Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 29 seconds

Another reason to go to #et4online – meet @gardnercampbell

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 29 seconds

This is another post in my series of reasons to go to the #et4online conference this year.

Gardner Campbell will be a plenary speaker at #et4online and he will be talking about #thoughtvectors – here is a link to his planned talk: Thought Vectors in Concept Space

Gardner is one of those people who is an incredibly beautiful writer, and equally eloquent speaker. Few people are that amazing at both! And the substance of his talks and writing are incredibly insightful and moving.

Now, I don’t know everything about Gardner, but I got to know him a little during #ccourses where he was one of the facilitators. I was really touched by two blogposts he wrote for #ccourses. The first was his From Open to Connected post, and I fell in love with his writing style. I love how he goes from talking about open, to opening and that a course should not just be open, but opening. It really resonated with me when he talked about how the paradigm of openness and connectedness is the reason he became a professor. Another post by him that really touched me was his Why I Teach post. Look at the beauty of this ending paragraph:

To encourage others–and thus myself as well–to be creative, intuitive, heroic inventors who record the world as it is actually happening, and thus to build a world of incautious love for the possible good we have not yet imagined: this, too, is why I teach.

Wow! “incautious love” and “possible good we have not yet imagined”! I’m adding that onto my own teaching philosophy and keeping it to heart.

Here’s Gardner talking about one of my favorite subjects (why Learning Outcomes are not the guarantee of a good education, and do not answer fundamental questions about education):

Here is Howard Rheingold interviewing Gardner on DML, and where I was really amazed by his extemporaneous speech (that, and the #ccourses hangouts, of course):

And here is one of his best talks, Ecologies of Yearning, where he digs into the meaning of open and why a lot of the rhetoric does not get at the essence of openness, the real purposes of education, and asks how systems like schooling can get in the way of learning/yearning (watch to see how this comes about – the wording is related to Papert):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIzA4ItynYw (ecologies of yearning)

I am not familiar with all of Gardner’s work, but this blogpost by Céline Keller is full of quotes from his writing and links and videos and all sorts of goodies if you’re interested.

I’m sooo looking forward to his talk at et4online, which you can watch if you register as a virtual participant, but wouldn’t it be even more amazing to meet him in person?

In the meantime, you can watch this google hangout with him scheduled Jan 20!

3 thoughts on “Another reason to go to #et4online – meet @gardnercampbell

  1. Maha, I agree, Garner coins such exquisite turns of phrase. I too am captured by his using the gerund “opening” rather than open. It gives such a sense of promise and possibility, of opening to the future like a plant leaning towards the sun. Just think of the richness that comes from sincere engagement and connection with each others’ truths, information, and passions in a way that creates openings for changes not merely at a personal or professional practice level but at organizational and societal levels!

    1. U, btw, are a Gardner-in-the-making – just look at the eloquence of that comment! I am privileged to be co-authoring that article with you and the awesome team we have 🙂

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