Imagine

Eddie Smith (on his Practically Efficient site) has a great perspective on how it's not about the iPad: 

The next time you watch a child use an iPad, think about what your knowledge-based toys looked like when you were their age.

The iPad is their slide rule; their typewriter; their Commodore 64. As great as the iPad is, it’s more mind blowing to imagine what will soon deprecate it.

This had me thinking from the moment I read it. It's an easy enough game to guess at what will come next. The real exercise is to see and understand the technological advancement from commodore 64 to iPad and then try and imagine what another such advancement will bring us. Words fail me quite literally. 

Real and authentic attention

Today I had a chance to experience what it’s like to be a school teacher, albeit brief. I was given the opportunity to teach an hour long lesson for the more advanced children at the primary school of my daughters. My oldest was in the class and was -- if possible -- even more looking forward to this than I was. 

It went really well. But the experience taught me a few life lessons. 

The topic of this class was The Internet. The children (ages 9 and 10) loved the story. They particularly liked the exercises I had made up at the end where they played a live internet and each of them had to cut up a word into ‘internet’ packages and distribute them, one letter at a time, towards class-mates while at the same time playing router, switch and proxy, about which they learned in the half hour before. It was an enthusiastic crowd, eager to learn and experience new information. One could almost literally see them absorbing the words I spoke and raising their hands as soon as I went too fast, or the matter got beyond their current knowledge or outside their frame of reference. 

It was fascinating. And I am glad I am asked to do this twice more in the coming weeks on similar topics. 

The children’s teachers were a different story. Besides the one who initiated this lesson and was unfortunately home with a flu, I did not see a single teacher. They did not show any interest in what I was telling the children. However, I feel they should be interested. If only to be able to refer to it in class, to add to it, or at least learn something new themselves and be able to answer the kids’ questions, which ran into the hundreds on this for them so important topic. 

Also, given the fact that no teacher could solve the problem with the computer sound system in the classroom not working, I am confident that what I told the kids, would also be at least partially new and at the very least interesting to those teachers. 

Directly after the lesson I noticed I compared the whole experience with presentations in my professional life. I often present to colleagues and management within my company and couldn’t help comparing both situations. The behavior in the office is different in several ways:

• there is no raising of hands when (not: if) people don’t understand something. 
• there is no eagerness to learn. Blackberry and the meeting after the current one is where attention focuses. 
• And I couldn’t help wondering if I am wrong more often than I think in understanding the real information needs of the audience. 

All in all, I am slightly disappointed, but really more wondering. Where, between the ages of 9 and 39 does attitude change? And why isn’t the educational system focused on preventing that? 

Lately I am coldly reminded of this drawing, a bit too often. Today I saw what real and authentic attention looks like. A life lesson indeed. 

Chasing thoughts

I really like to think. I like the process. It is fun to try out abstract concepts in the mind, finding curves and connections around and between words or ideas, and structuring complex issues into simplified models of reality. 

I remember this started early. As a child, not wanting to fall asleep in the evening, I often found myself backtracking my associative thoughts, sometimes as far back as fifteen minutes. I would go back in my mind to all the things I had been thinking of, in reverse order. I would re-think every individual thought and what triggered the connection between every two consecutive thoughts, until I ended up at a beginning where I could no longer find what started it. 

Mostly, the backtracking would take longer than the original thought process had. I still try it sometimes and find it a great brain exercise, although as a perpetually tired parent, I am greatly out of shape at the moment. 

Next to thinking, I enjoy writing a lot. Writing seems to be a catalyst for my thinking, much more so than speaking is. Speaking seems to be the manifestation of thoughts that have previously existed in my mind. Writing seems to create new thoughts and concepts that previously did not exist. I don’t know why this is, but speaking and the thinking that is part of it seem to be one and the same activity. During writing however, I experience two distinct processes in my mind. 

The first of those is the creative process. The task where your mind thinks up ideas, concepts and words. The second process is the actual writing-it-down. It is the task in which the words are appearing on the screen, form sentences and ultimately form the story you want to tell and write down to keep and for others to see. 

While writing, these two processes to me have clear different shapes and form. This is most obvious in the speed of those processes. Let me illustrate by an example which, in real life, often lasts no longer than minutes. 

Say you are inspired. Your writing is going well and seems to flow by itself. In such a state I often experience that I am thinking a little ahead of what I’m actually writing. Words and shapes of sentences, a bit ahead of what I’ve typed so far, form themselves in my head. This would not have to be a problem, but I can feel the story I want to write getting shape in my mind at a speed  which is exceeding the speed of my ability to write. The story on the screen is desperately trying to keep up with the creative process in my mind. And the mind is struggling: on the one hand it is coming up with these great ideas to put into words, and on the other hand I can feel it trying to store those ideas in some sort of structure and dependencies only to be able to retrieve those future parts of the story later. You have the feeling that if you stop and focus on just writing, you’ll never know the end of this part of the story and moreover, it feels as if you’ll lose some great ideas. And just as you think the two processes will be forever disconnected, you can feel the creative process slow down. The mind notices the gap, seems content, stops creating and lets its other process, the typing, finish its job. And while I finish typing, I am now aware that there’s only one activity in the mind: gathering the ideas from the created structure and putting them into words on the screen. 

I do assume I am not alone in experiencing this and seeing the two processes chase each other in real time, is a remarkable experience. I am glad I do not live in an age where all I would have as support of writing is a pen and paper. Think of the speed of those tools… On the other hand, will we ever see a time where the actual thought process is brought into a form for others to see, without the clumsy interface that is a keyboard? One can only imagine what would come out of our minds then.  

Not done yet

Hi! 

This site’s design is a standard template of my hosting provider. And indeed, the about page is not filled yet. There will be a search box, but obviously with these first few posts there’s nothing to search for yet. There is an initial subtitle, however, and that one I am pretty serious about. 

This place is where I want to write. I can't seem to think without writing. It took me many years to find out that if I put thoughts on paper (in a manner of speaking), they get meaning. So much more so than in my head, by themselves, hiding. 

So. This site’s design is a (probably by now) slightly altered standard template of my hosting provider. Nevertheless, I liked it straight away. I feel the same about this post. So there.