{"id":214,"date":"2011-02-01T10:26:54","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T18:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=214"},"modified":"2011-02-02T13:16:46","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T21:16:46","slug":"living-in-exponential-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=214","title":{"rendered":"Living in Exponential Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

What a phrase, \u201cexponential times.\u201d  A five minute YouTube clip emphasizes this:<\/a>  . I was told that the Sony Corporation played that clip at an annual shareholder meeting. My friend, Ed, who sent me this went on to say: \u201cIt has ever been thus, but in exponents there is a cusp where things do change rapidly. Imagine you are in Yankee Stadium, and that it is a bowl which can hold water. Imagine that a drop of water falls at second #1, two at second #2, four at second #3, etc. (this is exponential growth). A few hours later there is a puddle in the middle of Yankee stadium. A minute later everyone is under water! That is what it’s like to be at the cusp of exponential growth.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cExponential times\u201d is a good description of the next phase beyond the early postmodernist era: Man developing trends are accelerating in their rates of change, and this itself must be considered. It\u2019s not just that things are changing\u2014that\u2019s not new\u2014; but in the olden days we used to be able to keep up. If we don\u2019t extinguish ourselves from our folly, some day they may look back on this era of the centuries just before and just after the turn of the millennium as the \u201cExponential Era.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Olden Days<\/h5>\n

This phrase always used to range from reminiscences of life in small-town and mainly rural America to the circumstances a couple of hundred years ago. We told stories about kings and princesses, but they weren\u2019t just olden, they were another world. I\u2019ve begun to talk about my own childhood in the mid-20th century as olden days, though, because the rules for how things are and should be have changed so fundamentally and in so many ways. These shifts are addressed on many other of my blog entries, paradigm shifts, world-view shifts\u2014and what\u2019s weird is that a good major shift or two could fill a lifetime whereas now it only leads to the tipping point into yet further shifts in a decade or so. Wowsie-Woozie! That\u2019s the expression for hardly being able to keep up. <\/p>\n

Implications for Education<\/h5>\n

In the olden days when information was not immediately accessible in almost-too-much volume, it sort of made sense to teach kids the basic information they didn\u2019t know. Promoting creativity was irrelevant to producing good workers. But that\u2019s all changed. Knowledge is easy, and routine labor can be either automated or outsourced. What\u2019s needed and rare and worth paying for is a quality that can\u2019t be subjected to the same factory-processing as ordinary schooling or work. In such roles, authorities were experts who knew what needed to be done; but in the realm of exponential change that knowledge is not so rare; what\u2019s needed is the knowledge how to bring forth new ideas and a readiness and willingness to collaborate and innovate. <\/p>\n

Another friend, Connie Lawrence<\/a>, sent me another clip from a TED lecture in 2006: a talk by Ken Robinson about education<\/a>  . Now teaching for creativity requires a key element that the lecturer notes and I underline: What kind of classroom is it in which kids are supported in remaining unafraid to make mistakes? The activity of encouragement, the nature of the tasks designed, the invitation for feedback, all are key. The curricular content not so much\u2014considering that some of the information may be obsolete within a few years. <\/p>\n

Because I\u2019ve been interested in creativity, his approach was relevant. (I have been associated for almost 45 years with a sub-field of psychiatry called psychodrama, a method of therapeutic role playing invented by Jacob L. Moreno, M.D. (1889-1974). That method was in fact only one of many applications of a primary philosophical idea: Creativity is a primary force in the cosmos, and what can we do to come up with ways to implement it in our culture. In a wider sense, then, psychodramatic methods can be adapted to non \u201ctherapeutic\u201d approaches ranging from social action and education to spiritual development or recreation. )<\/p>\n

For some interesting reasons, I agree with one phrase Robinson used in his talk referenced above: Creativity is as important as literacy. The key point is to recognizes that literacy isn\u2019t so much knowing the information<\/em> that comes with reading, but rather learning the component skills, the tools, that refine the mind\u2019s capacity and expand it so that it can integrate and be creative with both sides of the brain. (In a similar sense, science is not about what is t<\/em>aught in science classes as the results of scientific investigation, but beyond the content, science refers to the whole infrastructure of methods and attitudes as to how to check out whether a seemingly coherent idea is really so or it is just an illusion. (Not that I\u2019m against illusions\u2014but it\u2019s useful also to know when to dissolve them and when to get involved in building more functionally relevant and encompassing illusions; but that\u2019s another essay.) <\/p>\n

That\u2019s enough for now: I wanted to share these two mind-provoking videos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What a phrase, \u201cexponential times.\u201d  A five minute YouTube clip emphasizes this:  . I was told that the Sony Corporation played that clip at an annual shareholder meeting. My friend, Ed, who sent me this went on to say: \u201cIt has ever been thus, but in exponents there is a cusp where things do change […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,18,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-history","category-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}