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Showing posts from November, 2009

A modern school thinker from 1836 - oral, respect and conversation

The living word In Grundtvig’s preface to his 1832 study of Scandinavian mythology, Nordens mytologi [Nordic mythology], the first glimpses can be seen of the Danish folk high school of the future: There will be the common centre from which the institution branches out into all the main lines of practical life, and back to which it endeavours to gather and unite all the energies of society. Here, all the civil servants of the state who do not need scholarship but life, insight and practical ability, and all those who wish to belong to the rank of the educated should get the very best chance of developing themselves in a suitable direction and of getting to know one another. 6 Although Grundtvig’s ideas for a folk high school are in the merest embryonic form in ‘Nordic mythology', nevertheless, this work does contain a full dress-rehearsal for Grundtvig’s later attacks on the ‘Schools for Death’, as he called the Latin grammar schools. Latin is ridiculed mercile

Storytelling is a modern thing - internet and the rest is so oldfashion

Two-Way Communication Imagine a group of managers discussing what to do about communication. One says: “Why don´t we try with storytelling?” and starts explain that stories can make complex messages understandable. The other managers are sceptical. They don´t understand, it sounds a little strange and very modern. The managers are right. Storytelling (oral!) is strange and very modern. Old fashion medias - books, Radio, TV, Movies and in many ways also the Internet (even though it is a more active from of communication it is still based on dead computers) - have one thing in common: They are based on one way communication. So in one sense it gives meaning to say that they don´t really care about you. You can fall in love, you can change your life, you can spend your time eating water melon or fish budding, you can die - they don´t care, because they can´t feel you. It is the same with power point presentations: The speaker doesn´t really care about you. The whole set up is finis