Learning Fantasies

How do we make learning interesting?

Richard Wurman’s 15 suggestions

An ideal school would be like a smorgasbord. You could take large or small plates and eat fast or slow. You could construct the meal going forwards and backwards and you could start again. You would be given permission to have desert first and the people who fill up the plates would have conservations with you. You could pick up a plate called fancy cars and have somebody advise you that this salad here, the road system and mode of transportation, go with it.

But most of us don't have that kind of experience with schools. In an attempt to overcome any shortcomings in my education, I try to create learning environments in my life. I have developed a list of imaginary courses that I thought would be good courses that would inspire me. They inspire me to look at the world differently.

1. Learning about learning

For me, this should be the only course taught for the first six years in school.

2. The question and how to ask it

Asking questions is the most essential step toward finding answers. Better questions provoke better answers.

3. What do you want?

We don't pay enough attention to the old adage: be careful what you wish for because all too often it will be exactly what will you get.

4. A day in the life

Studying in intimate details a day in the life of anything - a truck, a building, a butcher - would not only provide a memorable understanding of what it means to be something else but would also permits us to have a better understanding of ourselves in comparison.

5. What are we to ants?

This would be an advanced version of a day in the life. The whole idea of how a thing relates to something else is often left unexamined in school, yet it is the essential doorway to knowledge.

6. Time, fast and slow

If you studied all the things that take place in a minute or a day, or a week, or a year, or a thousand years, you would have a new framework for understanding and for cataloging information.

7. The five-minute circle

What could you do or see in five minutes from where you are sitting?

8. The five-mile circle

What could you do, see and understand about sociology, the fabric of schools, urban life and systems within five miles of where you are sitting?

9. This is your New World?

If you were king of this five-mile world how would you run it, change it, understand it, communicate with it?

10. A person course

You could have a course on Albert Einstein, Louis Kahn or Yasir Arafat.

11. Hailing failing

More learning is possible by studying the things that don't work than by studying the things that do. Most of the great technological and scientific breakthroughs are made by examining the things that fail.

12. Wait-watching

We spend a great deal of time waiting - in checkout lines, in ticket lines, in doctors' offices. How could we better occupy this time?

13. How to explain something so your mother could understand it?

The recognition of someone else’s ability to understand is essential to all communication, yet it is something we rarely think about. We assume that others can understand the same things we can.

14. The difference between facts and the truth

Facts are only meaningful when they can be tied to ideas and related to your experience, yet they are offered in place of the truth.

15. The obvious and how to hug it?

In our zeal to appear educated, not only do we often forget the obvious, we avoid it. Yet it is in the realm of the obvious that most solutions lie.

Source:

Information Anxiety 2

Page 243-244

Richard Saul Wurman

Que

ISBN: 0789724103