The Essential Arguments: Understanding Why Things Are As They Are

When I started this blog I wanted to write about the intersections of teaching, learning and technology.

But what to write about? Not that there was a deficit of issues and activity - but finding the right perspective to inform them any better than many much more brilliant people were never presented itself.

Until I realized my advantage was I actually knew far less than they did about their topics. They were experts - and that was their disadvantage. To an expert - by benefit of greater training and deep, deep knowledge - they understood, in the gestalt of their discipline, why EVERY detail was essential and critical to the integrity of the whole. Without one nail - the war would be lost. And this can often be their greatest single impediment.

Without that constraint I was free to misinterpret - nay question - the unquestionable assumptions of the academy. I was simply too naive to know how wrong I was. And that seems to be a pretty interesting way to look at things. Now I could have experts teach me. Together we could find the essential arguments that made me smarter - and might free them from their bonds of expertise.

So, at least for today as I write, this will be my new lens for looking at education, technology, innovation, disruption and the disjunctions they cause.

The Link Not Taken

(apologies to Robert Frost)

Two links emerged on a search return,

And sorry I could not click on both

And be one surfer, long I churn

And read down one to try and learn

Which to choose and which to spurn.

Then read the other, as just for sure,

And having perhaps the better claim,

It’s URL promised pure;

Though as statistics did ensure

Users clicked both about the same.

So both upon that screen did lay

With promise but unproven track.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how link leads to link along the way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two links diverged in a search, and I--

I took the one less Googled by,

And that has made all the difference.