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It has been a year or so since I started my website and it has been evolving into a place where I want to be tracking my thoughts, resources and inspiration on various topics. So, I’ve updated my theme to reflect this progress. Some of the features are:
1) A horizontal top navigation bar
2) An Inspiration and Resume tab which covers a selected book list and possibly other types of lists ( which will be growing over time) and my most recent resume
3) A brief “About Me” section on the top RHS and an updated About section.
Enjoy and also please feel free to suggest great books to me! I’m an avid reader and am always on the hunt for more!
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I recently attended a roundtable hosted by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada for a 25@25 discussion. The discussion emerged from the 25@25 video competition as a forum for participants and partners to share their experiences and examine future ways to engage youth in promoting Canada-Asia relations.
The video competition was a huge success and what I thought to be a really creative way of engaging youth to think about issues about Canada-relations. The issues that came out of the contest, harness the collective capability and genius that would spur growth and research direction of the foundation. Some of the themes that emerged included: People as a resource, representation in the media, self-identity and green technology exchanges.
“Capabilities to develop new kinds of relationships, sense important developments, add value and turn nascent networked knowledge into compelling value are becoming the bread and butter of wealth creation and success.”
- Wikinomics, Don Tapscott
On a another level, it was a great learning opportunity for me to step into an area and network of which I was not really connected to, all because I stepped out of my network circle. It reminded me a great TED video by Ethan Zuckerman on Listening to Global Voices. He spoke about how even though the web connects the whole world, we really end up being stuck in our own web bubble rather than listening to what the world has to share.
So in the spirit of collaboration, here are my favourite sites on listening to global voices:
1) OpenIDEO: An online platform where people collaborate to design better for social good. It’s a wonderful dynamic resource on tackling global resources and I’m going to submit a solution to one of their problems soon!
2) World Pulse: A global network that broadcasts and unites women’s voices from all over to create a powerful voice for change. What I love about this is not only is it a print and web magazine but it’s also an interactive community newswire, PulseWire, where women can collaborate and connect to solve global problems.
3) Global Voices: An international community of bloggers who report on different global issues with topics ranging from arts to politics. It’s an amazing resource and my fav feature is the different languages that you can read the website in. (I occasionally flip the switch over to Indonesian, just cause! And it’s so interesting to read the same article both in English and in another language!)
4) paper.li: This is a little different than the above three platforms as it really is more a snapshot of the things/links that you tweet about, but I love the creative format and I find it super interesting the way it picks up on the different things I’m browse through online. Below is a snapshot of what it looks like and I thought I’ll share this one just for fun!
So..what global voices have you been listening to?
So here I am, one night away from my last day of classes as an undergraduate, with piles of work to finish up…but I really really want to share one thing…before the end of of an era: A beautiful passage on experience and the human condition.
The truth of experience always contains an orientation towards new experience. That is why a person who is called ‘experienced’ has become such not only through experiences, but is also open to new experiences. The perfection of his experience, the perfect form of what we call ‘experienced’, does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to be, on the contrary, someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them.
The dialectic of experience has its own fulfillment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to experience that is encouraged by experience itself. But then this gives the concept of experience that we are concerned with here a qualitatively new element. It refers not only to experience in the sense of the information that this or that thing gives us. It is that experience which must constantly be acquired and from which none can be exempt. Experience here is something that is part of the historical nature of man. Although in bringing up children, for example, parents may try to spare them certain experiences, experience as a whole is not a thing that anyone can be spared. Rather, experience in this sense involves inevitably many disappointments of one’s expectations and only thus is experience acquired. That experience refers chiefly to painful and disagreeable experiences does not mean that we are being especially pessimistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through negative instances do we acquire new experiences, as Bacon saw.
Every experience worthy of the name runs counter to our expectation. Thus the historical nature of man contains as an essential element a fundamental negativity that emerges in the relation between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we call experience in the proper sense. Insight is something to which we come. It too is ultimately part of the nature of a man, ie to be discerning and insightful.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Chapter: Analysis of effective-historical consciousness, ‘The Concept of Experience and the Essence of Hermeneutical Experience’)
Complex. Intriguing. Radically undogmatic. Experience with purpose.
Here’s to — not the end — but the continuation of something purposeful.