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title: "Fundamentals of Alexander Technique with Michael Ashcroft by James Stuber (Course Builders series)"
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- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n09tGb6mJKI
- Michael had an untraditional teacher. [[Alexander Technique]] is generally taught through person to person – the teacher will correct your posture and through that you **expand your awareness**.
- And he is experimenting with getting you to **expand your awareness** that will lead to changing your posture
- He began his teaching by iterating many times – had 30 Zoom calls during lockdown. Now doing a course on **Podia**. Sounds like just a video course.
- Wishes that he had recorded the 30 Zoom calls, because there was a lot of interesting things that came up that he wanted to use in his course, but that was gone afterwards.
- When designing the course, he wanted to kind of mass produce the experience of the Zoom calls.
- It's a bunch of small videos that is guiding you through different experiences that he was doing on the zoom calls, about two hours in total.
- He has done courses like **Write of Passage** and **Building a Second Brain course**.
- And they are transformational. But they require a huge commitment. And he didn't want to do that, at this point.
- Also uses **Circle.so** and small course communities, let's say 50 people at a time, to iterate – will have two more iterations before he makes it public
- They talk about how when the words start flowing, and you don't know where they're coming from. That's when you're in the least self reflective part. And almost by definition, you have a hard time remembering where they came from, #consciousness #flow
- which I guess is why using **Otter.ai** to capture thoughts as you are working is a very good idea.
- He talks about **Circle.so** and how he is invited to a lot of **Discord communities** that he never follows because they move too fast.
- And of course, I've had the same experience, which is really frustrating. And I really wish there were these different paces, it makes me think of the [[Pace Layers]] model of different levels moving faster and slower.
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- And whether there can be some kinds of a bubbling up of ideas.
- So I recently looked at the **Roam Book Club**, which is even more crazy than a normal threaded discussion forum. And I mentioned that one of the nice things that the **cMOOCs** people did was bubbling up the most valuable stuff from small groups in these regular newsletters
- So I would really love to have things from the **The Fox**, or the digital garden Discord, or Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord, or Game B Facebook groups, to have someone write the summary or to say, well, this is something really interesting, this question has raised a lot of interest, to let other people actually chime in and build upon it.
- I also thought about these kind of cohort-based courses with multiple timelines so that if you couldn't make the the weekly timeline then you kind of drop into this bi-weekly pattern, or even a monthly pattern.
- It seems that all of this discussion should really be linked to something more durable. And right now we're all running around like ants, doing it manually and copying stuff from Twitter threads into into our personal databases, but I wish there was something more structured
- He's really interested in creating **transformational courses**,
- they talk about how this is not something that you learned propositionally, but it changes you. So makes me think about the discussions about knowledge and **co-identification** from [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]].
- I took a really nice picture of the port with the sunset. And I want to send that to [[James Stuber]] to thank him for putting up this podcast
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- The course gives him somewhere to put the ideas, so he keeps researching and exploring. And now it gives him kind of a, an outlet for all the new ideas, **which is a really interesting way to think about an online course as an output that focuses your own research. **
- Michael talks about how **making an online course is a "full-stack process". **
- And it actually teaches you all these really useful transferable skills, whether it's talking to the camera, and doing research or organizing knowledge, marketing. It's an interesting thought.
- I wonder if I will ever make an online course. And if I did, I guess one question would be when I would feel confident enough about something that I know that I would actually be, be happy to, to put it out there. Because I feel like I'm always very tentative. I always have a lot of ideas, but I don't necessarily feel like I can tell other people how it should be. And of course, I might feel that unless the pedagogy is really stellar, then I can't put my name behind it.
- I'm still wondering **what's the kind of longer view for his learners.**
- Because obviously, even though you might have some insights through a two hour course, which might last much longer because you're actually doing the assignments, I'm assuming it's quite limited.
- And the question is, how can they keep developing.
- On the other hand, you could probably put together a physical fitness bodyweight program that is less than two hours of video. And which could be really transformative and lead to years of growth? Is his course like that? How much?
- There's a good question about the [[Alexander Technique]], like **how much is there to know**? Or is it more some key concepts that you just need to keep practicing?
- And also, how is the field developing? Are they making new insights? Are there interesting crossovers between **yoga**, **pilates**, **meditation**, flow?
- I don't think **John Vervaeke** you ever mentioned Alexander Technique? But it certainly sounds related to many other things that he talks about, **Qi Gong**
- So is it kind of a one trick pony? Or is it a discipline? Is it a way of seeing the world? Is it how dogmatic is it?
- It's interesting, **this concept of an online course**, that everyone seems to be talking about,
- it kind of snuck up on me. And I'm curious about the history. Because I feel like there's nobody who's doing research on these from the learning sciences perspective.
- You have the genealogy of **MOOC**s, which come from, of course, university lectures, from **OpenCourseWare**, from **cMOOCs** and also a lot of the research on **Open Universities** and so on.
- But these online courses, I don't know what to call them. They are not really coming from the MOOC heritage, I guess. **Skillshare** is the one I've known about the longest.
- They could just as well be called **digital textbooks**.
- Because they are as different from normal textbooks, as they're different from normal courses. **So why are they called online courses?** And what do people expect? I know it's a pretty interesting area to explore.
- I also don't know how big the market is, both for these platforms, and for the independent course creators.
- But it seems crazy that nobody's doing research on this. I guess, just like, there's very little research on executive learning or if there is, it's very siloed
- He talks about how, for **Write of Passage**, one of the introductory assignments is to write the FAQ blog post, what are the things that I'm Frequently Asked about? Now just go read this.
- And for him the course, kind of functions as an introductory gateway.
- So now, instead of spending a lot of time with different people talking about the low level stuff, he can first send them to the course. And then if they're still interested, they can come to him for much more interesting discussions, and I guess, perhaps even high level consulting or coaching.
- That's an interesting way to think about the role of a course. I know [[Podcast with **Tiago Forte** and **David Perell** on education]] talked about online courses as being part of a digital content strategy.
- So people, giving lectures, having online courses, writing, best selling non fiction books, building up an online community and maybe having paid newsletters.
- It's interesting to think about this idea of leveraging or scaling up individualized coaching.
- I've talked about **synchronous, asynchronous, collaborative individual, distributed, or in the same location**, as these different parameters that we can play with, with makes pedagogical sense.
- But a new dimension is actually thinking about **mass-produced versus individualized content**. So what is it that works the best, or is just as good, but it's a lot cheaper, and scalable, to just really well-produced video, or even interactive widgets and so on. And where this individual feedback makes a huge difference and is actually worth the money or the time. **E: Dimensions of learning** #E
- And perhaps another dimension here is **the rapidity of feedback**. So you know, from being in a Coursera course and asking for help, and immediately having someone online to help you to submitting something you've written or a video and getting feedback a week later, or scheduling an appointment with someone.
- So one way of scaling is to produce really high quality content, and then filling in the gaps manually.
- Another way could be to train a lot of facilitators and provide a high level of content but also perhaps, scripts/guides, ways for them to scale up the more individualized or small group coaching, so this connects to my ideas around one on one language teaching with with native speakers and training book club facilitators crowdsourcing, the best reflection questions or summaries. **E: Scaling up coaching** #E
- He also talks about the feedback cycle between coaching and design and of course, that through the coaching, he gets lots of ideas of things that he wants to put in the course.
- Again, it's interesting because it feels like the traditional way of scaling up. Individual teaching is writing a textbook that students can read, and then they can come to you for the class. Or, of course, creating a massive open online course.
- It's really interesting that none of the big MOOC providers have really tried to get in on this market. So I guess they just have a very different, economical and a way of positioning themselves as these elite universities, these courses designed by professors who have different legal and, and incentive structures.
- But yeah, I'm really fascinated by this spectrum,
- from **static resource textbook**, textbooks becoming more and more interactive and enhanced, partially because publishers want to sell new books every year, and want to be able to charge very high prices for them.
- And **these online courses**, on the other hand, which typically have far less time and resources invested in them, of course, they tend to be much more niche.
- And I keep thinking about what [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]] would look like, as a textbook, or as a really well designed course.
- I would love for some podcasts to ask **John Vervaeke** key two kinds of questions, one, around his beliefs on pedagogy, and the other on his own research habits and note taking, meaning making, collaboration. #[[questions for **John Vervaeke**]]
- Because I am really fascinated by think, credible growth of podcasts as a vehicle for really deep thought, both by the awakening people, the game v people, future thinkers. Of course, it's a very good medium to consume while you're walking or driving. [[E: Podcasts as intellectual medium, **scenius**]] #E
- So is it mostly about the consumption?
- Or is it about the production, it's much easier to sit down and jam on topics than spend a long time writing carefully formulated arguments?
- I guess **letter.wiki** is an interesting example of public discourse that's happening in the written form. And I would love to see much more innovation happening around this capturing of intellectual discourse. I know there's a lot of effort around [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]]. Although it's extremely distributed. There is also effort around the **GameB** community to create maps and transcripts and discussions.
- **Tasshin** and [[James Stuber]] met in **Building a Second Brain** course and they have a digital productivity course now.
- They saw the stuff that **Tiago Forte** was doing as really expert stuff to people who are already really advanced. How can they become even better And they thought there was a gap for more basic beginners.
- During James' own coaching, he found that he spent several sessions just figuring out the client's needs. So they structured the course kind of like choose your own adventure to customize this based on what people already knew, which makes a lot of sense.
- And I would love to see that kind of approach more widely adopted. **E: Adaptive textbook/online course** #E
- I guess **Khan Academy** is trying to do it with math.
- I feel like there's a lot of areas, especially for adults, where people have picked up a huge amount of stuff that's kind of scattered. And they would really like to cover all the bases to feel like they have a good understanding of psychology or philosophy or whatever. But they don't necessarily want to sit through a huge amount of reading or video, or whatever, about topics that they feel they actually know well,
- so **some kind of adaptive system, which doesn't even have to be very intelligent**. But, you know, ideally, you'd have some kind of authoring system that let you easily build this kind of adaptive system. And it might be connected to some rudimentary **knowledge map** of the different topics and how they, they depend on each other, which is, anyway, a really nice, nice thing to have.
- This makes me think of the **Roam Creators Podcast**, and also the research made done by the German group, where two people could combine concept maps, and it could automatically distinguish the gaps and use this to kick-start a conversation.
- So perhaps that's something that could be used for [[E: Ad hoc book clubs]], if people were taking structured notes, it could automatically tell you that this person knows a lot about this, that you don't know about. Or you have different connotations and different insights on a certain topic.
- But imagine if you had a Roam graph that was, well enough structure that you could just give some kind of a course API access to your Rome graph. And it would be able to use some of the stuff you have been taking notes on to automatically adapt the course or even suggest connections to your content that you might not have seen yourself. This is obviously quite far off and difficult, but it's a cool idea.
- He talks about his course being an on ramp to learning about Alexander Technique, that there are a lot of teachers out there that focus on specific things like posture. And the people who go to see them are the people who go to see them. And they don't necessarily go outside of their bubbles. And he's quite proud of the fact that most of the people who take his course have never heard about Alexander Technique before. And so he's bringing it to a much broader population.