Author: Mat Schulze

professor, linguist, writer, blogger, manifestor Reflecting on change and complexity. Thinking about learning – learning to think. Smithing words and professing. Personal on texterium.org, professional on pantarhei.press

pre: What were you thinking? And what do the tags mean?

Panta Rhei

This is our initial set of tags. We implemented them on the site first to have a guideline for ourselves.

Change is not just the first word alphabetically. It is the central concept we are thinking about. It’s a cliché to say that change is the only constant. It certainly will make a frequent appearance in our writing. The topics and concepts will change; the tags might change; our approach will change. And all that is good. Some of the concepts from the social sciences – coadaptation, complex system, development, dialectic, dynamic system, nonlinearity, social dynamics – help us to understand change better, enable us to to talk – and write – about change, and facilitate living and working with change.

We have been working in Language Education for some years. Our linguistic training is helping us to make sense of many things in this world. Thought and language are inextricably linked. Everyone of us also uses language to construct our identity. We all mediate our social relationships with language. So, concepts such as cognition, common ground, communication, discourse, discourse analysis, discursive construction, language development, metacognition, negotiation of meaning, rhetoric, textual analysis, transcultural, word meaning, will be central to our pondering of life’s and work’s questions.

People work in teams, are part of a smaller or larger organization, and are members of communities and societies. Some of us find themselves in leadership positions. Especially at times of change – and change is the only constant 😉 – such social concepts gain in importance. We will involve the following: leadership, management, org behavior, org culture, org theory, social dynamics.

Although we both think of ourselves as predominantly rational and pragmatic, we are well aware that we would not have a full grasp of this world in all its beautiful facets and not a full picture of a fellow human, if we only relied on analysis and rational thought. Therefore, we will ponder questions of spiritualism, spirit, energy, and emotion.

Why are we conducting such discussions in a public blog? Both of us have been teaching and training different groups of adults (and to a lesser extent also teenagers and younger children). We hope to be able to put our knowledge, expertise, and experience – manifested in this emerging blog – to good use soon by holding workshops, training, teaching, consulting, and coaching.

But first we will explore individual concept tags in individual blog posts and see where this leads us in our thinking, and what feedback and questions we will receive from you.

pre: This was an empty post

Panta Rhei

About a week ago, I took some time and built a little skeleton of blog posts to set up the functionality of our site. Chris and I began the Panta Rhei site for two reasons (I believe; he will correct me soon if I am wrong):

  • We believe that with our joint expertise, experience, and education, we have a couple of things to share, things that we hope others might find helpful.  We have always shared them with family, colleagues, students, friends, … at conferences, in the classroom, in meetings and informal conversations. We want to reach out more and do this more systematically.
  • At this stage, our thoughts are on different phenomena, challenges, fields, prospects, questions, … It is a whole complex – a bit like a nourishing, comforting stew – of ideas, insights, lived experiences, learned theorems. Difficult to digest and even more difficult to name the ingredients and teach the recipe. So initially, we will use this blog to bring clarity and system to our thoughts. To stay in the picture: we don’t expect anybody to want our stew exactly the way we have had it simmering for many years. We will use the stew as a solid base for a variety of soups, soups that are not only nourishing but also presentable and transparent. In other words, each blog entry will bring more clarity to one thought. And we decided to do this “live” and publish each blog post immediately or soon after writing.

We are hoping to get your reactions, your comments, your questions, …

This post has been tagged with all 36 tags we currently have for this blog to give you an idea what this is all gonna be about. A little more in this vein in the next post.

pre: First blog post

Panta Rhei

Everything has a beginning. Has everything? Probably not. Something that has been here forever, did it have a beginning?

Well. This philosophical question doesn’t really matter at this time and in this case. Because this website and its blog have not been here forever. Chris and Mat decided to build this site about a week ago. It started off as an empty shell, a downloaded template … and a bag of ideas. Ideas about which we want to write and to talk, which we want to ponder and debate, and which — most important to us — we want to share with you. Yes, we believe we have some ideas that are worth sharing.

So we decided to just have this site emerge. We realize this requires work, a sustained effort, and consistent striving. We are ready. Are you? We will always appreciate your comments, your input, your support and counterpoints, your feedback, …

So, let’s get started.

If you arrived through this blog, you could go to our homepage or look at the whole Panta Rhei Blog, starting with the latest post and going back in time.

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