Simon Fowler

rLiving Day 9: Time (Directness)

Exactly. There doesn’t seem to be enough of it, does there. It’s also the ultimate disposable item. You use it once, and then it’s gone, and you have to use up some more. We spend a third of our lives asleep (if we’re lucky). And our time will come to an end at a completely unpredictable point. So we’d better choose wisely what to do with it.

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. Our relationship with someone is better and healthier if we actually encounter one another face to face rather than our relationship be contingent upon something or someone else.

People I know: I have 231 friends on facebook. I follow 409 people on twitter (followed by 374). I work with about 100 people worldwide (plus another 100 in our extended Resource Network). I think I have almost 500 people in my email list, but it must be more than that. My church, of which I’m an elder – one of 12, basically like an elected leader on a board of trustees, except it’s a church! – has almost 2,000 regular people (the irregular ones are banned! 🙂 ). I don’t know how to count people I knowI have six sisters, six brothers-in-law, and 14 nephews and nieces (none of whom live in the US). I used to know by name over 100 homeless men and women in London. I was in a church there for several hundred too. I don’t even know how to count my circle of friends back in London and now in Boston.

Time: Today I spent about 2 hrs 45 minutes “on my own”. I spent an hour praying this morning, and another hour doing some work. Then I spent about 45 minutes in the car on my own, shopping and going to and from helping someone move house. The rest, about 12 hrs, I spent with people; my wife and girls, with the girls swimming, with some friends helping them move house, and a little with the neighbors (“Adrienne” & “Keith” and their children) when they popped over. So that was one day of my life with, say, 8 of my family and friends. I’m sorry about the other two and half thousand people.

My gut tells me that spending more time with fewer people is a good idea. And probably best also to spend it with people I can actually see and touch. Let’s say we want to deepen our relationships with a few people, say, ten. If it’s true that encounter relationships are stronger, healthier, more satisfying, then we probably need to make some sacrifices of other relationships in terms of time spent. That’s because to spend time with some, especially face to face, you’re necessarily not spending it with others. There’s a choice to be made. And if you’re going to keep meeting regularly (continuity), do a bunch of different things together so you get to know the full dimensions of each other (multiplexity), then that’s gonna eat up a whole bunch of time and it’s most likely going to need you to be in the same physical space.

My main point is about time, obviously. I think we’d do well to make better decisions about spending more time, face to face, with fewer people. But it’s obviously not that straightforward because most of us have dear friends we can’t see face to face often. And we want to deepen those. I want to and need to spend more time on the phone or skype or email with my family and friends across the pond and around the world. But the main point of all this is about relationships, and relational health. And I think we think we can just keeping adding people to our lives without detriment to present relationships. But a lot of us are lonely with lots of friends.

How does the way you spend your time correlate with the quality of your relationships?

rLiving Day 8: UK/US ‘Special Relationship’ (Continuity/Multiplexity)

You’d never know it – if you live in the US – but there was a general election in the UK yesterday, that resulted in a hung parliament. The last election was four years ago and the last hung parliament was in 1974. There was very little US media coverage of the election, so most Americans probably have little idea about it.

Image: screenscrape using Jing from news.bbc.co.uk

The US election, which seems to go on for four years even though it’s only held every four years, is covered by the British media head to foot.

Relational Proximity Dimension #3 is Multiplexity: a relation between two countries is better and healthier if they interact in two or three different contexts rather than just one. This is, essentially, about knowledge of the Other.

Relational Proximity Dimension #2 is Continuity: our relationship is formed and strengthened by the amount, frequency and span of time we are together. It includes a sense of shared history, and an anticipation of the future.

With respect to ‘knowledge’; the media is one way the US and UK ‘interact’, get to know each other as nations. So you can see from the example of election coverage that there’s a huge imbalance, not to mention deficit and distortion, of information and understanding between the two countries. Unless an American and Brit meet, or travel to one another’s country, the media is the only way the countries will build an understanding of each other as a people. The news media (let’s be specific here) is just one ‘context’. We need more (type, quantity & quality) if we’re going to have a better relationship.

With respect to continuity; a relationship anticipates a future, and a shared future (Dimension #5, Purpose). A relationship cannot rest solely on its past, shared history. It has a timeline but that timeline has to extend forward if it’s to be considered a relationship. The election coverage doesn’t reveal this, but I don’t get any sense of forward thinking between the countries.

Little knowledge, and little future planning. Doesn’t sound very special to me.

rLiving Day 7: Connectivism & Education (the Relational Imperative)

In a world of rapid change, astounding technological advancement and exponential information growth, how do we educate our children to be better citizens, better members of society?

This is a question that drives George Siemens, with whom I spoke today in the context of Forum Corp’s Principles of Workplace Learning (which I’ll likely blog about some time). With Stephen Downes, Siemens has spent several years exploring the context and characteristics of knowledge and learning. That exploration has resulted in a learning theory they call connectivism.

The premise of Relational Proximity: The foundation of human flourishing is relationship. Ultimately, the foundation is love, but love is predicated on relationship. We flourish to the degree we are connected or rather, proximate.

Essentially – as well as I can articulate a fairly sophisticated and still developing theory – connectivism moves the focus of learning from a linear, structured, controlled method rooted in an industrial age, to a distributed mode of learning rooted in networks; more specifically, rooted in the connections between the nodes in a network. That’s how the brain works, and it’s now how, thanks to technology, the world’s body of knowledge is stored, built and accessed. But it’s not just about knowledge. And it’s not just about a post-modern fragmentation of knowledge without a coherent narrative or framework. In his book, Knowing Knowledge (2006, also available on pdf), Siemens says:

We exist in dimensions beyond pure cognition. We are shaped by social interactions. We are influenced by our emotions, our motivations. We require transformative (spiritual) knowledge for novel recombinations (to rethink and recast information).
We want to belong. We want to be a part of the many, but only if we are ourselves. We do not want to fade and cease to exist as we meld with the crowd. Our tools are about individualization and personalization, but we individualize so we are a (unique) part of the crowd.

He recognizes that the new media revolution is causing fragmentation, but believes that it is possible to “create a centralized outcome from a de-centralized process”. In the video below, Siemens explains (at around 10 mins) that whether it’s dealing with H1N1, or pulling together information that will identify terror suspects before they maim and murder, “we need to distribute our cognition and connect it in such a manner that allows us to address and meet the needs of the individual problems or challenges that we face.” And with respect to education in general he says that with technology, “we can understand how my interaction with you [can result] in conceptual advances on my part”. His talk is about changing education with a view not just to produce people ready for corporations (that are still highly structured and largely ill-equipped to respond to the rapid changes taking place) but to produce “better citizens, better members of society”.

Connectivism has its critics, and I have many questions of my own. It’s not a comprehensive theory – “Better citizens, better members of society” require much more than better ways of finding knowledge – but as change in the way we educate children, it holds a lot of relational promise!