Creativity and profound understanding... not merely skill or talent

Chris Dixon writes in his fascinating blog post MIT Is a national treasure, thus:

"Tom Pinckney... got his Bachelors and Master degrees from MIT.

He's the nicest, smartest, and most decent guy you'll ever meet. But my favorite thing about Tom is he never got a high school degree.

High school students today optimize their grades and SATs and after school activities. They speak French and Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art.
They dance around and play hockey and act like they help homeless people."

Sure, learning French and to play the piano among the million other "Mom/Dad Taxi" activities improves competitive capacity, as well as improves talents/skills of your child in multiple areas, but might not do much for creativity and profound understanding.

There is an outstanding creative problem-solving organization called Destination ImagiNation, apart from developing skills and talent, offers the most prestigious Da Vinci Award, to the team that demonstrates outstanding creativity ...not skill or talent.

...and we need an organization that facilitates deep understanding. (and the countdown begins)

P.S.: That is the picture of my daughter Samhita at the Massachusetts Destination ImagiNation Tournament 2011

Urgent Now, Repetitive Now, Bored Now,.... Understanding Now

Google breaks down current information usage in the mobile, into three categories, namely, a) Urgent Now, b) Repetitive Now and c) Bored Now.

As we deeply integrate mobile phones into our lives, a new category would erupt, i.e., "understand now".

Understanding is more than merely throwing some wikipedia links.

Researchers found that 8-month old Infants are capable of segmenting fluent speech, by computing statistical relationships between neighboring segments, that too, listening for just 2 minutes.

Fortunately, it is pre-language phase, that a teacher does not "tell" the kid, how to segment speech, of the n methods, we humans have discovered to be working efficiently.

Though we are not a blank slate, our learning systems don't factor that.

Also, the hardest part in facilitating understanding, is to provide, information content, at the right level of abstraction, that adapts based on the user's current understanding and current reaction.

When we hear an assertion, we react to it, by accepting or rejecting it as coherent to our current understanding. We could be intimidated by the terms used in the content. Or we could be totally confused.

The understanding process could be made efficient, if the content adapts, according to assessment of understanding as well as user reaction to content.

Otherwise, we would continue to rely on string of words and have no way of knowing, how deeply we understood something.

Last and most important, we need to invent a natural interface for users to scribble their reactions. No ackward menus or typing from the keyboard.

... and scribblebee.com could be the answer to such understanding.

A rose is a rose is a rose

Why is it warmer in summer than in winter? Sure you could google and tell me why. Yet Harvard Grads. had trouble correctly answering this question (without Google, of course)

When such is the state, where the competition is intense, average i.q. much higher, fees steep. Imagine asking the same question, in a less privileged school, where the barrier to entry is low.

The root cause is that, Google has not merely caused information overload, but has caused disruption in many fronts.

It first killed the adage, 'Knowledge is Power'.

Even if you worked for 30 years in a domain, someone passionate about the domain, can shake your foundation in a matter of months.

It then killed the myth of "hard work".

You could have worked on something all day long, every day, for the past year. Yet, someone passionate about your domain, can render your entire "hard work" obsolete, by re-factoring your entire model several times over, in just a matter of days.

Many scholars are predicting the demise of Formal Education, as we know it, now.

Lastly, "words are really going to be cheap", as in, it will lose its value, for communicating understanding. Words will always, be the first resort, to explain something, at a high level. But, after some level of detail, it is not effective in communicating understanding anymore.