--- First Cultures ---

                                                              [Truth in labeling]

The personal photo that I've been using is about 15 years old. I had hair then and it was dark, so, in the spirit of truth in labeling, I figured I'd retire it.

To the topic.....

I was at Auburn University 10 years (if you ignore the other 10 years that I worked to pay my way). I obtained two minors in World Literature. That means I have had several courses in various humanities - history, government, literature. It's rather disturbing how much got by me about how important first civilizations were in the development of Western Civilization (read that "European History").

For instance, I never picked up how important the people of the steppes were to Europe from the Roman period (B.C.) to the fall of the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages. Except for a couple of small glitches in history, Europe (and America) would be Mongol today.

I am still learning a lot of surprising facts about Native American culture and how important they were in the growth of the United States and Canada and how the totally disreputable behavior of the Federal government was often completely at odds with the will of the American people. Some things, I guess, remain constant.

Much of my new knowledge comes from, where? the library, of course. Suddenly, I'm finding all these Teaching Company courses on Eastern civilization, the people of the Eastern European and Asian steppes, Native American cultures, and serendipitously, lectures at the library about these cultures. Once a month Active Minds presents an excellent lecture on some subject - I always hear things I didn't already know and there's always a tie in to current events. Last month was Lewis and Clark. Before that it was Buddhism.

I can see some study on Australian Aboriginal culture in my future.

                                                                  [Linden tree]

We didn't have these in the part of Alabama that I come from, although there was a small town named "Linden" just south of me. The name had little to do with the tree, though. It was originally called "Screamersville" because the animals were noisy at night. Later the name was changed to commemorate the Hohenlinden family, who were some of the early settlers in the area. The name was later shortened to "Linden". Place names are interesting. This tree, though - bees love it and it smells great and it fires off all kinds of allergies.

Does your local library have educational programs for adults? You might want to check them out.

Active Minds (http://www.activeminds.com/index.html) is a Denver based organization that offers lifelong learning experiences for elders and adults, but I see that they're also in Florida. Maybe there's something similar in your area. If not, perhaps something could be started. Active Minds would be a good model to build from.

Why "go out"?

First, more succulents!

and clouds building up on the horizon.

The bottom line reason for this blog is to encourage people to explore their world in person - away from book, TV and computer - or in addition to book, TV, and computer. Why would I think that this is important?

Lifelong learning is a way to really connect with your world - a way to actually be a part of it all. So many of us don't even know our neighbors, much less the institutions that support us, tools that we can use to enrich our lives, and the "wilderness" that surrounds us.

I've begun writing another manual for DANSYS, this one suggesting ways that DANSYS  can be used by students in school and outside of school. (If you're curious, it's at http://www.theriantimeline.com/DANSYSStudents.ods ). In it, I bring up Bloom's Taxonomy of learning. The Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the kinds of things that go into complete learning of a subject. It is intended as a way to construct learning objectives. There are three parts: the cognitive domain, affective domain, and psychomotor domain. It's as if people associate "learning" with only the first domain (and, indeed, I think only the first domain was ever published in book form.) But the intention was that all learning involves mind, emotions, and skills.

I will use a rather inflammatory example. My emotional opinion is that it was a terrible thing that the United States did to Japanese American citizens during World War II by confiscating their belongings and placing them in concentration camps. But there are many World War II veterans that think it was perfectly reasonable. Is this an emotionally loaded issue? You'd better believe it - on both sides. Can you possibly learn about it by watching documentaries? I don't think so - you have to get out of your house, talk to the people who were involved to understand their sides of the story, go and see the camps, or at least exhibits explaining what happened, immerse yourself in the facts.

Even simple mathematics - can you really learn how to multiply without getting a pen and paper and actually scrawling some multiplication exercises out on paper? In fact, all learning involves thinking, feeling, and doing.

Why do some people think that the solution to their life problems involves taking other peoples' lives? One answer is that they never learned better alternatives for dealing with their life problems. Why do people think that learning is a chore? Part of the answer is that they never experienced the true joy of learning in the sterile learning environments provided by schools, and, worse, they were tormented by boring teaching during a very impressionable age.

A car enthusiast will diligently read the manual of a new car. But the same person will apparently relegate the care and operation of their body to someone else - a doctor or (shiver) a life coach. What's more important to understand - car or body?

I believe that the world is our home and to live to our fullest, we need to know how to use the "equipment" that is made available to us.

--- Your adventures ---

2016

Andalusia is far south in Alabama. There are no mountains near there. It's far south of the fall line. But there is a waterfall about 5 miles north of there. It's in a little town called River Falls and I was curious as to why a town that far south would be called "River Falls", so I drove down there one weekend to find out.

I asked several people if there was a waterfall in the area and no one knew until I stopped at a convenience store, ready to give it up and go back home. I asked the counter person, who didn't know but said that, if anyone did know, it would be the lady over there, a mail carrier. Sure enough, she knew and gave me directions to an impressive waterfall in town.

                                                        Photo of River Falls waterfall

It's my experience that people don't know what they have in their own neighborhoods.

Adventure can be near or far. It can be as simple as cooking a new dish or as complex as a vacation in a place that you've never visited. A surgical procedure is definitely an adventure. Do you dare go to YouTube and find a video of the same procedure?

But above all, an adventure can be a learning experience. Where are your adventures?

--- Getting started in programming ---

2016

There are still plenty of reasons to program computers.

Most software products have a limited bag of tricks. The developer has tried to figure all the features that a typical user would want from their program but there is no truly typical user. Sooner or later, everyone is going to gaze dreamily into the distance and say, "I sure wish this program could....(fill in the blank.)" The answer is to be able to program the computer to do what you want it to do.

A lifelong learner has much more reason to program. Programming a concept into a computer - teaching the computer to do what you're learning how to do - requires that you take the concept apart (analysis) and then put it back together in a form a computer will understand. You get to see the inner workings of the concept. How can you help but to learn?

There are many very accessible languages available to the beginner.

In fact, BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It is designed to be easy to understand and easy to use. Even better, most of the office productivity suites like Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and WPS uses a version of BASIC as a macro language. If one of these suites doesn't do something you want it to do, you can teach it to do the task and it will happily oblige you.

I like LibreOffice Basic because LibreOffice is a free, full powered office suite and, if you are using it to look at my Excursion documents, which are LibreOffice documents, then you're already set for programming with LibreOffice Basic.

There are programs that are designed to be fun and useful.

Scratch is a programming language consisting of blocks that you snap together. It was originally designed to manipulate graphic images in a learning environment, but with Custom Blocks, you can program it to perform more typical computer tasks.

If you want to play around with Scratch, you can find it here:

https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_Wiki_Home

Two languages that provide instant feedback as you program are Python and LiveCode. Both show you what your statements do as you type them in.

Python is a very popular, but fairly typical language. It seems too be very easy to  learn using supplied tutorials and user guides. You can find it here:

https://www.python.org

A modern version of a cool, old language (it was way before it's time back in the 70s) is LiveCode, an update of a language called HyperCard. It's also an object oriented language that will manipulate graphic objects, but it does much, much more. It's intended to be able to work with many platforms. Look at it here:

https://livecode.com

A similar such language also designed to be multiplatform (you can write programs to be used with many different systems - they're even working to make their product compatible with smartphone operating systems) is Xojo and here is their website:

http://www.xojo.com

In future articles, I will be giving you some tips for programming in LibreOffice Basic, primarily because it is very accessible, and most of the work I'm doing now is in that language, but, certainly, if you decide you like programming, look at these other languages and you might even want to spread out and play with some of the many (many!) other languages like C, FORTRAN, or (Whoa!) the assembly language for your processor.

--- Learning on a computer ---

2016

Computers are excellent platforms for learning. By its very nature a computer is multimedia and can engage most of the senses in the learning experience (they haven't hooked smell and taste in yet and maybe that's a good thing). Throw in a portable computer in the form of a smartphone or tablet and the learning goes with you.

I  can look up practically anything on the Internet and my digital library is enormous - there are public libraries without the resources I have on my desk.

Before I retired and moved to Denver, I found digital copies of all the books in my large library that I could and digitized audio tapes that I had made. There are a lot of sources on the Internet for digital books. Websites like the Gutenberg project (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) and the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) provide access to a breathtaking array of books, software, audio, and video in the public domain. There are booksellers that provide digital versions of more recent works but many embed security code (DRM) in their products so they can only be viewed on their own software - the product, in effect, belongs to them and you buy the ability to see it. The Calibre Ebook management system, a free download, has a function that allows you to search the Internet for books and will alert you to the presence of security code in the books.

Calibre lets you maintain a home digital library and provides a reader for most ebook formats. It has a lot of features. If you want to check it out, the website is: https://calibre-ebook.com/ .

Another powerful learning technique is programming. If you can tell a computer how to do something, you really understand it because computers require very exact instructions. I'll be showing you some programming techniques later.

Again, computers can connect you very intimately with the thing you are learning about. When I was first getting into computers, if you wanted to connect a sensor to a computer, you had to build the interface, which was fun, but if you made a mistake, you ruined an expensive computer. Now, you can connect a desktop, laptop, portable, or smartphone computer to all kinds of stuff - thermometers, spectroscopes, telescopes, microscopes, electrocardiograms - the list is endless because it keeps growing.

--- Lectures for lifelong learning ---

2016

I've mentioned that I'm a lifelong learner. That's my hobby but saying that is like saying I only eat food. My idea of lifelong learning is to try to pick up as much and as varied information as I can in this life. Adventuring, for me is just another phase of lifelong learning.

My bookmarks for online sources of lectures make up a long list. Still, I have some favorites - more coverage, better quality - and I'll share a few with you. Four are sources of free downloads (called "opencourseware") and one is commercial but well worth every cent.

Many colleges and universities make their content available to anyone. Only their students can get credit for taking the courses but, for lifelong learners, credit isn't the important part - it's the experience and the information. MIT is preeminent. They provide opencourseware in just about every field from sailing to differential equations and medical technology. The courses vary from "Here's the books we use. Read them." to full video lectures with textbook, tests, and software. But the video lectures they do have are excellent. Here's a link:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Another excellent source of lectures is Gresham College. They have several series of special lectures, not particularly opencourseware. The topics are varied but the speakers are active in their fields, informative, and engaging. Gresham College can be found here:

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/attend

Academic Earth brings together many of the best open courses from many schools. They try to keep the quality high and, for the most part, succeed. Here's a link to that site:

http://academicearth.org

Another source that brings together different sources is the Wikipedia article on opencourseware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare

It provides a worldwide sample of educational opportunities.

The Teaching Company is a commercial source of courses. The lecture series are rather expensive but every item goes on sale at least once during the year and, then, the prices are very affordable. The company auditions their lecturers and use customer feedback to choose future topics and lecturers. One thing I like about these products is that the lecturers are active in their fields and I almost always hear things that I've never heard before. I've never bought a Teaching Company product and regretted the purchase. Here is their home site:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com

--- Appreciation and mindfulness ---

Many people have taken art appreciation classes and many more have been through music appreciation classes. I, personally, having taken both, have never been in a class that explained what "appreciation" was. Mostly people learn names and dates, techniques and composition elements, types of art objects, etc. Is that supposed to help you appreciate the art or is that, in some mystical way, an act of appreciation?

In fact, appreciation is a mode of perceiving. There are several ways to appreciate art, and that can be visual art, music, drama, dance, a fine meal, or a sporting event.

For a while, as a vocational evaluator, my office was isolated in a building in back of the main facility building, so, when I had no client, I could have music playing as much and as loudly as I wanted and my tastes are very broad. The result is that, now, just about all music is background music. That is one mode of perception in which the perceiver is barely even conscious of an art object. It's just there as sort of a pleasant element of the environment.

Another form of art perception is pure entertainment. Art is art because it's beautiful in some way. I have only been to one concert (barring all the gospel music concerts I've been to, but seeing as I am a retired gospel musician, that goes without saying) and that was a Jethro Tull concert in Atlanta, Georgia. I went for no other reason than to hear the band. Jethro Tull puts on a very entertaining concert.

An art historian may visit a traveling exhibition for a very different reason and you may see them standing in front of one piece making copious notes. One out of a hundred people may view that piece of art in the same way as the historian.

Appreciation, whether it is of painting, or music, wines or football, is simply another way of appreciating art. It could be called immersion. And, indeed, what is being perceived doesn't even have to be art. Mathematicians can approach math as an object of appreciation. A chemist may very likely appreciate the chemical reaction that is happening in their laboratory. Appreciation implies a certain amount of passion.

An act of appreciation is prefixed by preparation. That is why there are so many names, dates, and technical terms in an art appreciation class. There is an attempt to understand the background of art objects. In 1802, Beethoven wrote his Second Symphony, a spry and jaunty piece full of musical jokes that irritated many of his critics. One wrote that it was a "hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refused to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death." To modern ears, the symphony sounds great and perhaps even joyful. It adds something of spice to the listener to realize that Beethoven has placed his severe gastric problems to music in that last movement.

The only way I can enjoy a football game (I am not a devotee of spectator sports), is to read histories of the players, understand the rivalries, and go into the experience as a social psychologist observing a conflict between two very serious teams of stakeholders. In a similar way, I can no longer enjoy any music fully without this "total immersion" process.

Another approach to art that is not mutually exclusive to appreciation is mindfulness. Despite the Buddhist history of mindfulness, it is a very natural "process" (or, maybe more accurately, "state"). The way Temple Grandin describes the mental processes of animals (in Animals in Translation), many people with autism, and, in my own observations, many Weres, mindfulness is very natural in nature. Briefly, I think in pictures and if I have nothing particularly interesting on my mind, I'm not consciously thinking at all. In other words, I let my environment happen to me, perceptually.

Followers of Buddhist and other contemplative disciplines often work hard many years to achieve this state of mind. Why?

Well, C. S Lewis often wrote that trying to be good could easily distract a person from actually being good. In the same way, listening to a piece of music actively can often destroy the joy of just listening to the music.

I compose and, so, I am painfully aware of what goes into music - its composition and its performance. I catch every glitch and, if it's a tape of one of my own performances, I am doubly aware of the horrible assaults I make on the musical sensibilities of my audience (whether they are conscious of them or not!). I am incapable of listening to a recording of myself without picking it apart.

But I usually, very pointedly, set the evaluative part of my brain aside when in the presence of others' artistic productions.

Most people have an internal dialog that just.will.not.stop. This is the very antithesis of mindfulness. In the mindful state, as I said above, you let the environment happen to you. You simply shut your brain's internal dialog up and let what's going on around you guide your perceptions. The result is that, without all that internal noise, you perceive and remember subtle details of your environment much better.

I had a friend send me the theme music of two anime saying that they struck him as very similar but he couldn't figure out why. When I listened to them, I could practically see that the main theme of one was the base theme of the other. When I told him, he couldn't hear the two pieces without recognizing the one in the other. A characteristic of mindfulness is that the whole mind seems to be involved in the perceiving.

And what does all this have to do with adventuring?

I propose that the ideal mindset for adventuring for the purpose of lifelong learning is a combination of appreciation and mindfulness. Learn everything that might be relevant on your adventure before you begin and then stop talking to yourself when you hit the trail. Your preparation will make you sensitive to the topic you are persuing and your mind will log all the relevant details without all the distractions involved in trying to learn.

That said, I can recommend a lecture series by The Teaching Company called Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation, presented by Mark W. Muesse (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/practicing-mindfulness-an-introduction-to-meditation.html ). It's a pretty good introduction to how to do mindfulness. As for appreciating nature? Well, that's what this blog is all about.