Springsteen, Vivaldi, Coast Guard, Avengers

I started my day as I usually do, visiting my social media sites and clicking into articles that interest me, especially those written by people I've been connecting with frequently. This map shows my journey.

As I scrolled Google+ I was drawn to an article posted on Kevin Hodgson's blog, which was a review of "Born to Run", Bruce Springsteen's autobiography.   Kevin embedded a few Springsteen songs, which I listened to.

As I did, I thought to myself about how my network exposes me to such different sensations and ideas. Last week I had visited Charle's Cameron's Zenpundit blog, where he had shared video of Vivaldi's Gloria.

I wanted to share this with Kevin, and went to the Zenpundit site. However, the first article on the site was one titled "Of Boxes and Worldviews" which I started to read. It led me through an deep exploration of wicked problems, silos, war planning, and more.

On Saturday I had posted an article under the title of "Climate Crisis - Environmental Racism" in which I described a complex problem and embedded a few concept maps. At the end of the article I invited better writers to help me communicate these ideas. If you read the "Of Boxes and Worldviews" article by Charles Cameron, you're looking at a "better writer" describing the same ideas.

Then, on Sunday, I viewed a 60 Minutes segment about Artificial Intelligence. Imagine harnessing that capacity to try to solve wicked problems.

All of these ideas are related. 

Toward the end of Charles' article he wrote this:

Somehow, these matters of extreme subtlety must at times be borne in mind while making the split-second decisions so characteristic of both military and law enforcement practice. And the higher the decision-maker in an action-oriented profession, the greater the need for deep understanding. Throughout Charles' articles he inserts quotes from other people. In this case, he pointed to Napoleon Bonaparte, saying, "In Napoleon’s own words, we can see that his actions, too, sprang from contemplation"

I spend time in this type of learning path every day, of every week. Through my links and web library I try to point to other people who are communicating ideas with greater depth, creativity and clarity than I do.

I hope you'll take the tour.

Why? Did you listen to the Presidential Debate last night? I doubt that Donald Trump has ever spent time in this type of learning. I suspect that Hilary Clinton has.  Yet, I fear that too few elected leaders at the city, state, national levels in America, or the world, are living lives of "super heroes", doing the deep learning and reflection, that prepares them to make important decisions that affect the world we live in, now, and in the future.

I suspect that too few potential voters are either.

This is why I take time to read Kevin's blog articles, and those of others who I've met in Connected Learning MOOCs. Keven is a 6th grade teacher. Most of the #CLMOOC participants are educators. They are helping shape the learning habits of future generations of leaders.

I connect my #clmooc and other education friends to people like Charles and to my own blog articles, because I hope they are teaching youth to build their own ability to understand and discuss wicked problems.

I keep looking for ways to draw people from the non-school tutoring, mentoring community into these deeper learning spaces, along with donors, policy makers, business leaders who all have a role to play.