People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.
John Seely BrownRead
It's never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.
Interpretation
True understanding comes from experience, not just information.
This quote emphasizes the importance of experiential learning over traditional teaching methods. John Seely Brown argues that simply conveying knowledge is insufficient; instead, educators should facilitate experiences that allow individuals to perceive the world differently and grasp concepts deeply, leading to genuine insight and growth.
In practice
A teacher could use this quote when introducing a hands-on project to highlight the importance of experiential learning.
People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.
If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology.
The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation.
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.
True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Persistent questioning and healthy inquisitiveness are the first requisite for acquiring learning of any kind.
I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.
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