I've never been to a Noh performance. But after seeing Naohiko Umewaka @TEDxTokyo, I have a sense of what I've been missing Naohiko, trained by his father, the legendary Noh master Naoyoshi, has been performing since he was three. He has composed, choreographed and directed a number of new Noh plays, including The Baptism of Jesus, which was performed at the Vatican before Pope John Paul II on Christmas Eve 1988.
Although spoke with his face covered by a mask, his presence came through like a force of nature.
At the reception, afterward, I met his lovely wife and found out that I know their talented son, Naotomo as well. Before you ask, it doesn't look like his son will join the family business.
According to Hawaiian-born Jake Shimabukuro, "one of the great things about being a ukulele player is that audience expectations are always so low." That comment brought a nervous grin of embarrassment and recognition to the crowd @TEDxTokyo, along with the collective recognition of how wrong we were.
Check out his live performance on YouTube. Adorable!
Bravo to Patrick Newell (left), Todd Porter (below with Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri). With a team of 100+ volunteers, TEDxTokyo brought together a line up of speakers and performers whose wide ranging perspectives: philosophers, designers, economists, visual and performing artists--including aUkulele player, were only out done by the diversity of the audience.
Nearly all of these students admitted to playing World of Warcraft or Farmville or some online game. No one taught them how to play. They learned the rules and became proficient on their own.
I CHALLENGED these students to:
1. Think about the process(es) they used to learn online games
2. Apply that same vigor to their studies
It’s time for this generation of students to PULL from the academy, not just wait for faculty to PUSH information, exercises and exams.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about learner-centered education. What does it mean? How will we teach if we don’t lecture? How will the students learn? How will we know? These are important questions for those want to challenge centuries-old notions of teaching and learning.
But, if we really want to CHANGE higher education, we can not lead. We must co-create new paradigms with our students. Just as we have to resist the temptation to play “sage on the stage,” students need to step up, and take control of their own learning portfolio.
Faculty are not the only font of knowledge and information. I suggested that students PULL from whatever sources they have available: textbooks (read them before class starts), Blackboard, Wikipedia, fellow students.
I also so suggested that they needed to be critical, not passive, readers of now-abundant info sources. While nearly all admitted to using Wikipedia, only student one had ever looked at the edit pages.
Students can learn the material on their own and view their professors as coaches. No one expects a track coach to be as fast as the runners. No one expects a football coach to actually play soccer. The players must take what they practice and go beyond the abilities of their coach.
"Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.
"Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities"
Actually, I feel more akin to his “early modern” readers as I jump from websites to journal articles to Twitter (every thing but FB).
Nonetheless, seeing reading and writing as “inseparable activities” reminded me of Lawrence Lessig (and possibly others before him) talking about our digital Read-Write culture. It seems to me that Jefferson, Milton, Bacon, and Locke were using “commonplacing” to reflect and extend on the issues they encountered, not unlike mash-ups today.
However, in comments that followed Johnson’s blog posting of the talk, some took issue with equating “commonplacing” with cut-and-paste. Johnson responded, in part:
What I was trying to say is that commonplacing shows that re-arranging bits of text out of context, from different authors, creates a new kind of value that is different from the original value of the text…it's true that the way blogs and tweets work is far less studious and attentive than John Locke was with his commonplace book, but it's just as important to point out that Locke's book was exclusively a private affair: whatever he captured went into his mind alone, whereas the blogger can now circulate his discoveries through the minds of thousands. Not the same thing, by any means, but valuable in a different way.
Yes, in deed, some people just cut-and-paste without reflecting--and with out appropriate attribution. Nonetheless, the original ideas get spread further than they might have otherwise.
In my mind, the key issue is “textual productivity.” What’s missing in discussion of IP protection and “walled gardens” is the value created by the flow. In stark terms, if a text, song or image must stay frozen (even though in digital form they are no longer subject to the laws of physics), then the value created is limited. This is the argument (as I see it) behind CreativeCommons and business models that produce platforms for co-creation.
Johnson was giving a talk on journalism; perhaps, a more direct analogy for “commonplacing” can be found in open source—open software, open hardware, open universities (course ware). Open platforms provide a nurturing environment for co-creation and, therefore, innovation.
Society benefits when value is created. Our long term interest should favor increase the velocity of this flow.
Though Nancy Wilson popularized the song, Guess Who I Saw Today with her 1960 recording, it is actually from the Broadway Revue "New Faces Of 1952."
Guess Who I Saw Today
I'll give away the ending. The lyrics of this song tell of a woman who, seeing "two people across the bar who were so in love," suddenly realizes that one of them is her lover. I saw you.
Well, this blog won't have that much drama. But, it will chronicle the people I meet in life and online.
They call me "Swint;" but, my mother wants you to know that my full name is William J. Swinton. "Jacob," is her father's name. I'm the director of International Business Studies @Temple University, Japan Campus
