Luke Walker.org

Learning through dreams

I’m a fan of Sheila Heti, a Toronto-based author. Her book, The Middle Stories, is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. It’s more a piece of art than a book. Literary art. And I think of her current project(s) as something very similar.

Every heard of postsecret.com? People send in their deepest, sometimes darkest (but sometimes funniest) secrets to the curator, Frank Warren (who gave an amazing keynote at sxsw), who posts a few new ones every Sunday.

Sheila Heti is doing something along these lines, but a bit more political… sort of. She’s launched a series of blogs, starting with I Dream of Hillary and I Dream of Barack (she’s since added I Dream of Both and I Dream of McCain, for all those Republicans out there.

The process:

1. Clinton, Obama, McCain (mostly the first two, but hey, McCain deserves some credit too) launch the most interesting US presidential race in years and become the talk of the town, creeping into every nook and cranny of our concious and unconcious minds
2. Sheila Heti starts her blogs
3. You dream
4. You send your dreams in to Sheila Heti’s blogs (only REAL, SLEEPING dreams, people)
5. Sheila Heti posts them
6. I spend hours reading them

I’d love to say that the time I spent/am spending pouring through these was leading to some deep revelations about the candidates, or the people who dream about the candidates, but it’s not. I’m just enjoying it, and hey, I’m having a bit of trouble focusing today.

Perhaps the best part of this project is this quote, from the Search Engine podcast, a show I’ve recently started following, and the source of this great find… anyway, the quote:

Jessie: “Sheila, is there a point to this?”
Sheila Heti: “… no…”

Check out the…. March 6 or 7 Search Engine podast for an interview where you’ll find that Sheila Heti is learning more, but only just a bit more, from these stories than I am. And read The Middle Stories, seriously. The full text is available online, and the Princess and the Plumber is among the funniest things I have ever read.

At a bit late: sxsw was awesome. Jane McGonigal gave a great keynote about the future of happiness and her work in alternate reality games (see the graphic representation.) She mentioned four characteristics of happy-making experiences:

1. Having satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Spending time with people you like
4. Being part of something bigger

She also mentioned that feedback (not report cards or occasional progess reviews, but feedback and encouragement consistently and continuously), instructions, and a mission help make games more engaging than the real world.The whole thing made me think about how amazingly simple it would be to make everything we do more engaging by taking ourselves a little less seriously and thinking more about how we can make people happy. Too often we (thinking specially of TIG and even more specifically about TIGed) get drawn into a pretty high degree of seriousness because of the environment in which we operate. When it comes to teachers and technology, there don’t to be a lot of happy-go-lucky conversations. The blogosphere, listservs, conferences… everywhere I look is full of conversations about cyberbullying, cheating, lack of access, lack of use, etc etc etc. And as much as we’d like to create paradigm shift, we’re drawn into these conversations and spend a lot of time focusing on all the reasons to not change at all.

So not only was this keynote really inspiring in and of itself, but the fact that it’s key messages are being replayed over and over again, in slightly different ways in all sorts of different venues is really making me think seriously about all of this. In a lot of ways, Jane’s messages are very similar to the things we talk about at WorldBlu Council Meetings, and most recently, Dave Eggers’ TED Talk (thanks to Alberto via Facebook). He started an amazing tutoring program that relies on principles very similar to Jane’s to give students opportunities to learn with a purpose, produce for an audience, and spend time in an environment they enjoy with one-on-one, consistent, continuous feedback. And guess what? It’s “addictive”… and fun. His pirate-supply-store-cum-tutoring-centre is now just one of many “fake” storefronts helping to open learning environments to the community.