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
I spent a fair amount of time today upgrading the site and my phone so that I would have better mobile access to the site on my phone and so that you can too! Here’s what I ended up doing: Adding the MobilePress plugin to DanKleiman.com, so that the site adapts to your mobile browser Installing the Wordpress app on my Droid, so that I can update the site from my phone Installing Moodle for Mobiles, which is “
This is a test post from my phone. I just installed a Wordpress app for Android. I’m also working on upgrading the blog and the noodle site for easy mobile access. EDIT: It looks like it picked up the post tags from my phone, but it missed the category. Also have to edit the post author through the site. But you don’t really care about that, do you? ;-)
This post is the second in a series I’m doing on the backstory of how I came to develop a web-based software application called Trainerfly. You can read more about it here. For about a year after I decided I need a way to manage all my clients’ programs, and share information with them privately, I wrestled with finding the right software. I tried private blogs, but at that time it was tons of work to partition information for each client.
I’ve been working with the team at Energy Arts on various projects, but mainly in the capacity as a community coordinator. Currently, my focus is on helping them get a new community discussion forum off the ground, but I also had the chance to participate in the launch of their new Ba Gua Mastery Program. The Ba Gua Mastery Program is a home-study program with information on circle-walking for meditation and martial arts.
This is a draft of an idea I’ve been trying to put together around the “Spectrum of Services” you can offer running a small business in a particular niche. I’m trying to capture the relationship between your time face-to-face with clients, how much of a custom service you are offering, and how many people you can reach. For the professional movement educator, here are some typical examples of these variables at play:
I’m sure I’m not alone here. Teachers in all disciples, if they need their students to practice to learn what they are teaching, will relate. I don’t know if “movement educators†have it worse because people tend to think of all movement as “working out†– something you go and do, not an art you have to practice. In fact, one of my favorite concepts when you are talking about getting really good at something is called “deliberate practiceâ€.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this work in the future, but we’ve just done a series of demos this fall highlighting the expanding role of evidence-based Tai Chi programs as public health interventions. When you look at the cost of a fall for older adults (I’ve heard figures like $20,000) and the good evidence that Tai Chi can reduce falls and fear of falling (now considered a risk factor for falling), it makes so much sense to fund Tai Chi classes all over: senior centers, assisted living facilities, community centers.
