Themes for thought

I’m exploring themes and concepts for this new domain location. The joy in creating something like this is that your imagination runs free, until the reality of doing brings you to full stop. Both are essential in crafting your digital persona with care and intention. As I begin again, anew, in view, I’m building my domain by thinking it over and designing it, in my head and mapping it out on paper, before I begin. There may be times ahead where my imagination faces the hard reality of what is not possible, but until that time, I’m letting things fly.

My early thoughts about crafting my domain is to build using familiar themes and metaphors. I’ve been hooked by David Thornburg’s primordial metaphors for learning – cave, campfire, watering hole, life, and holodeck. I’ll be applying these, in an adapted way, to my domain presence. I’m still exploring them, making sense of them and ‘extending my thinking’ about these underlying themes.

Caves: places for reflection, meta-analysis, cave walls as curations of stories, collections of artifacts that are meaningful, archives of events and actions; caves can also be places for ‘speleology’ to go deeper, get lost, map your route, find your way, get lost again; caves are not just moments of darkness – contrasts to light; magical and amazing views; zen moments; reflections of formal or informal education events.

Campfires: Thornburg relates this as lectures in classrooms where the teacher is the master storyteller; for me, there’s no central focus, it’s shared storytelling; sitting for moments in time; together; focussing on the fire, not each other; someone takes fire making duty; there’s food and camaraderie shared; campfires have beginnings and endings; building the fire takes precision; this could be classrooms, courses, online learning events, MOOCS; involve stories; food for thought cause there’s food involved.

Watering Holes: gathering spaces; sustenance; sharing person to person, group to group; conversations around and about something; messy thinking; talking and doing and talking; dangers can lurk below the water line; global; universal; coming together; could be conferences or video hangouts.

Stage: performance moments; presentations at conferences; reports; academic writing for journals; publications; sharing time in a classroom; visible; angst and anxiety; PhD dissertation events

Thornburg also describes life and his newest metaphor is the holodeck. I’ll hold these in reserve for now and consider them more as I read and reflect on these themes.

I’m adding a metaphor for the ‘walk about’ since this connects to my own practice of walking while reflecting, but also allows for the metaphor of vista views to come into play. A primordial metaphor for early peoples was the ‘walk about’ to get the lay of the land, learn where the hazards were located, find sustainable food sources, and get a feel for the space they would inhabit.

Walk About: journey; time consuming; attention to detail; tracking; alone or together; purpose but random; look for high ground; mark repositories for later; mapping; range beyond borders that bound landscapes e.g. rivers, mountains, forests; how far can I go?; walk & talk; walk & think; walk & meditate; explorations around a topic or space.

So, to start, I’ll build these five metaphors into my domain and connect my work in digital spaces and places under these metaphors. For example, my current studies in formal education will nest under the CAVE metaphor, my courses will be located under the CAMPFIRE metaphor, sharing conversations with Virtually Connecting will fit under WATERING HOLE, and conference presentations will slide under the STAGE metaphor. The mapping of my domain and vista-view thinking will be listed under the WALK ABOUT theme.

And so it begins! Designing my own cockpit panel. Now let’s see how it’s going to fit into my cPanel and DoOO.