You might think this post would show up as the very first one. But then, you’d be mistaken. Life is sloppy, even when it goes well. I’ve been away from blogging for a little more than three years. The previous experience was an unabashed and fully disclosed experiment, a space for creativity, a “space where [...]

The fact I avoid much of the social networking that takes place on the Internet is a feature, not a bug. MySpace and Facebook look like blogging with cool features that someone else controls. As for Twitter, I think Joel Spolsky (2010) has it about right, Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to [...]

John Cook makes several good points with respect to the distinction between “professional” and “amateur.” A professional is someone who does a thing for money, and an amateur is someone who does it for love. Volunteer fire fighters are amateurs in the best sense, doing what they do out of love of the work and [...]

Thinking further about my previous post on seeing vs. visualizing, and doing a bit more research, there is more to add. After falling down the rabbit hole for some considerable time, I ended up with solid footing on Korzybski’s insight: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar [...]

I first read about cargo cults in Feynman’s (1985) book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.” So I benefited from the unique perspective he brought to the subject. I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a [...]

A Buddhist proverb reads, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I have found this to be true and it marks one of the many ways in which my life has been fortunate. As is often the case with proverbs, there is a corollary which is equally true: “When a student appears, the [...]

The following exchange is from the discussion forum  for OTL560, “Facilitating Learning and Transfer.” The discussion topic for this week was to prepare a “top ten list of best practices for K-12 facilitation.” The assignment was a little vague, but presumably we needed to frame this within the context of various learning theories we’ve researched. [...]

Quantifying transfer of learning is a difficult task. Many attempts to substantiate the efficacy of any particular learning theory for facilitating learning transfer have proven to be elusive. This isn’t surprising, in light of Haskell’s (2001) observation, “Transfer is the basis of mental abstraction, analogical relations, classification, generalization, generic thinking, induction, invariance, isomorphic relations, logical [...]