Food For Thought: Discovering who we are.

This week I wanted to share three separate sections to my Food for Thought that I hope will help you know more whilst at the same time encouraging deeper thought about where we are going and who we are on our journey towards the 2020's. As you know I have been travelling a lot recently and on returning home have felt grateful to be able to come home to two loving and caring people, Nok and Kenneth, whilst being equally grateful for enjoying a good life with you all. In this 2 minute video by Deepak he talks about the importance of being grateful and focusing on that to create abundant consciousness, something we should regard as more important than the economics of abundance that so much of the world is focused upon.

Last week I posted on my Food for Thought for Parents a new resource from Commonsense Media called the ultimate guide to Facebook. Thought that you might be interested as well as it answers some frequently asked questions. Hopefully this information will give you the tools to guide both parents and students in their use of youtube.

• What's the best way to keep tabs on my kids' YouTube-watching?

• How can I find out what my kid has been watching on YouTube?

• How can I minimize my kids' exposure to iffy videos on YouTube?

• How can I find out who's behind the videos my kid watches on YouTube?

• How can I manage the related videos on YouTube?

• Can I get rid of ads on YouTube?

• What should I say to my kid about all the mean comments people leave on YouTube?

• Are there any parental controls on YouTube?

• How can I find good stuff on YouTube? 

Finally,  I couple of thought provoking 4 minute videos that link together on the theme raised last week by Yuval Harari, who am I? We know this is going to be important because the better we, and our children and students, know ourselves the less control AI will be able to exert over us. The first by Jim Carey and Alan Watts encouraged me to think about the challenges that we need to understand before we can prepare our students to think deeply about who they are.  As we all know this is not an easy task and in this short video it becomes clear that it is probably more complicated than it at first may seem. How many of us have truly discovered who we are?

Discovering who we are and being brave enough to be that person is the theme of this upbeat video from Way We Work TED series. This video is about bringing your whole self to work. How many of us really do that? How many of us only bring others perceptions of ourselves to work each day? How can we encourage our students to be themselves? This all links back tour mission and the achievement culture and ensuring that our rules and systems do no harm to each person in our community and that they allow each and everyone of us to flourish alongside each other.

AND for those who want to go deeper here is the Metaphysics of Inception, which raises important questions about our reality. It is 20 minutes of deep thinking about who we are and what is our reality? A quote in the narrative that I found very insightful is" is the idea that our reality can happen unconsciously.  If our reality is dictated by the mind this means that there are constructing forces beyond our conscious presence as our mind contains subconscious layers and emotional currents that run deeper than our immediate awareness and this adds a whole new level of vulnerability, for it implies our reality and by extension our identity is susceptible to manipulation." This returns us the the dangers of Big Data, Algorithms and AI to control us and our reality. To an extent this manipulation and control has already begun because of our attachment to our tech world of digital devices and social media.