I was particularly happy to see both Oliver Sacks and Oblique Strategies in the same post.
Pull quote:
Apple’s original Shuffle promo said “Life is Random”, but that’s stating the obvious. Perhaps a better mantra would be, “Random is Life.” We could all use more of it, and if we can give our users a few more moments of serendipity, we’re giving them a wonderful gift.
I’m reminded of an article in the Columbia University alumni magazine that profiled some of Columbia’s best-loved teachers (Mark Van Doren is the one I remember). Students reported that they often remembered their teachers’ digressions more vividly than anything particular in the lessons.
Digressions, like randomness, put more hooks in the Velcro(tm) of cognition.
Digressions, like randomness, put more hooks in the Velcro(tm) of cognition. How damn quotable! I can hear that scrunnnnch sound of ripped velcro in my mind.
Yes, our mode has long been to provide learning as a safe haven of strong structure, in contrast to the messiness of what lies outside the classroom. It’s a tricky balance, full of scaffolding and not exactly reached via a recipe.
Bloggin’ is back in action at GWrites! lovin it from Arizona
This strikes me as so true, and yet it makes my stomach clench when I think of how this would sound on student evals at end of semester: “Professor Dolson is passionate about her subject, but tends to go off on tangents.” Do we need to do more to change our students notions of learning, maybe rescue them from their standards-based existence?
Brilliant indeed.
Albert Einstein said that “problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking [where] we created them.”
Minds immobilized while following the usual, rational pathways in search of answers should take a walk on the random side. That’s where the creative unconscious fully engages the world.
At Delphi, they called it divination…