Thinking out loud v.03
Finally getting started…
The students are in place and the semester has started. I’ve done my duty as far as participation is concerned, and now I’m settling in to the home office. It’s time to make a plan and ensure I can keep up with both my pedagogical research and participation in MishMash as that work gets off the ground.
Before the summer I fixed up the home office, so it’s less like a multi-storgage room for all the things we don’t know here to put and more like a working space and home library. I’m pretty pleased with the results, and early indications are that it’s a good space in which to work.
The first order of business is making a prioritised reading list for the coming weeks. I’m currently about a 1/3 of the way through _How We Learn_ by Stanislas Dehaene. The most recent book I completed is _The Entanglement_ by Alva Noë, and the arguments in it informed some of my arguments in the piece on the key role the arts and fine arts education play in society I wrote for Norwegian higher education magazine _Khrono_ a couple of weeks ago (sorry; Norwegian only).
As of now, the next titles on the reading list are:
* _Sourcebook of Experiential Education_ — part I: Philosophers and Educational Theorists and part III: Psychologists and Sociologists
* _Strange Tools_ — Alva Noë
* _The Phenomenology of Perception_ — Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* _Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change_ — Maxine Greene
* _Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious_ — N. Katherine Hayles
* _Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning_ — Schoeller, Thorgeirsdottir & Walkerden (eds.)
* _Teaching to Transgress_ — bell hooks
* _Movement Matters_ — Sheila Macrine and Jennifer Fugate (eds.)
* _Foundations of Embodied Learning: A Paradigm for Education_ — Mitchell Nathan
* _Toward Wide-Awakeness: An Argument for Arts and Humanities in Education_ — Maxine Greene
* _The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition_ — Lawrence Shapiro and Shannon Spaulding (eds.)
I expect this list will develop and change almost daily…
Having music is an important part of how I work. My tinnitus becomes much easier to ignore if I have background music on, and so I spent some time last week organizing my digital music library. Here I suppose thanks are due to Apple, as the Music app for some reason made a mess of the location of my music files which meant I had to rebuild my digital library developed over 25 years completely from scratch… (Who me? Sarcastic? Never!)
I seems all external obstacles are cleared away, and now I have no excuses. I’ll spend about 25-30 hours a week on my research and about 10-15 a week on MishMash — at least for now. I figure out how to adjust that when other things intrude, like the presentation and panel discussion I’m doing at Oslo Pix festival on August 28th. At least, since it’s about AI and the film industry, it’s related to the MishMash work.
