Your final required blog assignment is to comment on Chapter 16. As this chapter has no Expedition Log at the end to provide prompts for responses, you can respond to any of the points raised.
I wish to respond to the first point, the suggestion that we "Cultivate Poised Incompetence." The idea here is that learning anything new involves a period of ignorance, and that we must be comfortable with this stage. As Perkins puts it,
"You have to be willing to be incompetent in order to learn. Just because you don't know what you are doing doesn't mean you have to be embarrassed or upset or convinced something's wrong with you."
I remember my grandfather telling me about one of his business associates, a person named J. R. Simplot. My grandfather was big in the potato business in Idaho when he began doing business with Simplot. Simplot was younger, and in the beginning he knew nothing. My grandfather said Simplot asked a lot of questions, and a lot of them were really "stupid" questions. But Simplot never forgot any of the answers. He remembered everything and with time got smarter and smarter. Soon Simplot rose above my grandfather and the other potato businessmen. Then Simplot secured a contract with McDonalds to provide all the potatoes for their french fries. This is how Idaho became famous for potatoes, and Simplot became fabulously wealthy. Eventually Simplot moved beyond potatoes to computer memory chips, and became one of the wealthiest men in America. But he started with a lot of stupid questions in the potato business.
I have taken this same approach with computer technology. I'm not a computer person, like, say, Rab, or Sylvan. But I have forced myself to learn by volunteering to teach CM class. It has been embarrassing, and I feel sorry for the students that have suffered through my classes, but I am getting better, and I am not so afraid of computers anymore, and it has helped my overall confidence knowing that I can take on something like computer technology and gain some level of competence.
Welcome message
Welcome to LILTDY blogging.
Each of you needs to go to Blogger and create your own blog for this course. Call your blog anything you like, but be sure to include your name in the title so we know who you are. Also, be sure to send to me (krenochs@gmail.com) the url so I can post the links to your blogs and we can read and respond to each others blogs.
Each week you will have one assigned writing task related to our text, Leading at the Edge. These entries should be between 150 and 300 words.
But you can also make additional entries, and/or add links to anything that you find interesting and related to our class.
I’ll try to make my blog a good model of what is possible. To help you feel like we are all doing this together, I will do the same assignments as you.
I look forward to blogging with you.
Ken
No comments:
Post a Comment