I haven’t written much lately, despite having so much to share about my new collaborations in work and the thriving community life here in Aireys Inlet. Life has been full to brim and we have managed to keep a healthy balance between work-family-community-play. I have just spent a couple of hours reading through my favourite 3 blogs … all written by friends and colleagues. You should check out what Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Chris Corrigan have been writing about recently … because you won’t find too much recent stuff here! That’s about to change as I rediscover my passion …

I love this latest cartoon from Hugh McLeod at Gaping Void … Hugh writes about it by saying … “This cartoon was inspired by my friend, Mark Earls’ new book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”. Mark (@herdmeister), a former hot-shot London advertising planner, came to the conclusion that advertising needed to worry less about the usual buzzwords swishing around the industry, and more about the hard science of human behavior. He calls it “Herd Behavior”. People are hyper-social creatures who behave en masse, not individually. And there’s a lot of new science to back it up. Which renders a lot of old-school, command-and-control …

I have started playing around with Storify again. I am going to introduce some school teachers to Storify during a session this Thursday at my local school. The topic will be on knowledge curation and the social web. I can imagine how useful Storify could be to a teacher. Please let me know of any other useful tools that teachers can learn to use. Something that helps to store, curate and publish information/ideas/stories/knowledge. Here is a Storify story that contains the basic content of my session …   [View the story “Knowledge sharing, storage and co-creation” on Storify]

How well do you listen? It’s a practice that I have to continually work on in all aspects of life – as a parent, partner, friend, family and consultant. Like with most of us, my attention tends to drift toward my thoughts, ideas and next thing I want to say. With discipline and practice I have learned to really listen when facilitating groups. Here are some other people and ideas who have taught me about the art of listening: Chris Corrigan and listening – I have developed some habits and techniques that turn my attention toward the group. Lately I’ve …

“Radiant, he departed: Siddhartha watched him go. With deep joy, with deep solemnity he watched him go: saw each of his steps full of peace, saw his he’d full of splendour, saw his figure full of light.” Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, p 115. Happy Birthday Dad. Remembering your radiance and splendour.    Grahame Harold Brown 27th July 1939 – 29th December 2011