Do What You Love

Finally: just do what you love, and all will be well: you won't be bored, and you will also not be afraid. Love has the power to make people fearless! [next]

Love removes fear.




Additional comments:

I'm one of those people who is guilty of overusing the word love. If you were to go through my Google+ stream, for example, you would find the word used again and again: I love this cartoon, I love that movie, I love this book, I love that blog post, and on and on. At the same time, it's really true: until we come up with a bigger vocabulary to describe our passions and enthusiasms with more nuance, I'm going to keep on saying that I love this or I love that.

It's also true that love is a way to combat the feelings of fear that are such a problem in education, and for life in general. I've come back to the theme of fear in these slides again and again because it seems to me a crucial problem that we need to solve, and the power of love is one way to fight against fear. I actually got invited to do this presentation because of a Medium post I wrote last year, all about why I love to teach online. For that post, I had to keep things short, so I have really enjoyed getting to explore all those positive aspects of online teaching with you here today.

For more insights into the problem of fear and education, I would highly recommend these two posts by Mariana Funes. Yes, I love both of these posts! Here they are: The psychology of open: On wrestling your inner MOOC and Of monsters, contemplation and information.

And since this is a Canadian conference, I'll include this great graphic from that you will see in Mariana's "monsters" post: It began in Canada... Day of the MOOC.



from a poster CC by D. Kernohan


The cat image above is another one of the LatinLOLCatsAmor tollit timorem. Love removes fear.

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