Evening Musings

Process, Goal, Method, Motivation, Context… quite often I get bored when simple semantics fail to describe the phenomena that drive our world. While we are easily distracted by monocausal comfort, the more intriguing drivers of history hide in plain sight.  We start a good story by reaching out to others: Come on board. Be with us! We believe that people should reach their full potential. Let’s call this intrinsic belief the Montessori Light Cones, based on…
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When the world we are trying to save is disintegrating in front of our very eyes: From American Taliban to Russian Z-Fascism

This is my first English blog article for a long time. So, my friends, where shall we start? Taking a deep breath as too much has happened The world at large seems to have turned into a dystopian nightmare. From George Floyd to Covid, from Covid to the Russian-Ukrainian war, from the war to the ill decisions of the American Supreme Court that tear America apart, with the grim prospect of worldwide hunger lurking due…
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PBL Tutorial Group Videos with Prof. Howard Barrows

These must be the origins of great coaching when it comes to collaborative problem-solving. I converted files from a fairly old video CD (lifted from VHS), which shows how Prof. Howard Barrows coaches a tutorial group through the Problem-Based Learning Process (PBL) in medical education. It is some historical footage and a real gem that I feel shouldn’t get lost. His book ‘The Tutorial Process’ (Revised Edition, 1992) makes for an insightful supplemental reading. If,…
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Europe’s Darkest Day

My heart sank today. The naivety of German diplomacy and media over the past years has been frightening. Putin has always been a stone-cold (ex-KGB) sociopathic murderer, and war criminal (Syria) who had been presented in Germany for decades as a reliable business partner – or a disappointed autocrat who traumatically suffered from NATOs expansion after 1991. However, with the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Germany’s ‘special status’ in diplomacy has been proven to be…
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SYMBOLIC ANIMALS THAT LIVE IN TIME, FISHING FOR THE FUTURE

If we had no language, we would neither have a negotiable memory nor could we anticipate and plan a future. It is only in language that our inner images, feelings, and narratives merge into a symbolic, intersubjective continuum. This means that other people can understand and relate to our linguistically encoded messages across time and place. Symbolic action constitutes our horizon of understanding. Only language makes culture possible for us, the ability to exchange and…
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Why you (logically) need a social hub when you develop Socialware

Together with friends and colleagues from my university, we are currently developing a SaaS Startup. Our product is placed in the Edutech sector as it allows for new levels of co-creation, empowering learners and instructors to develop higher-quality professionalization programs collaboratively. The first thing that I learned from other Startups was that the era of so-called minimal viable products (MVPs) appears to be over. There are several reasons for it. Firstly, the standard of products…
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Conditions for Co-Creating Learning in Organisations

The reason why we are concerned with learning in organizations versus individual learning is based on the premise that in transiting from a carbon-based to an alternative energy-based economy, the most complex problems among a great diversity of stakeholders need to be addressed. If we do not learn how to work in teams, we will not be able to achieve this level of environmental mastery. The second condition, besides cooperative competency, is transparency. As long…
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Who am I and if yes, which version of me am I running? Notes on the new structure of reality.

I believe that our time is unique in the history of mankind for at least two reasons: the first is that our consciousness is taking a quantum leap in its evolution, the second is that, for the first time, mankind is facing an ecological crisis that will affect all forms of life on our planet for generations to come. The Evolution of Mind, Reality and the IQ Puzzle For a long time I believed that…
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Digital Learning, Happiness and the ‘New We’: An Eudaimonic Inquiry into New Learning

Dedicated to my students and my teaching team @ Medienfaktur, University of Oldenburg, 9th of February 2021 Introduction and Overview This essay is about more than just hedonistic fun in hybrid (analog-digital) learning. It is about the unusual question of deep happiness and joie de vivre in so-called ‘new learning’. It is about eudaimonia – to use the Aristotelian term. After a discussion of our current societal context, I use Carol Ryff’s classic six-factor model…
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LOCK HIM UP: Why America needs to sever itself from the Trump monstrosity

How low can you go? When it comes to Trump, he has finally demonstrated to the entire world how to successfully manipulate and radicalise almost half of Americans. He is truly a con artist extraordinaire – we have to give it to him. Trump has turned ordinary citizens into zombified haters and has managed to project his deranged mental world successfully into the minds of a large part of the American population. Alt-Right feeds straight…
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