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Dear Gina, Mynoo and Almira,

I'm in Gaiaspace and raring to go. My focus at present is inviting people to register for our 'Practical Microfinance' course starting 29th Sept and running in 7 sessions in the City of London until 16th December. You can get full details from www.microfinancewithoutborders.com.

Best thing is that Prof Malcolm Harper and I are leading the course. He's a world expert on microfinance, very irreverent and down to earth. The people on our last course enjoyed it immensely and are now doing field work and one has got the job she really wanted in microfinance, fundraising for a charity. 

And we're making DVDs and podcasts of the course so people in microfinance around the world can share in the learning and fun.

I've got to run now so I can meet up with you tonight!

Love

Phyllis

It will not take long before the new term at our university starts.
It is going to be another 13 meetings with the students. 13 times struggle
of how to bring them some information and help them to learn something or at least
to prepare for the exam.

It is only 13 times 2 hours I can use and I am fed up wasting them the way I used to.
I do not want to help them to pass the exam. I want them to learn something.
They should be getting a degree in a year from now, but how to motivate them
to learn also something?
While reading some books about modern education, reading blogs on Internet,
I realised that I have to change my attitude towards the students.
And do what I am doing on the seminars of experience education for
teachers and students. It is to be open with your vision, offering the
vision and the goal and methods of reaching it. Doing this, part of the
responsibility of reaching the goal is transferred to the students. They should
be the actuators in this learning machine. I, as a teacher should only facilitate the action.
So the first step is motivation. Motivation for students to learn. To ask questions,
to get interested. This is what I believe I must do. So enough for the theory.

Here is my little proposal for the principles and actions I want to try out this term:

• discuss the goal of the class and agree on it together with students
• help students to make mistakes and learn from them
• make students ask questions
• work in groups on problems, forget about the frontal teaching, that is saved for the lecture, I am doing seminars
• link the work to their day-to-day life

There are methods how to do, there is a plan, a goal, so in a month we can start testing
my plan. Because there must be a way how to make a difference. I do not want to be part
of the system killing the creativity in students. I do not wish anything for the students,
 I just want to be proud of them. So let us see how shall I succeed.
This is an end of a post of one frustrated university teacher.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7538498.stm

 Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has launched a global fund to protect the Amazon rainforest and combat climate change.

Officials will seek donations abroad and aim to raise $21bn (£11bn) by 2021. Wendy Urquhart reports.

 

I found this interesting 9 min. statement of Clay Shirky (Here comes Everybody) about what's going on in the headline's sense.

My friend Robert Seltman from Kyoto, Japan, devoted a whole section of his excellent website (with a great old-fashioned design; gives me retro-feelings) to Atheism and what it is for different people. And as a last little illustration he had the below video by Alan Watts - who was the hero of youth and young years. And what he says (put into fantastic pictures by the guys who do made South Park) is timelessly wise… worth considering.

 

Create your own music show - if you like.

This thingy here will look all over the web for the band or music you enter... and then you play :-)

An interesting new conversation has started up on a year old blog entry of mine called, "An Amazing Question" and this afternoon I was interviewed around the topic of 'pluralistic spirituality' - so I guess it's worth to look at some of these matters again. And so I thought that it might be helpful to state some of the basic premises I'm coming from in this regard:

• The universe (Kosmos) does not have a center (or ground or basis or what-have-you)
• There is no beginning (Big Bang)
• The universe (Kosmos) does not have a goal (that we could possibly know about)
• The universe (Kosmos) does not make sense (we do)
• Spirit and matter are two (of an unknown number of) ways of interacting
• Gurus, masters, enlightened beings, etc. are not authorities by reaching the level or state they're on/in but by the grace of us (you and me) bestowing authority and trust upon them.
• Consciousness and unconsciousness relate to each other like a tree's crown and roots (connected by the trunk)

Present day spirituality is mostly (actually almost entirely, but not quite) structured vertically - like a pyramid: at the top are the realized, enlightened, etc. and at the bottom are the (very) unenlightened masses; the goal/aim of a spiritual life is to get as close to the top of the pyramid as possible, and once you 'made it' help those below to rise. Almost all of the vehicles (organisations) of spirituality do have a 'feudalistic' organisational structure where the (enlightened) person at the top is both worldly and spiritual leader and decider; usually advised by a 'court' of 'far advanced' students/disciples. This is the basic 'reason' why real collaboration between the 'spiritual stars' (as I called them in some of these comments) will not happen, just as it is hard to imagine Kings and Queens coming to a realistic collaboration - they put their kingdom at risk. Because of the feudalistic and often authoritarian social structure of spiritiual groups and movements - however benign they flesh out their activities in the world - no real dialogue can happen, and true dialogue is the basis of authentic collaboration. True dialogue is only possible if we reckognize each other as deeply and intrinsically equal; and if it is to become real collaboration in any sense that I can see (I'm not talking about cooperation which can also happen in vertical social relationships) we not only need to trust, honor and be utterly open to each other, we must also be willing to be convinced by the other and change our behaviour according to our (now reformed) convictions. I know, I'm making this awfully short, but nevertheless I have concluded from seeing matters this way that:

• The traditional and modern vertical spiritual paths offer no real solutions for the challenges humanity is facing in this Century
• These paths are our heritage and as such can help in developing a healthy sense of ego (in the sense of "it's me"; not in the misunderstood new-agey way of 'repository for everything we can think of as obstacle inside ourselves; obstacle to ascending to the pinnacle of being human)
• Traditional spiritual paths only reveal what they teach about reality before it is experienced (ask a Buddhist medtitator if ever he has a vision of Virgin Mary; or ask a Christian Mystic if he sees the Buddha or Shiva or some such in his meditation); traditional and modern spiritual paths are really co-creating the "basic, deep truths" that they think to have independent existence.
• 99% of the spiritual paths are vertical in nature, and vertical paths and structures have helped manouevre us into the state we're in world-wide; put in a different way: there is no reason to believe, that these paths offer any possibility to have the kind of change we need on a world scale.

All of this together has led me to let go of those paths and move on what I've called cooperative spirituality in the beginning to drop that term in favor of pluralistic spirituality, it is similar to what John Heron has named Participatory Spirituality or what can even be called P2P-spirituality.

• It's basic governance structure is the circle of equal and unique individuals.
• It's teaching structure is 'mutual apprenticeship'.
• It's practise is - when done with others - consentual and 'we-full'.
• It's practise from an individuals perspective is guided by non-judgemental openness and a 'holding of the space', an intense presence, so that who and what is can unfold its authentic way of being.
• It is embracing imperfection.

It seems those are some basic premises that can be mentioned now; over time it might become clearer as more of us are practising and dialogue about that...

 

(source) 

Learning new things actually strengthens your brain — especially when you believe you can learn new things. It's a virtuous circle: When you think you're getting smarter, you study harder, making more nerve-cell connections, which in turn makes you ... smarter. This effect shows up consistently among experimental subjects, from seventh graders to college students to businesspeople. According to studies carried out by Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck and others, volunteers with a so-called growth mindset about learning ("persist in the face of setbacks") have more brain plasticity. In other words, their noggins are more adaptable. They exhibit increases in cognitive performance compared with those who have a so-called fixed mindset ("get defensive or give up easily"). "Many people believe they have a fixed level of intelligence, and that's that," Dweck says. "The cure is to change the mindset." Certain that we're wrong? Enjoy stupidity!