The first time I read that the Chinese word for 'crisis' included components or elements of the words 'danger' and 'opportunity' was in James Lovelock's Gaia- A New Look at Life on Earth over 20 years ago, (see the wiki for Gaia Theory or a review of The Ages of Gaia). I have heard this reference literally hundreds of times since, and I have also perpetuated this idea countless times.

Well, chalk this one up as a fallacy or urban legend!

According to Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania ..."crisis" (wēijī) consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, wēi and jī.

The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits.

But jī is mistakenly believed to signify opportunity because jī added to huì ("occasion") creates the Mandarin word for 'opportunity' (jīhuì). However by itself jī does not mean 'opportunity'. If jī can be interpreted as "incipient moment" or "crucial point", then the jī in 'opportunity' can also be a crucial point. So in both jīhuì and wēijī there are crucial points, but there is no 'opportunity' found in the Chinese word 'crisis'.

The problem here is that despite the fallacy, I think that this is such a powerful metaphor to live by!

On the other hand, Mair thinks that this muddled thinking, "is a danger to society, for it lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit. Adopting a feel-good attitude toward adversity may not be the most rational, realistic approach to its solution."

Although I agree that 'looking for' or 'seeking out' a crisis in order to find an oportunity is not healthy, (I think here of hostile takeovers as an example), there is an inherent element of 'good' in looking for hidden opportunities when you find yourself in a crisis.

"When life feeds you lemons, make (and then sell) lemonade!"

 

http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/Skaalid/application.html

I found this while procrastinating on finishing my masters paper.

Disgusted with how this has transformed from a labour of interest and love to one  of 'hoop jumping' that is just what I googled... along with 'education'. This is just what I was looking for:

Instructional Strategy Development

• Distinguish between instructional goals and learners' goals; support learners in pursuing their own goals. Ng and Bereiter (1991) distinguish between (1) task-completion goals or hoop jumping," (2) instructional goals set by the system, and (3) personal knowledge-building goals set by the student. The three do not always converge. A student motivated by task-completion goals doesn't even consider learning, yet many students' behavior in schools is driven by performance requirements. Constructivist instruction would nourish and encourage pursuit of personal knowledge-building goals, while still supporting instructional goals. As Mark Twain put it: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

 ...no they do not converge and no I do not feel nourished... and I should really listen to Mr. Twain!

So can technology come to the rescue?

• Allow for multiple goals for different learners. ID often includes the implicit assumption that instructional goals will be identical for all learners. This is sometimes necessary, but not always. Hypermedia learning environments almost by definition are designed to accommodate multiple learning goals. Even within traditional classrooms, technologies exist today for managing multiple learning goals (Collins, 1991).
• Appreciate the interdependency of content and method. Traditional design theory treats content and the method for teaching that content as orthogonally independent factors. Postmodern ID says you can't entirely separate the two. When you use a Socratic method, you are teaching something quite different than when you use worksheets and a posttest.  Teaching concepts via a rule definition results in something different than teaching the concept via rich cases. Just as McLuhan discerned the confounding of "media" and "message," so designers must see how learning goals are not uniformly met by interchangeable instructional strategies (see Wilson & Cole, in preparation).

 So we should be spending our time 'designing' learning environments... I need to look up 'hypermedia learning environments'.

I like the focus in this next section:

• Think in terms of designing learning environments rather than selecting instructional strategies. Metaphors are important. Does the designer "select" a strategy or "design" a learning experience? Grabinger, Dunlap, and Heath (1993) provide design guidelines for what they call realistic environments for active learning (REAL); these guidelines reflect a constructivist orientation:
  • Extend students' responsibility for their own learning.
  •  -Allow students to determine what they need to learn.
  •  -Enable students to manage their own learning activities.
  •  -Enable students to contribute to each other's learning.
  •  -Create a non-threatening setting for learning.
  •  -Help students develop metacognitive awareness.
  • Make learning meaningful.
  •  -Make maximum use of existing knowledge.
  •  -Anchor instruction in realistic settings.
  •  -Provide multiple ways to learn content.
  • Promote active knowledge construction.
  •  -Use activities to promote higher level thinking.
  •  -Encourage the review of multiple perspectives.
  •  -Encourage creative and flexible problem solving.
  •  -Provide a mechanism for students to present their learning.
• Think of instruction as providing tools that teachers and students can use for learning; make these tools user-friendly. This frame of mind is virtually the opposite of "teacher-proofing" instructional materials to assure uniform adherence to designers' use expectations. Instead, teachers and students are encouraged to make creative and intelligent use of instructional tools and resources.

 There is so much room for creativity, the use of metaphors, and problem solving... meeting multiple goals for individual learners... as long as we invest time in making the learning meaningfuly relevant, and in designing flexible learning environments.

The hardest bone to swallow here, the one that sticks in my throat as I sit here knawing on the sparse backbone of higher learning, is that this freedom is what I desire for my own learning, but how much of it do I offer to my own students in my classroom?

How many of them are jumping through my hoops?

Turn your speakers on for this one... a little dark humour about living in a wired world.

"Can I please have a Double Meat Special Pizza." 

We live in a wired world where a man with a blog, and a little PR, can turn One Red Paperclip into some Real Estate.

http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/NOV02_Issue/article01.html

The Teaching Moment:a learning metaphor
Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer, Randy Swedburg

I like the Introduction:

The Internet is saturated with distance education claims about learning environments, effective pedagogies, teaching modules, skill training techniques and community building models. Typing into Google: “online teaching training distance education” nets one 265,000 hits. Typically, efforts to deliver educational content and to construct knowledge online seem to be asynchronous. The synchronous teaching ‘engagements’, either attempt to incorporate high tech features like sound and/or video into their delivery method, while others seem to use Java based synchronous chat modules which only allow interacting in simple ASCII text. In general, one presumes that at least some portion of the teaching effectiveness claimed by this vast community of practitioners is predicated on long-term preparation, research, and experience. However, what this preparation may involve, on what specific data the opinions are based, or what the actual teaching really looks like, remains largely unclear.

“The Stone Soup” is an Eastern European folk tale. At the end of the war, a group of bedraggled soldiers come upon a devastated village. The inhabitants, having hidden the little bit of food they still had left, watched as one soldier made a fire, another fetched water in a cauldron, while another removed an ordinary looking stone from his pouch and placed it into the boiling water. Having accomplished this task, the soldiers settled around their campsite and began talking enthusiastically about their anticipated meal. The first soldier said: “Yes, stone soup is my favorite, but once I had it with cabbage, and that was delicious!” Hearing this, the bravest of the villagers, approached the cauldron and threw in his cabbage. The second soldier said: ”Ah, yes, but when you add a bit of beef, well…” Next, it was the village butcher who added a piece of meat he has been hoarding to the soup. Eventually, everyone sat down together to partake of the best soup the villagers have ever had. Before they left, the soldiers gave the magic stone to the villagers, reminding them that the stone’s power is actually in their cooperation.

Like in the children’s folk tale “The Stone Soup,” there seems to be a famine of empirical information about how learning actually takes place in the synchronous distance education village. Everyone seems to agree that knowledge is being delivered and the practitioners have found the delivery methods that serve them. The content of the knowledge being delivered is largely known, and often, grounded in theory. What seems to be missing is twofold: what are participants saying and how are they saying it? How is the learning task accomplished, and how are the group’s dynamics facilitated to allow the learning to unfold? This paper is an attempt to make transparent the process of experientially constructing knowledge in a real-time eClassroom, which has been described in Lobel, Neubauer, & Swedburg (2002).

The following account may be viewed as offering that which is invited: namely, other practitioners with whom to dialogue, and share the ingredients involved in creating the content and process of facilitating online real-time learning. The particular ‘teaching moment’ offered here seems apt in several ways. It demonstrates how people with different points of view, sharing their perspectives, can and do create a common pool of knowledge, where the lowest common denominator is raised to the highest one. The learning segment presented in this paper includes and makes visible the elements sought above: namely, the preparation, the research and the experience used to design, deliver and process a learning sequence. Like in the story, the Instructor provides a “stone” by posting a pictographic ambiguous image. As each villager brings her own unique contribution to the interaction, the resulting synergy-rich “soup” belongs to everyone. Could not any community, including one of teachers and learners, dialoguing in this manner produce the same result?

Essentially, teaching begins with the belief that “The way of the teacher is a practice in trust” (Arrien, 1998). The trust involved in this case study is supported by decades of observing the learning process, and is anchored by theories of learning and of group development to active practice and risky experimentation. “Trust the process” and “Be open to outcome,” accurately describe the value-base of the primary Instructor’s teaching approach. In keeping with “the Stone Soup” metaphor, the teacher brings the cauldron, builds the fire, puts the “magic” stone into the boiling water and trusts that eventually the audience will engage enough to bring their own hidden ingredients to the process."

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This is very Tao of Leadership-esque. It fits well with my thinking around having students develop the curriculum around their interests, or more aptly, their tastes.