It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday. Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the [...]
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babies,
behaviour,
change,
development,
emotions,
groups,
growth,
learning,
mood,
music,
nurturing,
psychology,
relationships,
social,
switch
Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time. What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and [...]
Tagged as:
change,
culture,
history,
invention,
psychology,
remix,
transformation
The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
Tagged as:
biases,
change,
crisis,
finance,
great reset,
irrational exuberance,
mindsets,
recovery,
self-serving bias,
uncertainty
I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
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advertising,
blogging,
change,
craft,
craftsmanship,
discipline,
learning,
marketing,
persuasion,
philosophy,
quotes,
rhetoric,
writing
How much do I love Jacques Barzun? The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs: A world of professionals [...]
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amateurs,
expertise,
higher education,
history,
jacques barzun,
learning,
professionalism,
professions,
universities
This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.” (Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written [...]
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diy,
edupunk,
higher education,
learning,
love of learning,
maker culture,
mastery
The gist of Connected, the excellent book about the power of social networks, is that the most important factor in whether a person will do something — e.g. donate to charity, gain weight, steal a car, or simply smile — is whether the people around them are doing it too. It isn’t true of everything, [...]
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apathy,
changecamp,
connected,
elections,
mobilization,
networks,
relationships,
social networks,
sociology,
voter turnout,
voting
They’ve done a good job of making moderate people critical. I tend to give police the benefit of the doubt, and I was one of the people thinking, “well it’s not an easy task” last week, but the way complaints have been handled (i.e. not) since then is deplorable. Both the police and people in all [...]
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authority,
competence,
courage,
g20,
government,
law,
police,
power,
protests,
security,
toronto,
trust
