This year i am carrying out a critical reappraisal of my body of published work as part of a broader analysis and reflection on the context of the Social Age. Which is another way of saying that i am looking both backwards, and forwards, and deciding what to leave behind.
My reflections will inform the eventual publication of a Social Age Handbook, which will capture one of the central pillars of my work and current understanding. But it will also lead to an archive series: books which will be ‘retired’ from the catalogue. Books that i am leaving behind.
I published the first part of the work this week: a look back at the Singapore Diary, which is a book about ‘Learning, Knowledge, and Meaning’.
Revisiting this work was quite comforting: it was familiar, but i could quite easily see how some of my language, and understanding, had changed. Not all of it, but some of it. In some ways the most surprising thing was not what had changed, but how some ideas have remained relatively static. I’m not sure if this is reassuring or alarming: perhaps everything should have changed, evolved, if i am not to remain trapped in yesterdays understanding?
Finding Voice
I was rather reticent about restarting the Social Leadership Daily work this year: i don’t know why, but it had become a weight for me, a friction in my thinking. Possibly it had become too heavy.
Anyway: i am rather pleased to have discovered a new voice and energy with it this year. I think the writing is shorter, and more poetic. Perhaps something of the voice that i found for the Humble Leader book.
The idea of voice has been with me for a few weeks now: i ran the two Campfires which considered ‘our many voices’, and these were insightful. The idea of our many voices, and how our relationship with them may be fluid.
It’s odd: i shared a short post late on Thursday night, to be honest, not something i was that happy with, and yet it seemed to land well. Perhaps it’s fragility gave it some kind of value.
I like the idea that our voice is fluid, although in that work i also consider how voices can be silenced, or discredited, or taken away. Everything casts a shadow.
Learning Science writing
Progress continues on the Learning Science work, and i’ve published two pieces this week which, i think, illustrate the approach quite nicely.
The first piece, on metacognition, is a piece of some certainty: it’s based on the research and covers quite a lot of ground.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2023/01/19/humility-as-action/
The second is a hypothesis, an idea, and is far more speculative: it considers Social Metacognition, presented as a feature of, and in the context of, the Social Age.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/workingoutloud-on-learning-science-metacognition/
I like that this work will contain both certainty and curiosity, so a foundation, and something to develop on top of it.
Perhaps all our work should contain these two things, for if we are trapped in our own certainty, we are weaker for it.
Best wishes
Julian
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