Inforgraphics are wonderful tools that can be used to visually convey a unique message, compile several thoughts and ideas into a single frame and to help people get a visual representation of your ideas. Sharing inforgraphics has also never been easier through blogs, twitter and Pinterest. Now even making infographics has been simplified by using one of the many of the sites listed on edudemic
Daphne Koller argues:
maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them.
Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix argues that Nothing is original. Ferguson states:
From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, our most celebrated creators both borrow, steal and transform.
If you look at the act of remixing music, writing or other artforms you will see that people are simply taking aspects or artifacts in their environment and shaping and moulding those items to construct their own understanding of reality. To a constructivist this is learning. To be more specific this fits into the the realm of social constructivism because music and other cultural artforms are aspects of our social networks that help shape and mould society. The great thinker and educational refromer John Dewey argued:
“constructivists do not look for copies or mirrorings of an outer reality in the human mind”, but instead they rather see humans as “observers, participants, and agents who actively generate and transform the patterns through which they construct the realities that fit them.
Is remixing equivalent to learning or is it simply imitation or plagiarism?
Simon Sinek puts out a quote each day and today’s quote is one that I hope to live up to and I would also hope that all leaders live by:
Great leaders are idealists. They are optimists. They overestimate what we are capable of and inspire us to believe the same. Sinek August 16, 2012
Most people instinctively avoid conflict, but as Margaret Heffernan shows us, good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counterintuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers — and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.
Unfortunately, most organizations will go out their way to avoid conflict and essentially stop thinking and stop progress. Why? Heffernan points out that it takes a significant amount of courage, effort and work:
to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.
It is not that organization don’t want to embrace and engage with these divergent and disruptive thinkers it is that they can’t. And as Heffernan points out, organizations limit their thinking and progress:
because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.
Fortunately, Heffernan doesn’t leave us hanging without a solution to this problem. The challenge is that the solution is an age old human shortcoming of not facing the hard truth or reality that circumstance demand. Perhaps Heffernan’s closing challenge needs repeating:
But truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.
