Passion: 3 things

I was watching the TED videos the other day.  I finally got around to setting up an RSS feed for them and ended up with 357 items in my reader.  I love the TED videos and often use one or two in my classes.  They seem to say things in more compelling ways than I can, and grab the attention of students.  But one of them got me thinking about an issue that has been plaguing me for some time – somewhere in the vacinity of 5 years.  That talk was Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better. From reading the comments, I get that people either love him or hate him.  I’ve heard the name before, but had not really paid attention.  The thing that got me was that this talk connected to me at the level of that 5+ year old issue – the issue of what I really want to do with my life.  I keep thinking that I have lost the passion for things, but the problem isn’t that I don’t have passion, it’s that it’s very diverse and in the moment.  Things affect me NOW and I latch onto that – sometimes following through, sometimes not.

So I suppose I’m really at the stage of working out what issues are really important and which are worth my time.  What things do I want to focus on.  The video allowed me to contemplate that.  This post is an attempt to qualify that – to give shape and form to the things that really matter.

I suppose the thing that really got me thinking was the 3 Decisions of Destiny that he asked during that video.  I don’t know that I’m really ready to answer all three, but I’m going to start thinking about them and writing about them.

Screen cap from Tony Robbins video@TED

What AM I going to focus on?

Looking around this blog, there seems to be a few things that get me posting.  I’m passionate about my teaching, and hence about learning.  I love to find innovative ways of engaging students and I think that Internet enabled learning is important.  I’m not sure that I buy into the whole Gen-Y/Digital Natives mythology.  That seems to simplistic and I know there are many people who are not Gen-Y who are more natively digital than a lot of Gen-Y people.  But the connections between learning and technology are important to me.

Another issue that has become really important to me is the anti-censorship movement, particularly as it relates to technology, aka the Intarweb!  I find myself getting really annoyed at attempts to filter/constrain/delete stuff from the web.  I guess it’s related to the previous point about teaching.  Anything censored, anything removed or blocked is knowledge foregone.  We no longer have access to it and knowing that there are some things that some people deem inappropriate for someone points to a possibility that any thing can be deemed inappropriate for anyone.  I hate that knowledge may be denied to us.  Of course, there are things that we may prefer not to know[1].

So I suppose the things that I am passionate about, that I do know about[2] are technologies and the way they influence learning and knowledge.  That could be said another way: What we know, how we find out and what tools do we use to know.  Three things.  I need to focus on how those things come together.

1. For example: I once saw an image from the Abu Ghraib that I wish I had never seen, but it’s important that the image is there if only to shock us out of our complacency [↩]
2. although possibly not to the same extent as others eg Libertus.net [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.