Advertising is designed, by purpose, to make you discontented enough to buy something to relieve the stress. Improve your life by creating ad-free zones where the minions of Madison Avenue cannot find [...]
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Note: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the role of mentors in one’s educational development and remembered the following essay I wrote for the Virtual Conference in Informal Science Education, sponsored by the Society for Amateur Scientists in May, 2004. I’m reprinting it here as a way of dusting off my thinking on [...] Elsewhere I have written about the power of projects. There is no educational experience that quite matches making an example of what you are studying, or even a model of it. But the experience of building or making something goes beyond the item itself and can introduce you to skills, tools, and ideas that you [...] Some time ago I blogged on a system called PoIC, which stands for Piles of Index Cards, a system for creating a personal knowledge database by Hawk Sugano. You can read more about it in the earlier entry, but the quick and dirty description is that PoIC is a nifty system for helping to organize [...] Get some educators or instructors into a room and before long you will get an earful about good teaching practices, pedagogy, learning, and so forth. You’ll hear all the latest info about how best to get kids to pay attention, how to reach adult learners, presentation and communications. But what is less often [...] Every other week or so my spouse and I meet with some friends for dinner and conversation, usually at a favorite Chinese restaurant where we enjoy stimulating banter over excellent cuisine. An evening’s dinner conversation recently turned to the matter of competition and how it really works in business and other areas of human [...] I caught a very interesting opinion piece in the 27 February issue of the Providence Journal about how, once again, Finnish 15-year old students were rated the best in the world in math and science by the Program for International Student Assessment. You can read the article by Walt Gardner here. What struck me about [...] Some time ago I blogged on the use of cards as a means of generating ideas, learning, and thinking. Recently I’ve come to realize that the subject needs revisiting in light of an on-again, off-again quest I’ve had in my career as a guerrilla scholar. The problem was the use of the humble index card. [...] A skill not commonly taught in school, and certainly not taught (or even encouraged) in our deadline-driven workplace is the art of incubating ideas. Not all ideas spring from our brains like the Athena fully grown from the head of Zeus. As often as not, they take time. The brain quietly, in [...] “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.” -Alvin Toffler I once knew a professor whose intellectual talents were highly respected, particularly by himself. Granted, he was very, very bright, and highly knowledgeable in the fields he [...] |
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