Tag Archives: reconceptualizing understandings

How do we see things from a new perspective, engage in transformative or deep-level learning, which in my view constitutes the heart of learning.

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Personal data tracking →

Mil­lions of us track our­selves all the time. We record our weight. We count calo­ries. We bal­ance our check­books. But as elec­tronic senors have got­ten smaller and bet­ter and as social media has made it nor­mal to share every­thing, the process of self-tracking is becom­ing more allur­ing and more mean­ing­ful: pedome­ters at our feet, breath­a­lyz­ers in our lungs, and glu­cose mon­i­tors in our veins. This isn’t the tra­di­tional, ther­a­peu­tic notion of per­sonal devel­op­ment, says Gary Wolf, but rather the self of our most triv­ial thoughts and actions that would go unno­ticed with­out tech­ni­cal help. “Their valid­ity may be nar­row, but it is beau­ti­fully rel­e­vant.” It all seemed a lit­tle too triv­ial to me, until Wolf tells the story of Bo Adler who suf­fers from sleep apnea and resisted the stan­dard course of treat­ment because he did not want to be treated as a stan­dard case until there was evi­dence that he was a stan­dard case. After all, are any of us really stan­dard cases:

Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend our­selves against the imposed gen­er­al­i­ties of offi­cial knowl­edge is typ­i­cal of pio­neer­ing self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quan­ti­fied self resem­bles ther­a­peu­tic ideas of self-actualization, even as its meth­ods are star­tlingly dif­fer­ent. Track­ers focused on their health want to ensure that their med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers don’t miss the par­tic­u­lars of their con­di­tion; track­ers who record their men­tal states are often try­ing to find their own way to per­sonal ful­fill­ment amid the seduc­tions of mar­ket­ing and the errors of com­mon opin­ion; fit­ness track­ers are try­ing to tune their train­ing regimes to their own body types and com­pet­i­tive goals, but they are also look­ing to under­stand their strengths and weak­nesses, to uncover poten­tial they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of opti­miza­tion but of dis­cov­ery, and if track­ing regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becom­ing nor­mal, one of the most inter­est­ing effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “nor­mal” means.

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R
The cold hard facts of freezing to death →

Peter Stark could have sim­ply defined hypother­mia as the con­di­tion in which the body is at abnor­mally low body tem­per­a­tures, one that needs treat­ment at body tem­per­a­tures of 35℃ and becomes life threat­en­ing below 32.2℃. Cer­tainly that is what most train­ers would do. Instead he embeds the cold hard facts of freez­ing to death in a story that begins:

When your Jeep spins lazily off the moun­tain road and slams back­ward into a snow­bank, you don’t worry imme­di­ately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your sec­ond is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for din­ner. Friends are expect­ing you at their cabin around eight for a moon­light ski, a late din­ner, a sauna. Noth­ing can keep you from that.

It is an engross­ing read. Nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ences can be so pow­er­ful. Some will trans­port you to another place and time in a way that is so com­pelling it seems real. A nar­ra­tive like this could pro­vide the struc­ture for an entire train­ing pro­gram. The story offers an orga­niz­ing struc­ture for new expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge. It could shift the focus from a rote mem­o­riza­tion of facts in a text­book to a diag­no­sis of a real-world condition.

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R
Becoming Screen Literate →

We are peo­ple of the screen now, says Kevin Kelly. When we were peo­ple of the writ­ten word, we devel­oped a long list of inno­va­tions and tech­niques to per­mit ordi­nary read­ers and writ­ers to manip­u­late text in ways that made it use­ful (think: quo­ta­tion sym­bols, tables of con­tents, page num­bers, indices, foot­notes, bib­li­o­graphic cita­tions, and of course, hyper­links). We will do the same to sup­port screen fluency:

With our fin­gers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone cam­era will cap­ture a land­scape, then dis­play its his­tory, which we can use to anno­tate the image. Text, sound, motion will con­tinue to merge into a sin­gle inter­me­dia as they flow through the always-on net­work. With the assis­tance of screen flu­ency tools we might even be able to sum­mon up real­is­tic fan­tasies spon­ta­neously. Stand­ing before a screen, we could cre­ate the visual image of a turquoise rose, glis­ten­ing with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen lit­er­ate, maybe even faster. And that is just the open­ing scene.

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R
Debunking Psychological Stages →

Elis­a­beth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Sig­mund Freud’s five stages of psy­cho­sex­ual devel­op­ment. Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral devel­op­ment. The urge to com­press the com­plex­i­ties of life into neat, tidy stages is irresistible…and has very lit­tle to do with real­ity.

Those stage the­o­ries reflected a time when most peo­ple marched through life pre­dictably: mar­ry­ing at an early age; then hav­ing chil­dren when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife cri­sis; then retire­ment; then death. Those ‘pas­sages’ the­o­ries evap­o­rated with chang­ing social and eco­nomic con­di­tions that blew the pre­dictabil­ity of our lives to hell.

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R
Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death →

Jesse Bering on why so many of us think our minds con­tinue on after we die; rather than being a by-product of reli­gion or an emo­tional secu­rity blan­ket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.

And so per­son per­ma­nence may be the final cog­ni­tive hur­dle that gets in the way of our effec­tively real­iz­ing the dead as they truly are — infi­nitely in situ, inan­i­mate car­bon residue. Instead it’s much more “nat­ural” to imag­ine them as exist­ing in some vague, unob­serv­able locale, very much liv­ing their dead lives.

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R
Dawn of the Picasso Fish →

Carl Zim­mer gives a typ­i­cally fas­ci­nat­ing account of the evo­lu­tion of our under­stand­ing of how the flat­fish came to have two eyes on one side of its head, an evo­lu­tion­ary conun­drum that engaged both Charles Dar­win and his crit­ics. Dar­win argued that the trait evolved over many gen­er­a­tions of flat­fish; how­ever there was no evi­dence for this mor­pho­log­i­cal devel­op­ment in the fos­sil record.The most recent con­tri­bu­tion to the story is evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Matt Friedman’s dis­cov­ery of three exam­ples of tran­si­tional forms of flat­fish among the dusty fos­sil col­lec­tions of Europe. What is most inter­est­ing to me is that these fos­sils were long ago col­lected and curated, but so clearly sat­isfy the require­ment of a Dar­win­ian inter­me­di­ate. Matt Fried­man explains:

I sup­pose there is a gen­eral per­cep­tion that museum col­lec­tions are dusty, sta­tic archives, and that every­thing in them has been care­fully stud­ied and pre­cisely iden­ti­fied. But the truth is that they are much more than just long-term stor­age, because as our inter­pre­tive frame­work matures, we can begin to make sense of spec­i­mens that evaded or baf­fled ear­lier gen­er­a­tions of researchers, or draw new con­clu­sions about mate­ri­als we mis­tak­enly thought we had fig­ured out ages ago.

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R
Is Google Making Us Stupid →

Con­trary to the title of this arti­cle, Nicholas Carr isn’t so much ask­ing if Google is mak­ing us stu­pid, but rather if Google mak­ing us think dif­fer­ently. The answer to this ques­tion is yes, and it echoes ear­lier sen­ti­ments by Neil Post­man who pointed out (about tele­vi­sion) that tech­nol­ogy is not neutral:

Then again, the Net isn’t the alpha­bet, and although it may replace the print­ing press, it pro­duces some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. The kind of deep read­ing that a sequence of printed pages pro­motes is valu­able not just for the knowl­edge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intel­lec­tual vibra­tions those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sus­tained, undis­tracted read­ing of a book, or by any other act of con­tem­pla­tion, for that mat­ter, we make our own asso­ci­a­tions, draw our own infer­ences and analo­gies, fos­ter our own ideas. Deep read­ing, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indis­tin­guish­able from deep thinking.

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R
In Defense of Hulk →

What if Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie isn’t as bad as every­one said it was? Comic-book adap­ta­tions typ­i­cally invent new adven­tures for their pro­tag­o­nists while remain­ing rel­a­tively faith­ful to the back story of their heroes. Lee, how­ever, reimag­ined the story of the Hulk, blend­ing ele­ments from the comic book, the tele­vi­sion show that aired in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and his own imag­i­na­tion. The ver­dict? Comic-book fans, crit­ics, and every­one in between agreed: It stunk.

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R
Put a Little Science in Your Life →

Brain Greene explains why sci­ence matters:

Sci­ence is a way of life. Sci­ence is a per­spec­tive. Sci­ence is the process that takes us from con­fu­sion to under­stand­ing in a man­ner that’s pre­cise, pre­dic­tive and reli­able — a trans­for­ma­tion, for those lucky enough to expe­ri­ence it, that is empow­er­ing and emo­tional. To be able to think through and grasp expla­na­tions — for every­thing from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal pat­terns con­firmed by exper­i­ment and obser­va­tion, is one of the most pre­cious of human experiences.

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R
Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science →

David Sloan Wil­son on design­ing the Human­i­ties Ini­tia­tive, a course con­ceived to cross the cul­tural chasm between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, bring­ing together the strengths of both mind­sets to issues in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy, and to avoid roman­ti­ciz­ing sci­ence or pre­sent­ing it as the ulti­mate arbiter of meaning:

You can study music, dance, nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling and art­mak­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally, and you can con­clude that yes, they’re deeply bio­log­i­cally dri­ven, they’re essen­tial to our species, but there would still be some­thing miss­ing, and that thing is an appre­ci­a­tion for the work itself, a true under­stand­ing of its mean­ing in its cul­ture and context.

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