Will’s Similiblog

My day job, is teaching “alternative” medicine [tho of course, we tend to regard what we teach as traditional or conventional, and consider the practices of contemporary western medicine - my original field of practice - to be the upstart on the block ... ;^)]

A prevailing trend I’m encountering in my current crop of students, is the desire to engage in “intuitive” practice; with a resistance on the part of some to apply themselves to the systematic study and application of established principals of healing, and a regard of such systematic study as comparatively somewhat stodgy or mundane.

I’m curious about how much this may reflect a general cultural phenomenon, and how much may be associated with our particular crop of students, exposed to the contemporary notions of “energy medicine” and therapeutic relativism. It’s a bit unclear as well, whether “intuition” is being used to refer to a paranormal perception of information, or to “second nature” access to “normally” acquired knowledge, or perhaps to a variable and unstated admixture of these.

The former - paranormal perception of patient needs and healing approaches - is something I find difficult to address. We’re exposed to examples historically of such healers as Edward Bach, who evidenced such abilities with his flower remedies; and to contemporary medical intuitives. Intermingled with the more questionable examples are some remarkable stories that might inspire the aspiring mages among us. The cultural phenomenon that has given rise to the popularity of Harry Potter is no mystery - we all of us are a little intrigued at the notion that we have a bit of Merlin within.

The access by “second nature” to knowledge and skills acquired through “normal” means is a bit easier to speak to. This is in part reinforced in daily clinical experience in the teaching clinic, by the seasoned supervisor’s often quick perception of the nature of a patient’s needs, and seemingly effortless generation of a treatment plan; in the crunch of time, often unaccompanied by detailed explanation of the underlying processes that drove their conclusions. For the student, this may often appear to be somewhat paranormal - a “David Copperfield” experience of magic in the moment, without realization of all the hard work involved in creating the illusion. It can all feel rather impressive, and worthy of emulation.

The development of such “automatic” competency has historically been described in a model of “competency consciousness“, most often in an hierarchical model, or in a 2×2 matrix model presuming a hiearchical progression - beginning with a state of “unconscious incompetence” (we don’t know that there is a field of knowledge we know nothing about), progressing to “conscious incompetence” (we discover a field of knowledge we don’t yet have competence in), on to “conscious competence” (we engage in the new knowledge intentionally and consciously), and finally on to “unconscious competence” (we engage in the task effortlessly, as if by second nature).

Ernest Farrington (c.1880’s) described this expression of “unconscious competence” in his introductory lectures on homeopathic materia medica at the Hahnemann College of Medicine (please forgive the lack of gender neutrality in his 19th century words):

Man’s mind is composed of more than memory. Memory is the impression made on the mind by a fact. Recollection is another qualification of the mind, which enables one to call up the facts which have been memorized. It is understood that nothing which we take into the memory is ever effaced. It remains there forever. It may be covered with figurative cobwebs and never brought to light, unless the mind is so drilled or so orderly arranged that it may be recalled when occasion requires. The mind should be so drilled and its various faculties so trained that when an external thing occurs similar to an internal fact, i. e., a fact memorized, at once that external thing awakens into recollection the fact or facts bearing on that subject …
Thus must be the intellectual mind of the man who would master the science of medicine. He must see his patient, and when he sees his patient it awakens in his mind the picture of the remedy. This has been termed instinct, but it is not. To do this he must study persistently. You see a physician old in years come into a sick-room. At once he says, this patient needs Sulphur. How did he know that? It was not second sight on his part; but through thirty or forty years’ experience he had been studying Sulphur, had been forming in his mind images of Sulphur, and living ideas of Sulphur. The moment he sees these in his patient, that moment he recollects Sulphur. If he had not the idea of that remedy in his mind, he could not see it in his patient. Now, I ask of you not to try to jump over these years that must pass between the beginning and the ending of the art of medicine, and do not make yourselves prophets before your time.

Reflecting on the existing “competency consciousness” model, and on my own learning & practice, I’d like to propose a modification of the model from its classical hierarchical structure, with “unconscious competence” at its pinnacle, to a continual, lifelong-learning model with “mature practice” at its core. I realize in my practice that despite my incorporation of learning into some degree of automatic mastery, I am constantly encountering deficiencies in mastery - due to changing/evolving external knowledge, complacency, forgetfulness, new discovery, &c. In a nutshell, one never really leaves the experiences of “unconscious incompetence,” “conscious incompetence” and “conscious competence” behind. There are always realms of ignorance (unconscious incompetence); of discovery (conscious incompetence); and skills advancement (conscious competence) in our daily experience. Mature practice requires recognition of this, and demands disciplines to bring these realms into our continual development of mastery.

So my model:

________________________

In mature practice:
It is essential to acknowledge that there is material that we are entirely ignorant of. We can be truly effective mentors for our students only when we model this recognition, assuring them that they are not alone in this experience, and fostering a posture of willing discovery; not merely at the beginning of a path of study, but continually during their evolution of skills development.

At the threshold of “conscious incompetence” are two gates - the inspiring excitement of “beginners’ mind”, aware of the pregnancy of possibility; and fear of failure threatening forward movement. I recognize that my most valued mentors have maintained a sense of “beginners’ mind” well into their mature practice; I recall the vivid image of my marine biology mentor Don Abbott, wading into Pacific tidepools above his hip boots to excitedly point out a bryozoan as if it were the first one he’d ever seen - with the brilliant enthusiasm of a 2 year-old Steve Irwin.

Beyond mastery, it’s our interest and willingness to actively embrace what we know we don’t know, and even what we don’t know we don’t know, that will empower us as effective practitioners and teachers.

I’m trying out a navigation solution to my featuritis dilemma. As I’ve got 3 major features on my site - [1] a community blog, [2] aggregated news feeds, and [3] an aggregation of forums postings from selected forums in an associated Moodle course support platform (I’ll describe this, and the reasons for it, in a subsequent post) - each with multiple views - the comprehensive navigation for all 3 features together was growing cumbersome, with a rather lengthy side column of menu blocks.

So - I’ve created a front welcome page using a “Page” node, with a menu block linking to each of these 3 sections of the site; and added links as well to my 3 sections in the “primary” menu, which displays below the header on all page views.

The side-column menu blocks relating to the Community Blog should show up on the various views of the Community Blog “section” of the site, but should not show up on the views relating to Aggregated News or the Aggregated Forums, & v/v. To accomplish this, I’ve set up custom block visibility for these views.

On the Blocks Administration page, to manage block visibility, click on the selected block’s configure link. At Show block on specific pages:, select Show if the following PHP code returns TRUE (PHP-mode, experts only). Paste in the equivalent of:

<?php
$match = FALSE;
$types = array(’blog‘ => 1);
if (arg(0) == ‘node’ && is_numeric(arg(1))) {
$nid = arg(1);
$node = node_load(array(’nid’ => $nid));
$type = $node->type;
if (isset($types[$type])) {
$match = TRUE;
}
}
$url = request_uri();
if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
return $match;
?>

The first criterion - $types = array(’blog‘ => 1); - will include this block on all single-node pages where the node is a blog entry.

The second criterion - if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) { - will include this block on all pages where the URL contains the string blog/. I’ve set up the various Views of the community blog, in their Views settings, to have the url blog/… (e.g., blog/communityblog_listview, &c.).

The third criterion - if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) { - will include this block on the tagadelic tag-cloud page that lists my blog-specific taxonomy (but will not include it on the tagadelic pages displaying taxonomy specific to news aggregation &c.)

This was repeated for each of the side blocks that I want to see displayed on the Community Blog related pages of my site; these will now show up when the user is navigating through pages related to the Community Blog, but will not show up if the user is in other “sections” of the site.

Side-column menu blocks for the other sections of the site are similarly configured, to display menu items specific to the News section only on the pages dealing with aggregated news, &c.

I like it - it works ;^)

In the continued development & refinement of my social learning platform, I find myself facing a featuritis dilemma, as elegantly described by Kathy Sierra (illustration from her most wonderful blog):

How to resolve? Navigation? Simplification? A collection of simple sites each of focal purpose, linked with one another, v/s one “swiss army” site? Do I/we need all this?

Aggregators were apparently developed to help shift the web-phenomenon east of “happy user peak” to the left; yet my aggregation site seems to be beginning to slip down the slope past “guess I better look at the manual …”.

I’m wondering about using Drupal’s multisite function, with the multisite_login module, to create parallel sites for separable functions of my currently swiss-army-ish tool - with shared user db’s and single login. Community blog with aggregation of users’ distributed content on one site, community rated aggregated news on another, aggregation of selected Moodle course forum discussions on a 3rd.

Or perhaps I’m just getting too excited about the tools, & need to simplify overall. The tools are just too cool.