All Learning is state dependent...

It is so obvious that the state ( Zustand ) I am in - deeply influences my learning progress...so in what state are my students in when I enter the room? And am I able to change their states for the better once I start the lesson of the day?And do I manage to maintain their by then hopefully resourceful state throughout the entire lesson?

And what about my own state? In what state am I in most of the time?

And who helps me to "recharge" either during or after the lesson?

Lots of good questions with their inherent consequences....so here is a video about how Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were introduced to a group of journalists the day before Mother's Day....just watch how people change their states in just a few seconds...so I know it can be done...and maybe I should bring a portable CD/Cassette player and turn up the volume and play some wake-up music as I enter room 1.11 at 7:45 in the morning ??? - this would certainly be a great pattern interrupt!

Which one? The iPod Touch or the new Kindle DX

I love well designed high-tech gadgets...there are two that have caught my attention for some time new: the Apple iPod Touch ( without the phone function ) and the latest version of the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

Once you have watched the video you may just decide that paper based materials are definitely not as hot any more as they used to be - and maybe the paperless office
or the paperless school is not that far off anymore...

Are we as humans the only creatures who are conscious.Yes or No?

In class we are currently practicing how to write a comment.There is a certain structure to it and it usually has four parts etc. etc. and as I was searching for some additional topics for our pre-test practices I hit upon the above key question involving human consciousness and it led me to a series of ten minute YouTube films - the speaker there is Peter Russell whose book: The Global Brain is available in German under the titel:Die Erwachende Erde.

These books were published in the early eighties - just after my return from a very stimulating sabbatical year in San Francisco and they played a major role in my renewed interest in human consciuosness - the first exposure happened thru the writings of Timothy Leary in the mid-sixties..then Peter Russell crossed my path and now some 25 years later the writings of Eckhart Tolle deepen my understandings in this area even more.

And my thought was: what if my students were one day ready to argue in ENGLISH the most difficult question if we as humans are indeed the only creatures who are conscious - and as a meaningful preparation for this exam we would go thru some of these fifteen YouTube based mini lectures?

Seeking Oneness via Twitter?

Most teachers would probably argue that nothing good will come out for our students when they engage in the microblogging service Twitter....some would state it is just another annoying platform - like Facebook or MySpace and the rest - that hinders the student to appreciate written language...they fear that what gets expressed within Twitter's 140 character frame will be the profane and not the profound...

I have not tried it myself but I would go along with the embedded cartoon - Twitter seems to be just another "form giving" tool whose constant "in-form-ations" distract students and retirees alike...but then I had a second thought:what if Twitter messages ( tweets ) get rushed out of my electronic device or onto any of my chosen screens in such a rapid sequence that it would create an almost permanent reporting link between myself and my "friends" who would share my entries all so very fast that the feeling of a networked ONENESS could suddenly pop up in a logged-on user??

Just as the early pioneers who experimented with basic flying devices were bicycle riders - they had a sense or intuition that if only they were able to pedal fast enough and achieve a certain speed they would eventually have lift-off!So if a given medium is accelerated beyond a certain point ( a grounded bike with extended wings on it ) something completely new is created: an airplane.

If the tweets are blogged and read at an ever faster rate by a circle of users - the previous sense of being separated and isolated may suddenly be transformed into a knowing and feeling as being ONE with the others....if Twitter achieved that liberating and sought after felt-sense of ONENESS in our students it would radically change the current meaning and experience of our present competition based educational system for the better and turn even sceptical teachers into supportive twitterers.