Mindfulness and Friendship

Friendship is a topic with significant contemporary relevance both popularly and in academic areas such as philosophy and psychology. This could be due to the huge contemporary trend of focusing on well-being, of which social connectivity is a key component.

Simultaneously, there are many ways that mindfulness is being applied for a heightened experience and understanding of social and interactive phenomena in both physical and virtual reality in areas such as communication, collaboration, friendship, and love.

The central idea in mindfulness and friendship is to be volitional and active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing action-taking rather than a passive stance of acceptance. In fact, self-awareness of your own parameters, mindset, rules, and ethics of friendship is a good starting point, especially as your attitudes may be unconscious, and are likely to differ from those of others.

In the friendship context, there may be a greater tendency for conflict avoidance, e.g.; less awareness and interest in acknowledging and discussing issues, in a way that would be unavoidable in other interaction contexts like work or romantic relationships. 

Massive educational reform facilitated by technology

More than any other sector, education is currently poised for significant reform, of an expansionary, inclusionary, complementary nature, with the fingers of change that have long been present being gathered into inexorable industry-shifting waves. The hand of technology is the beneficial enabler.

Distance learning, and digital recording and streaming technologies have been steadily improving which has given way to a new way of connecting large worldwide audiences. What was the initial opening up of courses to online students has now turned into classrooms of huge online audiences in the range of 60,000-70,000 participants. This in turn has brought attention to the need and possibility of innovating educational methods to make material more dynamic. It may be possible to reorganize pedagogy in the new venue of the large-scale online audiences. Some ways are by communicating in real-time for both exercises and feedback loops to instructors, and by participating in dynamic exercises. This could help in making educational content more alive, experiencable, and interactive.