Sense and Sensation

Moonshot Thinking At SXSW this past spring, a Googler gave a presentation about what Google calls Moonshot Thinking, the kind of no-holds-barred, imaginative, off-the-wall, visionquest thinking that solves problems ten times more effectively than existing solutions do.  This kind of thinking was what spawned the Google[x] office, a home inside Google for pursuing radical ideas, like self-driving cars, email accounts with virtually unlimited space, and more.  (The “x” in Google [x] is for ten--as in improving what’s out there by a factor of ten.)  The man speaking at SXSW was Astro Teller , who oversees Google[x], and goes by the title “Captain of Moonshots.” The session was an inspiration session, which means there wasn’t much in the line of content.  It meant to inspire with big ideas, but if you follow what’s going on in the tech world, most of it was familiar.  Despite these shortcomings, it did plant the expression “moonshot thinking” in my head, ...

In the last 30 years, a field has emerged that is primed to dramatically influence the way we teach our classes, the way we shape our learning environments, perhaps even the way we think about education.  Reading headlines today, we would all be forgiven for suspecting that that field is technology: since the early 80s, driven by a massive economic engine, technology has poured into schools and enabled imaginative learning environments and opportunities.  And now, we are investing heavily as a nation into technology as the key to education’s ills. This is great.  Our technological advancements have limitless potential, but at this moment in history we’re putting the cart before the horse.  We’re putting the object of delivery ahead of the engine that should power it. For what has also flourished in the last 30 years is the field of cognitive science.   Our understanding of the mechanics of the human mind has deepened enormously, and this unde...

Starting the spring term always feels like grabbing onto a passing train: the sudden jolt, feet in the air, hanging on for dear life, and the train keeps speeding up.  The next stop five or six weeks away, I'm afraid the blog silence will continue on for a least a little longer. Until then, I've just discovered that podcasts are up from SXSWedu.  To re-experience the talk on creativity, audio is available here: http://audio.sxsw.com/2012/podcasts/edu/07_Creativity_in_Education.mp3 And, for the multimedia savvy, abridged slides are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/pnilsson/nilsson-creativity-in-the-classroom-nais-sxsw You can flip through the slides while listening to the audio... et voila!