…and I'm all out of bubble gum.
Posts tagged Howard Gardner
Multiple Intelligences About Coding
Mar 23rd
Having just struck upon the similarities between Pink’s six new senses and Gardner’s multiple intelligences, I continue to be fascinated by examples of folks employing these ideas in creative ways: enter Basildon Coder, recently highlighted on Slashdot for describing a Wodehouse-ian approach to code refactoring. As always, I look at this and start to ponder how to use it in the classroom with my students: one of the real challenges that my students face is not the development of new code (although that is challenging) but figuring out how to use a body of code written by someone else (me, their classmates, some godawful Windows GDI API, etc.). I have been struck by the difficulty my students have faced this year in grasping the 50,000 foot view of coding — perhaps a visual representation like this might be a first step. Sort of a Powers of 10 for programming.
Pink’s Sense of Meaning (in Rachel’s Numbers)
Mar 21st
I have a shelf (well, two shelves now) of books that I want read in their entirety (many of which I have cherry-picked and explored already). But one of the things that I’m particularly bad about is setting aside the time to really sit down and read a book cover-to-cover (even in chapters — I get distracted easily, like a cat with shiny things). Fortunately, I am traveling today, which creates the enforced seat-time necessary to get some good reading in.
I read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind on my flight from Dallas to Chicago this morning. It turned out to be a shockingly quick read. While I was put off for several chapters by his apparent need to ingratiate himself to left-brain directed skeptics (myself included), I was gratified to find that he did have a clear line of reasoning, rich in examples of why right-brain directed folks will be in greater comparative demand in the coming years. Much like Thomas Friedman, but much, much quicker to get through. And with interesting portfolios to match each of his new six senses.
Ironically, Pink’s last sense is the sense for meaning, touching on what he perceives a general human need for meaning in life beyond, say, comfort or safety — Viktor Frankl was his dramatic example of this. (I have some doubts that this is really a “sense” per se — much like Howard Gardner’s intelligences: they represent ideas that are hard to categorize, so any categorization is necessarily arbitrary.) Pink offers some interesting suggestions for how to try to hone this sense, particularly focused on establishing reflective rituals for oneself. I say ironically, because I just saw that my friend Rachel posted this reflection earlier this week. Way to go Rach!
