Creative Chaos in Many Worlds (Guest Speaker)

Our event is on the edge of chaos sometimes.  — Danger Ranger aka Michael Mikel, as quoted in Enabling Creative Chaos by Katherine Chen

In class on Thursday, we will have  a guest, Dr. Katherine Chen, of City College of New York.  She is a relative newcomer to academia, (like yours truly) and has written a very interesting book, Enabling Creative Chaos, that is a deep analysis of one remarkable organization: the Burning Man festival.

Dr. Chen will speak tomorrow at 4:30 in the Willard Smith library (in Vaughan Lit).  I hope you can come.

In class, she will tell us more about Burning Man and what it has to tell us in general about the sustaining creativity and community in an organization that has pursued ambitious goals and experienced many kinds of adaptation over many years.   I recommend you look over the Burning Ma site, especially material like this essay and all of the fascinating multimedia and images.

My participation isn’t low… my connection is slow! Revisited

I chose to evaluate the post “My participation isn’t low… my connection is slow!” which looked into the use of Second Life and other virtual worlds for the classroom.  This was very interesting to me because my cousin is in an advanced nursing program, which uses Second Life for lectures and office hours. I also find the concept of being able to “attend” class while geographically being located anywhere that you have an internet connection very intriguing.  I also found the use of humor in the beginning captivating enough to want to read more.  The article was interesting because it touched on the idea of people evolving as technology evolves.  Technology that is new affects people differently depending on how old they are when it comes out.