There is an interesting conversation thread on Slashdot asking “What practices impede developers’ productivity?” The conversation is in response to an excellent post by Steve McConnell from 2008 addressing productivity variations among software developers and teams and the origin of “10x” – that is, the observation noted in the wild of “10-fold differences in productivity [...]
In The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dörner makes the following observation: In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from [...]
College students, their parents, and the economy are mixing in a way that is causing an important realization to emerge. And that is, there is no one type of post high school educational program that will work for a broad population of students and situations. Different needs, different interests, and different financial resources are generating [...]
In a conversation focused on the value of a liberal arts education in today’s economic and social climate, a classmate took the following position: The problem lies in the social aspect of non-traditional schools and an example of this would be the Colorado School of Mines. Mines is a very tough engineering school that focuses [...]
“Read outside your field,” suggests Wally Bock: Some of the most powerful, breakthrough ideas happen when you adopt practices that are common in other fields. It’s a good tip. And in the comments, Adi Gaskell notes: Many of their solutions are provided by people working outside of their normal field of expertise. Also true and [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
While researching this weeks’ discussion topic in my Masters program, I came across a recent LA Times article that made me think about, for lack of a better phrase, the intentional delay of transfer of learning. Roan (2011) summarizes, For more than a decade, California and other states have kept their newest teen drivers on [...]