This week we’ve reached the third anniversary of 3D Eye; this is blog post 555. Three years ago we had no experience of publishing on WordPress, and we had limited previous experience of writing for blogs. It’s been an active learning experience – learning through construction and experimentation, learning through necessity.
We began from the idea that all of us benefit if everyone shares ideas on subjects we know are crucial to human wellbeing – education, learning, intelligences and human potential.
We want to thank all of our occasional visitors and collaborators, and especially our regular readers and commenters. We’ve gained enormously from reading the blogs of numerous others who share our interests and concerns, and we’ve benefited from the encouragement of those who’ve found some interest and stimulation in our posts.
We also want to thank everyone who has reblogged our posts or posted links or tweets to them. (Twitter has been a new enthusiasm and another means of communication we’ve stumbled into)
Three years has seemed like a very long time in a fast-changing world of education and technology, especially during a time when England’s education system has been directed by a Secretary of State with a set of advisers whose stated personal ambition was to wreak as much systemic change as possible within as short a space of time as possible. On the other hand, we know that educational blogging is still in its infancy, and that thousands more professionals, parents and students will become part of the blogging community during the next few years. This is a journey, and a long strange trip it’s turning out to be. Worldwide, countless thousands of children and young people are already learning how to communicate through blogs.
There are communities within communities. There’s scope for coexistence, collaboration – and separate development. There’s potential for misunderstanding, disagreement and connection. We look forward to 2015 and what should be a crucial time in an increasingly connected world of educational writers, bloggers and practitioners.
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Extracts from a post we published on November 12th 2011:
[This is from] an article in today’s Guardian by Jenni Russell, who consistently writes perceptive and stimulating articles on education and learning. There are several themes – learning, leadership, government, decision-making, humility, confidence, human fallibility, etc.
[Bill] Clinton is doing this because he is ferociously curious. He’s a man on an intellectual journey, and he wants to understand a complex, constantly changing world, rather than being trapped by limited, outdated interpretations of it. He’s trying to challenge the mind’s natural inclination to jump to conclusions about a subject and never question it again. He says he wants to be a learner until the day he dies, and that the only way to achieve that is to have an open mind.
Put that way, Clinton’s approach sounds like eminent good sense. It’s more than that. It’s difficult and remarkable.
We don’t tend to do it ourselves, preferring to stick to a set of certainties we happened across some time in the past.
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/being-wrong-and-not-knowing-everything/
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/new-3di-website-launch/
From November 12th 2012
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/the-thinker-3/
This is precisely the right time to consider what schools are going to do to ensure that we have a new generation of thinkers who know that there is a time when we should not think; a time when we can empty out our minds, enjoy silence and stillness, allow our inner thoughts and feelings to come to the surface . . .
From November 12th 2013
Pressure to Achieve Targets, and the Mental Health of our Children
Who really understands or gives a damn about unmeasureable things such as resilience, optimism, self-esteem, confidence, enthusiasm, creativity, empathy, emotional literacy, honesty, perseverance and self-reliance?
Gary and Clare