I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting. And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality. The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write [...]
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books,
borges,
chekov,
david foster wallace,
discipline,
fiction,
geoff dyer,
learning,
literature,
pessoa,
practice,
reading,
self-improvement,
writing
I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]
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authority,
expertise,
information,
internet,
knowledge,
learning,
lifestreaming,
medium theory,
social media,
technology,
twitter
Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]: Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to [...]
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beginners,
david foster wallace,
discipline,
disciplines,
discovery,
entrepreneurship,
history,
hunter s thompson,
journalism,
learning,
outsiders,
reporting,
work,
writing
There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them. But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor: Young [...]
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computers,
digital natives,
generations,
internet,
learning,
technology
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
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
Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche) Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance: Criticizing schools is [...]
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change,
learning,
love of learning,
mastery,
narrative,
revolution,
video
Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description: Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship [...]
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craftsmanship,
edupunk,
learning,
love of learning,
makers,
motivation,
responsibility,
richard sennett,
teaching,
the wire
The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world» Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have [...]
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bias,
epistemology,
heuristics,
learning,
meta factors,
metaphors,
metaphysics,
networks,
object bias,
philosophy,
psychology,
relevance,
social media,
will to relevance
Continuing the Thinking in the 21st Century series… Great comment by Phronk on the previous think21st post [excerpt]: Autonomy, flow, exploration, striving for material (digital) goods, relatedness, competence, they’re all represented, often in explicit numerical form. And they interact in a complex, emergent way that even the game developers can’t anticipate. See also: Twitter. I’ve been [...]
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collaboration,
learning,
metaphors,
networking,
research,
social science,
think21st,
understanding
