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How We Think

I’m trying to end the year on a high note, but it’s not so easy due to the current hospitalization of a noted colleague at MIT named Seymour Papert.

To occupy my mind and to build a better appreciation of Papert’s contributions, I (tried to) read John Dewey’s How We Think. It’s a slender volume of 224 pages, but it certainly packs an intellectual punch. Lucky for me, Dewey has left many marginalia throughout the book to help non-theory folks like myself decipher his writings.

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Here in pages 188 to 196, Dewey exhorts that facts-based learning in schools is insufficient, and that learning how to think happens best when actually doing things — or as they say “learning by doing.” Papert’s contribution to the education field follows with Papert’s adherence to the constructionist “learning by making” approach.

Papert’s current medical status can be reviewed here, and you can sign a get-well card I created for well-wishers around the world.

Simplicity, my dear Watson.
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As part of my holiday readings, I opened a gift from a few years ago. I wish I could remember who gave this to me. It is a Sherlock Holmes book entitled The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. By the fifth page, I realized how much a simplicity-buff Sherlock Holmes really was. I guess the famous phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” might just as easily have turned out, “Simplicity, my dear Watson.” I think I need to go and grab my bent Briar pipe now …

Out of Our Minds

 

At TED last year, the high point for me was seeing Sir Ken Robinson talk. I remember how at the end of TED, Diego Rodriguez and I were both knocked out by Robinson’s PowerPoint-less, completely a capella delivery.

His book Out of Our Minds was something I bought at the conference, but I never had a chance to read it until recently. In a way it’s similar to A Whole New Mind but it achieves greater depth based upon Robinson’s tremendous wealth of experiences. You’d be “out of your mind” not to read it at the first chance possible.

A Whole New Mind

 

I was happy to read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future because I’ve heard his book quoted by many thought-leaders. Affirmations like “MFA’s are the new MBA” and other global cheerleading for more right-brain inspired approaches to problem solving owe Pink a great deal of thanks. Pink’s heavily researched “Six Senses” of Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning are actually quite compatible with the Ten Laws so I feel that my conjectures are flying in the right air space. Or maybe that’s my left side of the brain doing the talking here. I have to be careful because I now know that left is the new wrong.

Good to Great

Although the title isn’t great, it’s still a great book. One of Jim Collins’ points of philosophy is his “Hedgehog Concept.” According to Jim, hedgehogs understand that the essence of profound insight is simplicity. He elaborates further on these animals that — “They see what is essential, and ignore the rest.” — which sounds an awfully lot like the tenth Law the one. I sincerely hope I haven’t inadvertently upset these little fellas.