I keep coming back to the importance of the balance of judgement, learning and experience in making the right decisions. It's becoming so interesting that I am considering a more formal approach, even maybe some classes! Now, back to school, that would be a real change for me.
I was entertained by a radio interview with Daniel Dennett, a populist philosopher and author. He was talking about his book - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - and made a chance remark that made me smile, then made me think. Aren't those the best ones? I bought the book and my head is perhaps a little bigger but hurting nonetheless.
Dennett was explaining one of his ideas and compared learning to downloading an application to the "neck top". His way of getting a message across. Beautiful.
What a wonderful idea! Imagine being able to learn in the same way as we access smartphone software. Gone all those days of cramming and revising. Learning rhymes to tackle lists of scientific formulae or kings and queens, all consigned to a bygone age. Wouldn't that be fantastic? Or would it?
Then some days ago, I watched a segment on the BBC at breakfast time, examining changing attitudes to spelling and how it seemed to be becoming much less important, because spell checkers re-skewed the lazy. There is a great soundbite about the reliance on spelling auto-correction being akin to following a sat-nav blindly and ending up in a canal or, perhaps in Croatia, like this unfortunate Belgian driver! Add predictive text and the consequences could be worse still.
It would be ironic to let ourselves consider that technology and the internet enslave us rather than set us free and that the great web pioneers are more short-sellers like Kane rather than Abel-ers playing the longer-term game.
Then to contrast today, an admiring article about the daughter of another BBC correspondent in Paris, talking about learning philosophy as part of the French 'bac literaire. The defence of ideas and the discipline of thinking can build great ideas and great ideas can make greater things happen.
It seems that learning HOW to think and not WHAT to think is the fundamental mission of teaching.
As we accelerate towards some sort of singularity of people and technology, we would probably do well to be wary of some of the sat-navs we encounter.
In fact, I consider sat-navs to be inherently dangerous. They should be banned.
Imagine what would happen if NASA used this technology to conquer space. A sat-nav directed mission to Mars would be fraught with unpredictable dangers, especially as the minimum and maximum distances to the Red Planet vary by close to 350 million km. This is because of the way both planets orbit the Sun. The smallest miscalculation could bring social disaster.
Think, astronauts might arrive so unexpectedly early that the Martians hadn't had time to do the shopping or so late that the welcoming dinner might have been spoiled and they'd gone to bed, all unhappy.
Now that's just absurd.
I was entertained by a radio interview with Daniel Dennett, a populist philosopher and author. He was talking about his book - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - and made a chance remark that made me smile, then made me think. Aren't those the best ones? I bought the book and my head is perhaps a little bigger but hurting nonetheless.
Dennett was explaining one of his ideas and compared learning to downloading an application to the "neck top". His way of getting a message across. Beautiful.
What a wonderful idea! Imagine being able to learn in the same way as we access smartphone software. Gone all those days of cramming and revising. Learning rhymes to tackle lists of scientific formulae or kings and queens, all consigned to a bygone age. Wouldn't that be fantastic? Or would it?
Then some days ago, I watched a segment on the BBC at breakfast time, examining changing attitudes to spelling and how it seemed to be becoming much less important, because spell checkers re-skewed the lazy. There is a great soundbite about the reliance on spelling auto-correction being akin to following a sat-nav blindly and ending up in a canal or, perhaps in Croatia, like this unfortunate Belgian driver! Add predictive text and the consequences could be worse still.
It would be ironic to let ourselves consider that technology and the internet enslave us rather than set us free and that the great web pioneers are more short-sellers like Kane rather than Abel-ers playing the longer-term game.
Then to contrast today, an admiring article about the daughter of another BBC correspondent in Paris, talking about learning philosophy as part of the French 'bac literaire. The defence of ideas and the discipline of thinking can build great ideas and great ideas can make greater things happen.
It seems that learning HOW to think and not WHAT to think is the fundamental mission of teaching.
As we accelerate towards some sort of singularity of people and technology, we would probably do well to be wary of some of the sat-navs we encounter.
In fact, I consider sat-navs to be inherently dangerous. They should be banned.
Imagine what would happen if NASA used this technology to conquer space. A sat-nav directed mission to Mars would be fraught with unpredictable dangers, especially as the minimum and maximum distances to the Red Planet vary by close to 350 million km. This is because of the way both planets orbit the Sun. The smallest miscalculation could bring social disaster.
Think, astronauts might arrive so unexpectedly early that the Martians hadn't had time to do the shopping or so late that the welcoming dinner might have been spoiled and they'd gone to bed, all unhappy.
Now that's just absurd.
