Tag: Thinking

Read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

Source: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world by David Epstein is a book about the benefits of breadth in the modern world. One of the issues raised throughout is that specialisation focuses on complicated problems, but does not necessarily help with wicked complex problems. Grit and expertise only get you so far.

Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.

One of the benefits of breadth is the opportunity to come to a problem as an outsider, but with a range of references to draw upon.

In some ways this book reminds me of Amy Burvall’s argument to collecting the dots, as well as the art of holding on tightly and letting go lightly. However, breadth verses depth is also something of a wicked problem.

The If Books Could Kill podcast raised the problem that the breadth of research and anecdotes thrown together in these sorts of books can sometimes be problematic. Or as Tosin Adeoti raised in a review, it is hard to ‘distinguish fact from assumption’:

While I believe that there might be valuable insights in the book, most of them are embedded within contextually bare stories that are edited to fit a particular narrative. It is nearly impossible to distinguish fact from assumption. I suggest reading each chapter heading and skipping straight to the last two pages for a brief summary of the argument, thus avoiding wasting time on unnecessary fluff. Then, use those topics as a starting point for further study.

Source: Book Review By ‘Tosin Adeoti

I therefore wonder if the book is useful as a provocation as much as a manual for success. For example, Martin Weller looks past some of the over-simplified findings to reflect upon his experiences of ‘range’, whether it be offering different forms of assessment, the rewards that come from a breadth of experience and the benefits of different perspectives on a situation.

Going beyond the question of success, if the focus is on wicked problems, I feel that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work is a better place to start? I was also reminded of Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question too in regards to engaging with the unfamiliar.

Continue reading “📚 Range (David Epstein)”

Liked https://casco.art/resource/unlearningexercises/ (casco.art)

Unlearning Exercises shares a set of collective “unlearning exercises” to make way for a culture of equality, difference and fairness in art organizations; and aims to inspire active critical investigation of normative structures and practices in order to become aware and get rid of taken-for-granted “truths” and values.

ᔥ “Doug Belshaw” in Life has no instruction manual – Open Thinkering ()

Liked In Defense of Thinking – Study Hacks – Cal Newport (calnewport.com)

There’s a great satisfaction and steadiness in the general application of Hemingway’s advice. We cannot make sense of ourselves or the world around us without putting in the mental cycles necessary to wrestle this frenetic information into useful forms. Thinking — true, hard, energizing thinking — is not yet another healthy activity to add to a long list of such commitments. It’s better understood as a way of life; one that’s become even more radical in an increasingly shallow world.

Liked From forgeries to Covid-denial, how we fool ourselves (Tim Harford)

A Dutch resistance newspaper published the news and Van Meegeren waved it away, claiming that he had signed hundreds of copies of the book and the dedication must have been added by someone else. It’s a ludicrous excuse. But people wanted to believe it. Wishful thinking is a powerful thing.

Caught in a scandal, a modern-day Van Meegeren would say, “That’s not my voice on the tape,” or call the story “fake news”. And their supporters would agree. It seems that if you show people a trickster with a sense of humour, a penchant for mocking experts and the capacity to land a few blows on a hated enemy, they will forgive a lot. What they cannot forgive they will find ways to ignore. Recent experience has only reinforced that lesson.

Bookmarked An Appeal for Friction Writing (THR Blog)

Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.

Richard Hughes Gibson pushes back on the frictionless experience to help foster clearer judgement.

My case for friction in writing (particularly writing on the Internet) echoes and amplifies Kosslyn’s concern that frictionless design is partly to blame for the rapid spread of misinformation. When writing meets no impediments, we can easily become links in a chain through which misinformation spreads. Yet my appeal for friction writing goes to something even more basic: When you encounter (and pay heed to) resistance in your writing, you have the chance to change not only your words but also your mind—and even to consider whether you need to be writing something at all, or at least at this moment.

Borrowing from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg he talks about the power and potential of the waste book. This allows us to write more and share better.

This touches on Ian O’Byrne’s discussion of thinking twice before sharing that hot take:

I’d urge you to focus on first doing the work yourself before you move to the local context. Read up. Problematize your perspectives. Question your assumptions and biases. Listen to others.

Personally, I find sharing first in my own space before sharing elsewhere builds in a healthy level of friction. This also reminds me of Clay Shirky’s discussion of junking perfectly good workflows to maintain attention.

At the end of every year, I junk a lot of perfectly good habits in favor of awkward new ones.
…
Some of those changes stick, most don’t, but since every tool switch involves a period of disorientation and sub-optimal use, I have to make myself be willing to bang around with things I don’t understand until I do understand them. This is the opposite of a dream setup; the thing I can least afford is to get things working so perfectly that I don’t notice what’s changing in the environment anymore.

ᔥ “Snakes & Ladders” in Murmurations, Months, Masters • Buttondown ()

Liked Contextual Computing, Workflow Thinking, and the Future of Text (Ryan Boren)

To flow forward into this future of text where hyperlinks enable workflow thinking, contextual computing, and cultures of knowledge connection, we need intrinsic addressability in all of our tools. We need ubiquitous bidirectional linking of the sort Hook provides.

Bookmarked 8 Quick Checks for Understanding by Jay McTighe (George Lucas Educational Foundation)

Formative assessment is a proven technique for improving student learning, and the strategies shared here by Jay McTighe work both in the classroom and remotely.

Jay McTighe provides a list of eight formative assessment techniques that can be used for quick pulse checks:

  • Ask students to display a designated hand signal to indicate
  • Present students with a few binary-choice statements
  • Have students create a visual or symbolic representation
  • Present students with a common misconception or a frequent procedural error
  • Have students regularly summarize what they are learning
  • Ask students to find or create new and novel examples to illustrate a newly learned concept
  • Ask students to teach a new concept or skill to someone else
  • Invite students to develop an analogy or metaphor to illustrate a newly learned concept or skill

I feel the right technique often depends on the context and situation, online included. For example, I remember using misconceptions in mathematics and  response systems for exit tickets.

ᔥ “Ian O’Byrne” in Digital Resilience – Digitally Literate ()

Bookmarked Learning Strategies by Sign in – Google Accounts (W. Ian O'Byrne)

Learning strategies refer to methods that students use to learn. A learning strategy is an individual’s way of organizing and using a particular set of skills in order to learn content or accomplish other tasks more effectively and efficiently in academic and nonacademic settings.

Ian O’Byrne discusses the concept of learning strategies. This includes diving into different categories and how to teach strategies. It has me thinking about the reference to strategies in the Modern Learning Canvas. It is also helpful in considering something like visible thinking routines and how they work within the classroom.
RSVPed Attending Assessment of Critical and Creative Thinking

In this session a range of strategies for assessing Critical and Creative Thinking will be explored. Different assessment methods will be introduced within the context of planning for assessment. Examples of student work and associated tasks from Levels 5 and 6 will be used to illustrate the discussion, however this session is suitable for all teachers from F-10.

This VCAA webinar unpacks the Critical and Creative Thinking curriculum and how to go about assessment. The curriculum is broken into three strands:

  • Questions and Possibilities
  • Reasoning
  • Meta-cognition

Some examples of activities include:

Lotus Diagram

The Lotus Diagram is a structured concept mapping activity which provides a means of assessing questioning and reasoning. What was interesting about the example provided was that there may not be an explicit way of completing the task, this ambiguity is where the reasoning comes in.

Compass Points

The Visible Thinking routine, Compass Points, is a way of not only coming up with ideas, but also to step back and help make preconceptions more visible. In regards to assessment, what matters with such as task is how a students may use a particular tool to foster their learning.

Journaling

Showing your thinking in Mathematics provides a means of making your logic and reasoning visible. As a process, this could involve focusing on processes or digging into particular errors.

If students are not being challneged, then they are just practicing what they know

This reminds me of Back-to-Front Mathematics.

Tiered Success Criteria

Sometimes the biggest challenge is getting all students to push themselves further. One method for doing this is using the SOLO Taxonomy to create tiered success criterias to help students managing their own learning and thinking.

My take-away from this session is that from an assessment perspective, a stimulus can provide many different opportunities for assessment. What matters is the lens that you use. I was also reminded of the work of the ATC21s team and the work done to develop assessment methods for collaboration. So often it felt that the process was a subplot to the product of learning.

The VCAA have collected together a number of samples to demonstrate what is possible.

Liked The Science and Poetry of Messy thinking by Derek Jones (distancedesigneducation.com)

So here’s the List of Fun Things to Try with Conceptual Metaphors:

  1. Start with conceptions, not solutions or tech. Instead of saying ‘I need a Virtual Design Studio’, ask yourself what the studio space should feel like (using conceptions). What is the ‘quality without name’ you’re looking for (just because you can’t name this it doesn’t mean you can’t describe it)? Have a look at the dimensions listed here for ideas and use these to brief, specify and discuss requirements with others. You do not have to fall into the trap of using reductive tech language to ask for what you need for your students.
  2. Use conceptual metaphors, not tech names. Someone else mentioned this at the CHEAD event, but to call a lecture a ‘Webinar’ is to deliberately draw attention to the technical medium. We don’t call seminars ‘f2f-inars’ … (OK, clunky example…). If an event is a tutorial then it’s OK to call it a tutorial regardless of where and how it’s arranged – it’s the human value that’s more useful to communicate than the medium or mode.
  3. Make some key things more complex, not less. If you need a particular atmosphere or feeling (a ‘quality without name’) in your studio or class then state that clearly. Be confident about your uncertainty – describe this as boundaries of knowledge rather than just ignorance (you’re technically an agnotologist). But don’t hide it either – be open about how we use uncertainty with colleagues and especially students (give them something solid if they need it).
  4. Be critical and reflective when you do this. I haven’t touched on the dark side of this type of cognition (it can be very dark indeed) so make use of the other major tool in our design toolkits – our ability to evaluate the process at the same time as engaging in that process. Using some simple, critical frames to help you critique from other perspectives.
Bookmarked LF10 – Permissionless Identities (Little Futures)

For both full timers and independents, career growth in a permissionless world is increasingly going to be a modular and iterative process vs the step-change enabled by the old world of gatekeepers.

So don’t wait for permission. If you’re unsure about the future of your career – don’t look for answers, don’t look for validation or labels – look for experiments, new networks and narrative air-cover. And remember that this networked permissionless world has enabled the opportunity to simply write your way into a new way of thinking and being

Big futures are permissioned. Little futures are permissionless.

Tom Critchlow discusses blogging and thinking out loud as a form of narrative institutions.

One way to create narrative stability is through creating “narrative institutions” – these are projects, websites, businesses, side projects, hobbies or activities that you can lean on for stability. While formal things like career, job description or professional label are in flux we can rely on our narrative institution to provide stability.

I wonder how this relates to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s discussion of anti-fragility?

Bookmarked Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter | WIRED (WIRED)

We write the equivalent of 520 million books every day on social media and email. The fact that so many of us are writing — sharing our ideas, good and bad — has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public.

In an extract from Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson explores being connected, as well as the impact and influence this has on our thinking.

Marginalia

Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge.

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Children who didn’t explain their thinking performed worst. The ones who recorded their explanations did better

Once thinking is public, connections take over

The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand

FAILED NETWORKS KILL IDEAS. BUT SUCCESSFUL ONES TRIGGER THEM.

Replied to Nobody Cares … Maybe (cbarclay.global2.vic.edu.au)

When I think about WHY I started blogging it was certainly not for the likes, kudos and comments. It was for one simple reason and that being – to share my experiences in teaching, learning and leading. Pretty simple hey.

I was left thinking by both your post Corrie, as well as Doug’s.

There are two pieces that I often come back to on this topic. The first is from J Hillis Miller who argued that we are always already writing:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

The challenge is getting those thoughts out.

The second is Clive Thompson’s discussion of the power of public:

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Although nobody may care, it is the possibility that they might which probably matters.

In regards to your writing, what I have always appreciated about your posts over time is your effort to bring things together. Personally, I am less worried about the technical side of writing and more interested in the voice and perspective offered. But then, maybe I am just a bad writer too. Who knows, who cares 🙂

Bookmarked The Inhumanities; Or, the war on the humanities & why our humanity is at stake (marktredinnick.com)

IS IT A COINCIDENCE that at a time of protest around the world—a cry for systemic reform, an outcry against the failures of imagination and the decimation of the spirit, against the smallness of mind and meanness of heart, against the exploitation of the earth and of each other, upon which the colonial project and global commerce have depended—is it a coincidence that at just this time the Australian government, a more reactionary and ideologically driven regime than any we have known, has decided to dismantle the humanities?

Mark Tredinnick responds the challenge being made to the traditional liberal arts education in Australia.

The humanities teach us how to think. How to Be. And how to do it for oneself. They teach one how to write and speak. For oneself, on behalf of interests greater than one’s own. They school us in ethics, in care, in imagination. They ask us to ask ourselves to do better with our living. And how to ask for better. For instance, from those in power. The humanities help us to know what, beside profit and security, counts. For any and every human life.

He argues that rather than job-focused degrees we need to be people-focused.

We don’t need job-focused degrees (heavy on data and light on wisdom). What we need more than ever is students who learn how to live and who know how to help others live meaningful and meaning-making lives. We need minds capable of apprehending merit and beauty and of fashioning justice and joy; we need hearts that know how to care for the wreck of the world and the wreck of other lives that the prevailing economic and political models have made; we need minds skilled at the craft of conserving what’s left, and keeping it habitable for human—and all sorts of other beings.

We in fact need the humanities as an anti-thesis of being too economically focused.

We need music because we have factories; we need poetry because we have politics; we need the humanities because we have economies, and because there is always the risk that one might enter dangerous times like this, and governments like this.

Liked Why ‘worthless’ humanities degrees may set you up for life (bbc.com)

But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the liberal arts, in particular the humanities – whether that’s by debating other students in a seminar, writing a thesis paper or analysing poetry.

Liked How “Peanuts” Created a Space for Thinking (The New Yorker)

Charles Schulz’s beloved comic strip invited readers to contemplate the big picture on a small scale.

This essay is drawn from the anthology “The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life,” edited by Andrew Blauner.
Liked Helen DeWitt (full-stop.net)

Writing can be a way of thinking. Sometimes it seems as though a voice comes into the head and one writes down what it says — that would count as thinking, it seems to me, only if any conscious mental activity counts as thinking.

You’ll probably see, from my answer above, that I don’t think thinking is always done in language. Tufte’s work surely shows a wide range of non-linguistic thought that makes use of the page.

Bookmarked “Real-World” Math Is Everywhere or It’s Nowhere by By Dan Meyer (dy/dan)

Amare is looking at these 16 parabolas. Her partner Geoff has chosen one and she has to figure out which one by asking yes-or-no questions. There are lots of details here. She’s trying to foc…

Dan Meyer on differentiating between ‘real’ models versus ‘non-real’ models in Mathematics. The problem with this is that from a process point of view it is all real learning.