idealawg

Med students learn how graphics can effectively communicate: Why not law students? Lawyers? Mediators?

Those of you who have been following with me the pictograph path (using images to communicate) may guess that I was happy to learn of a program at Penn State College of Medicine. From the Penn State Web page:

Since 2009, fourth-year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine have created comics as part of a course called “Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives.” The course was developed to show fourth-year medical students how graphics and text can be used to effectively communicate complex medical narratives, and to help students develop their own stories into graphic depictions.

...

Of course not all medical students are naturally gifted writers or artists, but as one can see from the following pages, everyone can tell stories and everyone can draw pictures. While this course is unlike any other in their medical school experience, the students rise to the task, sharing their reflections on becoming a doctor with honesty, wit, and creativity.

Enjoy the following Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives by the medical students at Penn State College of Medicine!

Click to see what the medical students created.

Because of the benefits of communicating with visual methods in addition to or other than the written word, I imagine the medical students learn much about their own stories and ways to communicate with patients, colleagues, family, and friends. Images are

Mindful Ghosts

While composing this photo, I created this poem, too.

Mindful ghosts

Prefer rare light—

Eerie boasts

Grow by night.

BARBRI offering a class on mindfulness

Announcing email from Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness in Law:

We wanted to share some exciting news from one of our colleagues at BARBRI who has recently created a 4-week mindfulness based bar prep program, set to launch tomorrow - June 25, 2013. We encourage those of you in the law school world, or who know students preparing for the bar exam, to share this widely so that students can access this excellent resource; from previewing the content, we believe it will be of great benefit, and it is available to anyone -- not just those enrolled in Barbri.
 
The audio programs have been developed in partnership with the internationally respected University of California- San Diego Center for Mindfulness, and are aimed specifically at teaching students how to control stress and focus on bar exam preparation.  By listening to an online 30-minute audio session once per week and practicing just 15 minutes 4 times per week, students will develop skills to apply immediately to current studies and in preparing for and taking the bar exam itself.

Further information from Barbri:
In addition to learning these helpful techniques and strategies, we invite students to participate in our ongoing efforts to improve our learning technologies and methods.  In this effort, we have partnered with the University of Missouri Schools of Law, Psychology and Anthropology to help us gather data on the effectiveness of this program.  We will send follow-up surveys, after the bar exam to learn about students’ experience with this resource.  This information will help us further expand and refine our products and will support the expansion of mindfulness as a wellness and productivity tool in the legal profession.
 
To gain access to these programs, students must OPT-IN by clicking here, and this will also serve as a registration to our bi-weekly wellness tip email.
 
Current BARBRI students will be able to access this program through the Enrolled Student Center once they have opted in.
Non-BARBRI students will be able to access the same programs on the external website here once they have opted in.
 
Please feel free to forward this information to all students, faculty and administration whom you believe will be interested in providing this ground-breaking resource to their students. 
 
Best wishes,
The Mindfulness Initiative team

Being productively dangerous by ignoring perfectionism: Learning bold from a story told

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.
From "Defeat" by Kahlil Gibran [should be centered on the page but that function of Typepad is not working today]

In skimming the new book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!, I ran into a story that has influenced me ever since. Not a day has gone by in the week, plus a day, since the reading that I have not found motivation in the story. As I learn new things such as iPhoneography, I now jump in more quickly and easily, making an ever-wider detour around perfectionism. I hope the story's influence does not wear off but instead lasts until the jumping-in attitude and skill is mastered by me at the level of unconscious competence.

Another lesson I learned from this story: The effects of a story, even a short one, can be potent. Actually I relearned that lesson, as I am already convinced of story's clout. And now here's that story:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Like the story?

Two signs: Two ways to turn

 

Is technology making us stupid—or smarter than we’ve ever been?

The title of this blog post is the first line in a new piece by Annie Murphy Paul titled "Rules for thinking with tech." She writes:

Is technology making us stupid—or smarter than we’ve ever been? Author Nicholas Carr memorably made the case for the former in his 2010 book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. This fall we’ll have a rejoinder of sorts from writer Clive Thompson, with his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better.
 
My own take: technology can make us smarter or stupider, and we need to develop a set of principles to guide our everyday behavior, making sure that tech is improving and not impeding our mental processes. Today I want to propose one such principle, in response to the important question: What kind of information do we need to have stored in our heads, and what kind can we leave “in the cloud,” to be accessed as necessary?

Click to read the rest. This question of whether technology is helping or hurting is hot. I watch as friends and colleagues take positions on the matter and then argue vehemently for their point of view. I like Paul's approach: It's how you use technology that makes it a positive or negative influence so let's find the ways to use it with wisdom.

Note: Here's a related article by Paul from which a couple of the paragraphs in the above-linked-to post were originally published: "‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace The Traditional Kind" (TIME).

Miksang contemplative photography: Meditation with a camera

Intention and discipline are required to practice meditation with your camera. To learn more, watch this short video of Michael Wood talking about what gets in the way of seeing in the moment and how to overcome those obstacles. He also describes the process versus the result, control, appreciation, seeing clearly, and discovery.

Note: If you can't read the haiku I put on my photo, it is below. Clicking on the image will make it larger, too.

this world of dew
is yes, a world of dew
and yet . . .
--Issa Kobayashi

(I first saw the haiku in Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart.)

Note (added later): Click to watch another video on miksang contemplative photography and mindful seeing.

Want to help yourself and others get more done (and enjoy the doing)? Here's an excellent method

If you want to support people, including yourself, in making changes or accomplishing goals, read The Progress Principle. The simple message: Research shows that if we can see our progress, no matter how small, we are motivated to keep on the path towards the change or goal. I can't tell you how many times I have recommended the book, or how many times people have read the book and then sent me a hearty "thank you."

For a quick overview of the book, click to watch this video (99u) of coauthor Dr. Teresa Amabile. In it she mentions that a person can track their progress in many ways including using an app; one example of this kind of app is iDoneThis, which you can download for free.

A related technique comes from, of all people, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. It's called "Don't Break the Chain" and is decribed at lifehacker:

I finally decided to give Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret a try. It's more commonly known as "Don't Break the Chain," and the concept is simple: spend some amount of time doing a desired activity every day and, when you do, cross off that day on a calendar. This creates a chain of Xs showing your progress. If you don't do your specified task on one day, you don't get an X and that chain is broken. It seems almost too simple to work, but it's allowed me to accomplish so much more than I ever thought possible.

And here's an app to support you in not breaking the chain: Wonderful Day.

If you have not already tried harnessing the progress principle, I urge you to give it a try.

Note: One of many reasons I am a believer in the value of the progress principle (other than that I have seen it work for myself and others) is because it is compatible with some of the solution-focused techniques, such as scaling. I have blogged about solution-focused approaches in the past, e.g., here, here, and here.

Green hair and Parmesan cheese: Ask big, new, shiny-bright questions about mediation

Mediation can be boring. In the last couple of years, I have talked with several experienced conflict professionals who have echoed my feeling of boredom. The boredom does not so much flow from being with parties in conflict but from the discussions among practitioners. I sense that too frequently we are playing small, our thinking and acting constrained, and governed excessively by the past.

And for those us of who have been involved in the field for decades, the feeling of deja vu descends upon us as we hear the same old discussions arising anew, from questions about process accreditation to prickly analyses of party autonomy and caucusing to debates about mediator self-awareness and mindfulness. We've been there and done that and know deep in our hearts that those may not be the right questions for the 21st century.

Always on the lookout for ways to ascertain the best questions to ask myself, parties, and the field, I was delighted to learn that Dr. Roberta Ness has a new book. I savored her first book. She teaches a class on innovation and is dean of University of Texas School of Public Health. (Click to watch her TEDxHouston talk on increasing innovation.) Today I listened to an interview of Dr. Ness (WGBH News) in which she talks about all of her books and how to become more creative.

In the interview she looks at this question: What if you could define—and distill—innovation and creativity? She says that innovation is teachable (although it takes practice like playing a musical instrument) and geniuses work from a toolbox. Her first book Innovation Generation describes those tools. She talks about her concern that the US is facing a lack of imagination and that schools are not teaching students to be creative. Even though kids' IQs are going up, their creativity is going down.

Ness says when a 3-year-old colors in a coloring book or draws a picture, he may decide to use the green crayon for hair; the typical school soon teaches him that is not an acceptable option. On the other hand, a philosophy and practice of education that does raise students' ability to innovate is Montessori, and Ness includes Maria Montessori as one of the people she profiles in her new book Genius Unmasked.

A threshold skill of innovation is frame-shifting. Ness explains that frames are expectations we have through which we filter new information. What's a frame-shift? From the WGBH site:

"Focus On Passing Down Your Values, Not Money"

The Goodwin Games might be a fun show to watch. Whether you watch or not, the article describing the new comedy makes some good points about legacy and inheritance. Excerpt:

The Goodwin Games, a new Fox TV comedy starring Beau Bridges, is a little wacky but it makes a vital personal finance point between laughs: Parents should ensure their children will inherit their estates as they wish, of course, but it’s equally important – maybe even more important – that they pass on their values.

How are you doing on that score?

An intriguing finding that caught my eye in the recent survey of people over 45, Americans’ Perspectives on New Retirement Realities and the Longevity Bonus, from Merrill Lynch and the Age Wave consulting firm, really underscores this view.

Click to read the rest of "Focus On Passing Down Your Values, Not Money" (Forbes).