We are deep in the heart of the Social Age Safari. This is a prototype event, a live rehearsal, a chance to bring together a number of ideas to see what works. A series of three-hour hack events, separated by creative sessions, the energy is high, but the pace fairly relentless. It’s all a matter of joining the dots. With 50 people that’s a lot of expertise, a lot of insight, a lot of distractions too. The event is designed as a scaffolded social learning experience, in other words a series of sense making spaces. This community does the sense making, we just have to hold the space.
The trouble with formal learning is that it’s always an inherently abstract about everyday reality, it may be a great experience, but we leave it with the challenge of what to do out in the real world. In a social learning context, we are learning from each other, embedded in our everyday reality, grounded and pragmatic. But we still have a challenge, and that challenge is to find the structure to find the underlying meaning. Our intent is not to comment on problems, it is to come up with practical things could do about them.
The Social Age Safari is a three-day co-created event. It’s a luxury and privilege: the luxury of dedicated space for reflection, the privilege of doing it in such great company. But the interesting thing about the experience is that when we are given the time, we don’t necessarily utilise it.
This is a space to join the dots: to work out the multiple lines that we could draw, the ways we could navigate.
