Mind at Focus Research & Learning Lab

The chance favors the connected mind worth watching

people of earth…

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do …

Read more including the 95 theses from 1999 at http://www.cluetrain.com/

Now 12 years later, do you think the early adopters almost a generation ago were right? Are we living in these conversational markets today?

Welcome. This blog is an experiment. During my teachings (10 different subjects, 5 different curricula, 3 different universities, and sometimes 4 different teachers in a team) I have learned so far:

• playful collaboration really leverages learning and results
• the disciplines or subjects I am asked to teach are less fragmented than I, my team colleagues, and my students have assumed (in the beginning)
• we truly have to prepare students for jobs and technologies that do not exist yet … in order to solve problems we do not even know are problems yet
• thinking outside the box is only possible if you are aware of the outside the box, getting rid of the damn thing
• and where the heck did I leave my notes with all these loose ties and nodes which I want to grab on … now …

Thus the purpose of this blog is the beginning of an experiment called the learning lab, which should give us the possibility to have a sneak around the edges of our boxes – our thinking – while we are exploring the different topics from different points of view, together.

This lab is an invitation to my students and my team mates to collect, share and comment on each others mind snippets.

And if you are not sure what I am talking about by expressing the wish to get rid of the box, well, let´s have a look at the box

“A Vision of Students Today” (BTW a masterpiece of students collaboration within the Kansas State University working group led by Dr. Michael Wesch, an inspiring colleague I had the pleasure to meet ones in my lifetime – before he received celebrity status, which he truly earns).

But we need not only rethink education …

… we need to redo education, so I hope you will follow my invitation, let´s start