Flow (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

Components of flow

As Csikszentmihalyi sees it, there are components of an experience of flow that can be specifically enumerated; he presents eight:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness , the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time - our subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is not too easy or too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding , so there is an effortlessness of action.

Not all of these components are needed for flow to be experienced.

Group flow

Csikszentmihalyi suggests several ways in which a group could work together so that each individual member could achieve flow. The characteristics of such a group include:

• Creative spatial arrangements: Chairs, pin walls, charts, however no tables, therefore primarily work in standing and moving.
• Playground design : Charts for information inputs, flow graphs, project summary, craziness (here also craziness has a place), safe place (here all may say what is otherwise only thought), result wall, open topics
• Parallel, organized working
• Target group focus
• Advancement of existing one (prototyping)
• Efficiency increase by visualization
• Difference of the participants is a chance

References

• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0060920432

The last one percent...

Chris Carmichael, the coach of seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong:

"The last one percent most people keep in reserve is the extra per cent champions have the courage to burn."

Cubicle Warfare

"Politics is a necessary evil...it's also how things get done."

—Blaine Pardoe, author, "Cubicle Warfare"

Swing - state of arrival

World-class rower Craig Lambert in "Mind Over Water" (Houghton Miffin, 1998):

"Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing. . . . Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our
thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no
such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived.Swing is a state of arrival."

Mind like Water...

"In karate there is an image that's used to define the position of perfect readiness: "mind like water." Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriate to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact or underreact.

The power in a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle; it comes from a focused "pop" at the end of the whip. That's why petite people can learn to break board and bricks with their hands: it doesn't take calluses or brute strength, just the ability to generate a focused thrust with speed. But a tense muscle is a slow one. So the high levels of training in the martial arts teach and demand balance and relaxation as much as anything else. Clearing the mind and being flexible are key.

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines your thoughts about what you need to do, your children, your boss will lead to less effective results than you'd like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don't operate with a "mind like water.""

Source Ana Maria González

learning method Vs learning tools - from cooking to IT literacy

extract of a thread on slashdot.org - for entire thread, visit
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/03/12/0548224.shtml?tid=109&tid=146

COMMENT:

.....
when one of the objects of a computer program at a uni is to prepare students to work in the business world, why would you alienate them from the very systems that they most likely will be working on? Not very smart if you ask me.

RESPONSE:

Ever try to cook Chinese food? Compare it to Western cooking...

When my mom taught me how to cook, all she taught me was how to make a few things. Scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, and my dad taught me how to cook a steak on the grill. Then they both spent some time showing me how to follow a recipe under the reasoning that as long as I could follow a recipe I'd always be able to cook something tasty. Then I moved out onto my own without a cookbook. Luckily I went to work in the food service industry and learned how to cook. ANyway, this is typical of passing on cooking traditions and skills in the Western world from one generation to the next.

Now, I've been learning about Chinese food lately. In the last two years I've spent a lot of time getting recipes and cooking them, and failing. Failing? Why? Because I was applying Western cooking techniques (focus on measurement and explicit instructions) to Chinese cooking. It doesn't work well going that direction.

What I've learned recently about Chinese cooking (since I bought a cookbook that was written to bridge the gap that I had already run into) is that Chinese cooks pass down cooking methods. They teach how to stir-fry and choose spices, how to make the sauce. Rather than teach specific recipes. The food is actually very simple to cook, but you have to learn how to cook it. You don't follow a set of instructions, there's too many factors that can change. Instead you learn how to manage the heat, how to stir, how to steam, etc. Then, with this foundation, you learn about complimentary spices and how to make the sauces. The recipe might say "1 tablespoon of soy sauce" but what it really means is "jigger some soy sauce in there". I imagine that the actual chinese recipes say something like "put sauce of soy until sauce is the color of crow feathers".

What's the point?

If you know Chinese cooking techniques, you can easily and quickly learn how to cook anything that uses Western cooking techniques. Since Western cooking focusses on measurement and explicit instructions, whereas Chinese cooking focusses on method.

So, if a university wants to teach people in the Western style, they will focus on rote memorization and having the kids learn the tools that are currently used in business. If a university wants to teach people in the Chinese style, they'll teach method first, knowledge later. Combine the two and you have Wisdom.

So I ask, what is more valuable? Is it better to memorize the multiplication tables, or learn multiplication?

With that in mind, your entire argument (as well as the head of the program you were talking about) crumbles. If the reason you use MS products in an educational setting is so that people will know how to use MS products in the real world, you haven't taught them method. You've taught them rote. If you teach them instead the methods of word processing, spreadsheets, acounting, and so forth, then you give them the skills to adapt to any new situation they should encounter professionally.

In the end, it's all irrelevant. All that matters is that I'm finally serving kickin-ass Chinese food in my own kitchen. :)