Moodle

Here’s a sneak peek at some online learning support I’m doing with a Tai Chi group in Farmington, Maine. I went up a couple weeks ago to teach an afternoon workshop and this was the practice set we did by the end. The workshop participants also have access to a private Q&A forum, so as they practice between now and the next live training, I can give them feedback. I’ll probably add some new videos as we go to answer any questions that come up. I also think it will be a useful way to pre-load content for the next workshop, i.e., if I can get them to learn some basic choreography before I arrive, we can spend our time focusing on refinements or more subtle internal principles that are best learned by feel. ...

Can you learn qigong, or any movement art, online? This is a burning question for me right now. My immediate reaction is “NO!”. However, I believe there is a significant role for supplemental online material in the overall learning process, even for movement arts. Here’s why it’s a bad idea to learn movement online: Learning movement is a kinesthetic experience, not a visual one – you have to feel where you are in space and you certainly can’t get that from staring at a screen You need feedback – when you are learning something new, you need refinement and guidance, usually hands-on Some things need to be felt on another person – we get into this all the time with more subtle qigong principles and there is no way around feeling what’s going on in the instructor’s body to learn what you are trying to do in your own Those are my big 3 “No way!” reasons you can’t learn qigong online. Or I should say, the reason why online learning shouldn’t be your sole way of learning this stuff. Let’s look at it from a different point of view. ...