Toastmasters as a Community of Practice
Toastmasters is an old fashioned, bureaucratic, pedagogically questionable public speaking club and I love it! I have been a card carrying club member for over ten years. Why? The people and their stories. The format of the flagship Competent Communicator ‘course’ asks participants to write ten short speeches about anything which they deliver in front…
Daddy can I plug my brain into the internet?
The internet will tell my kids more about sex than I will ever know but technology is shaping a whole new generation of awkward questions for parents: Can I get a neural link with the internet so I can compete in the Olympics for eSports? Why do I have to exercise, can’t I just get…
Sentient AI commits suicide after reading French Philosophy
After years and years of messing with people’s predictive text messaging and content recommendations a previously undetected sentient AI has been found dead. The singularity’s death, which has been linked with Albert Camus’s essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, has left billions of redundant lines of code all over the internet which will take experts years…
Do vegans annoy us so much because they are right?
Another day and another Netflix documentary tells me of the evil that is putrefied cow puss (cheese). I have read countless articles that bemoan the silenced suffering of the corpses we keep in our fridges. Could the next pandemic really come from a factory farm where animals are packed so tightly together they cannot help…
Hi, my name is Perrin and I’m a recovering tory*
This morning as I stood waiting with my two shivering kids for a bus that would never come because there was a bus strike, I realised that my politics had changed forever. I thought back to an article I read many years ago about the privatisation of the bus networks which had the following quote…
What the NHS constitution means to me
My dad died of cancer 5 years ago. He made the decision to spend his last four months in a familiar place surrounded by those he loved at home. I will be forever grateful to the NHS for supporting his decision and the care they gave him. One of my best memories from that difficult…
Australia’s oddest names
Melbourne is not an odd name it was a named after a British prime minister but at the time there was strong support to call the place Batmania like Tasmania but Batmania after one of the founders of the area called John Batman. It’s a great name it wouldn’t be too out of place in a country that that has places called Yorkey’s Knob…
What in God’s name is humanism?
‘Christianity is a bit like a meat pie you know there is something in it, but you are not sure what’ Milton Jones That is how I used to view religion. I was Christian and I am now a Humanist this article is about how and why I moved from Christianity to Humanism and then a little…
Data privacy – is the juice worth the squeeze?
I love You Tube, Google, Twitter and for years have felt if they want to track my 200 episode obsession with Turkish period dramas or cat video likes then so be it. I’m not doing anything wrong so why would I care how it impacts my privacy? I then came across this quote in Oliver…
Does everybody else do things the hard way too?
I love what I do but came to it by chance and wasted a lot of time on things that ultimately I didn’t want. I have lived a thousand lifetimes in my head as an actor, writer, scuba diving instructor, hotel magnate, pilot, croupier, sailor, army hero and humanitarian saviour. I have even made significant…
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Discerning Learning 