Over a period of time we figure it out to conclude that many things are cyclical – seasons, days and nights, full moons and new moons, autumn leaves withering and spring leaves blossoming, just to name a few. These are the things we can see, smell and feel.
These are not man-made. How about man-made things that are cyclical? How about fashions repeating themselves – we label them as retro. Pepsi and Coca-cola are coming out with retro-drinks. In IT we moved away from central processing to distributed and the pendulum is swinging back to central processing through cloud computing.
The things we eat and dispose of become compost for the things that we eat again. We can eat things that come out of using compost, but not the compost itself even though the things that we ate are the ones that went into making compost. We can’t drink the sea water, but we can drink that water that is pulled out of the sea as rain water on the land. The point I am trying to make here is that even though things are cyclical in nature, the point at which you are on that cycle matters for what you can do and can’t. A transformation is necessary to use or re-use the things that we can during this cyclical process.
Since COL inception is through the concept of circle and the circle being cyclical in nature, it forces us to be in sync with what is happening around us naturally. The learning may change as each season goes by, but we build on the learnings from the previous seasons. However, a transformation is necessary to use the things that we have learnt previously in the new setting.
If you google ISBN database to look for a central database holding all the books in the world, you will be presented with hundreds of sites, each claiming to be the leader in this area go give you what you are looking for. However, if you look at this with a bigger picture in mind, you will see that a search for a ‘single’ book has now been presented with hundred different ways in which you can look at the book with information tags that can take you to the places previously unknown to you. If you don’t transform this learning of surfing hundreds of sites to maintain the focus on the book that you are looking for, you will either get lost or get frustrated in not being able to decide on the site to choose to get what you want.
The wash out from this is focusing on one simple learning – more choices will waste more of your time. I call this as ‘fake learning’. Even the simple broadcasting of the daily news will also be fake when it is dramatized to an extent more than that is necessary. You may hear or see something that you think is coming up for you to see or hear, but as each commercial break goes by, you see yourself wasting more time than necessary waiting to hear that news that could have taken you perhaps less than minute when presented at last.
It brings us back to the C-quadrant – connect and collaborate. It should now make you more sense on the importance of how we should connect and how we should collaborate so as not to waste our time or someone else’s time.
Since it is now possible to get the news almost immediately as it happens, you tend to follow the news rather than to wait till it rationalizes – the way it was done when there were no radios or televisions. Following someone on twitter or following the news that is relevant or irrelevant is contributing to either ‘fake work’ or ‘fake learning’. Most often than not, you will see the same news item being repeated at different hours along with other more up to date news items. It is wasting more of your time once again. This is what we need to out watch out for in cyclical learning.
How about the internet fast becoming the place where you can do whatever you want to do at any point in time as more and more apps are discovering their ways into your gadgets that is connecting you to the world. Think about this. Even the cumbersome paper statements that you were once getting by postal delivery is no is now available as online statements, but you will have thousand different apps to store them, sort them, follow them and waste your time in doing so.
Each credit or debit transactions can be relayed back to you through the alert messages on your phones and emails. These things have become necessary evils in the connected world that we now live in. This again is wasting more your time in monitoring what you need to do in response to what has been relayed to you thus wasting more of your time that could have been used for a useful learning.
Is this the cause of a decline in learning abilities through the established ways in which the education is being delivered now OR can we use these commercial channels that businesses are so adept in using to reach out to its customs be used by the educational institutions too? I say, we can as long as the educational institutions start thinking students as their customers and teachers as the front-end service personnel to deliver the education that has been designed as a product of that institution.
Many of you may rebel at this idea of commercializing the education system. Do you think the education institutions are not commercialized already? Do you think that they are doing a favour by embarking on a noble purpose educating the masses? I don’t think so. Gone are the days when a Guru would go all the way in teaching his disciples without expecting anything in return. So you have to agree with me that it is a business of education that needs to adopt as other businesses do.
The only way to come out of this cyclical nature getting caught on wasting more time within a system is to travel to other quadrants regularly. Discover the things that are affecting you or your time, plan new ways to overcome that, setup new goals as benchmarks and acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to implement. Simply put – traverse the COL.