Initially, I was quite enthusiastic when GPT was able to generate new workshop structures for me within seconds, given the appropriate prompt. My students were also highly successful in creating prompts for generating creative learning methods that could be used in the classroom. Funky, cool stuff, although – since GPT is a black box – we’ll never know how the idea was generated or if it actually works in practice. However, when it came to…
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Dear 300,000th Visitor,
You come from the USA, England, Thailand, India, Germany, Canada, or any of the other 190 countries on my guest list, including Cuba, and even the Cook and Faroe Islands. A global outreach was never the plan. I started my blog as a notebook while studying psychology at Liverpool University. I didn’t even have an audience in mind. The basic motive was pride in any academic work that was judged to be very good by…
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Pragmatism, Constructivism and Beyond: Empathic-Organizational Co-Creation
The term Empathic-organisational co-creation is a working term that I have chosen for my field because it best describes the inner attitude and self-conception of learning designers and learning & development coaches concerning our daily work. The concept of an empathic-organisational design of social spaces refers to two fundamental competencies of our work that are inseparable from each other: (a) the competence of empowering people and (b) the competence of system design. The Pragmatic Component:…
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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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