• Malcolm Gladwell: Albert O. Hirschman and the Power of Failure : The New Yorker

  tags: creativity

  • Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.
  • People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.

• Cracking a Secret Code to Learning: Hand Gestures | MindShift

  tags: learning

  • One of the most interesting lines of inquiry within this perspective is known as embodied cognition: the recognition that our bodies play a big role in how we think. Physical gestures, for example, constitute a kind of back-channel way of expressing and even working out our thoughts. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk constitute a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. And it reveals (as Donald Rumsfeld might put it) what we know, but don’t yet know we know. What’s more, the congruence—or lack of congruence—between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn.

     

    There’s plenty of research to back it up. A study published by educational psychology journal Child Development just a few months ago showed that students do better when educators use hand gestures.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.