“Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone… In 20 years, we’ll know a lot more about the costs and benefits of minimal manning and lifelong learning. But nobody on the Giffords was pondering that after the crew finished its unloading job… Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.”
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, and even demands, hyper-specialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part — we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
“The aim of this study – Predict, a collaboration between King’s College London and Harvard and Stanford medical schools in the US – is to measure thousands of people’s responses to different foods and discover why, when it comes to health, different diets suit different people. The hope is that when enough data has been gathered researchers (using AI), and eventually an app called Zoe, will be able to predict individual healthy and unhealthy food choices for each of us.”
“The feet are the most honest part of the body. If you’re not confident, you tend to turn them away, toward the exit.”
“One of the world’s greatest pianists takes the stage. He panics. Where is the plastic lobster? He doesn’t know. He only knows he can’t play without it.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson