in a list of general learning rather than “100 Things I want to achieve with my DIY Masters Project”. Most of the 100 things are skills that I want rather than a body of knowledge. Looking over the list I can divide the list into skills I can learn as a result of the DIY Masters project (highlighted), some long-term general learning (botany, musical skills) and a lot of smaller life skills.
Since writing the list earlier this week I’ve found that there’s a local printing museum which runs bookbinding and letterpress tutorials in German. And I keep on coming up with even more things I want to learn, like 101. How to assemble a yurt. As I eventually want to build my own Mongolian style yurt / ger, I might just have to make a new list 100 Things I Want To Make.
But that is another list, for another day.
Anyway, here is the list of things I want to learn in the order they came out of my head:
100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About…
Over the last months I’ve realised that there are two major components to my DIY Masters project: DIY Masters as a learning concept and the field I want to work in, and the actual learning and skill development I want to achieve as a student. I’m happy with the way the project has developed, as achieving clarity about a long-term career path is something that has been very important to me.
The major goal that I professionally want to achieve with DIY Masters is to develop a sense of greater learning community and help provide tools and services which support self-organised learning networks. My long-term study goal for the project is to find out more about how people become friends and to explore creative ways of representing and exploring these connections beyond social network graphing.
In my first post exploring the idea of a self-organised ‘degree’ I wrote:
How do I give myself a practical and theoretical grounding that will help me be recognised as someone who knows and creatively works around the issues of friendship and society in a technological, globalised urban environment?
It turned out that the societal, technological and globalised issue I want to explore professionally and academically is the self-learning community itself. How convenient is that?! Just to remind you though, this “convenience” is one of the benefits of making your own learning experience, you do have the opportunity to shape your learning experience to your needs and interests.
Luckily, I’m part of a growing global community looking at ideas of future learning and post-graduate educational systems. A few of the lovely people talking about this topic are:
I’m really looking forward to growing this community, if you want to talk DIY Masters and self-learning in general – please contact me. I’m also looking for mentors, teachers, peers, task masters and sponsors to support me throughout this project.
DIYMasters talk for Bank of Common Knowledge
During January I recorded a video about starting a DIYMasters degree which has recently been uploaded to the Bank of Common Knowledge.
I met Olivier and Ninon from Barcelona based cultural co-operative system Platoniq while they were running a Free Knowledge Market at Club Transmediale. Their project, Bank of Common Knowledge, was active in one of the display rooms at Kunsthaus Bethanien.
Bank of Common Knowledge operates both as a website and real time skill and knowledge sharing environment. That’s just the type of service that works really well with the concept of DIYMasters, not just as a way of receiving information, but as a way of sharing what you’ve learnt.