LanceWillett.com

From AJ, I found out about a book by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. The book is called God’s Debris, and is 132 pages long. Even though the hardback version is available in stores, Scott has made a free PDF version available online.

This is not anything like Scott’s other work, which as far as I know, are all cartoons. This alone really led me to download the PDF and start into it. I had no idea what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised. The book is a mind-bender in the tradition of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Ishmael , without the depth or length of either of those two. Adams introduces the book as a “thought experiment”, and it certainly is that.

If you haven’t read it yet, go get it! If you have, then stay tuned for my thoughts on the book (coming soon…).

You might be wondering why you are here at LanceWillett.com when you tried to go to NealFanPage.com.

I decided that one less blog would be good for me, plus there just wasn’t enough content to put up on just Neal and his work (great as it is!).

So, all my old posts (and the one that Aaron did) are here on this site now, under the category “sci-fi”. This will allow me to still include my thoughts on Neal from time to time and link to interesting web content that deals with his work.

That said, make sure to change any links or bookmarks accordingly.

Thanks (and goodbye for now to NealFanPage blog).

I came across an interesting blog post on John Maeda “Thoughts On Simplicity” blog that speaks to teaching. The question is this: do you give a student all the answers they need verbatim, or do you send them to figure out the answers on their own?

I’ve learned in many different ways myself and recently I’ve found that the less I am taught, the better I learn. This is John’s perspective as well. He gives the example of a class he took where the instructor basically spoon-fed the answers to him. Then another course he took was the opposite: the teacher would answer questions with something like “go look it up, the answer is in the book!”.

In my own experience, I find that my first instinct is to ask someone to help me solve a problem (while I am hoping they will pretty much just show me the way step by step). In a few cases, like with my pal Aaron, I’ve learned more when he didn’t actually show me right away but waited for me to find the answer myself. So, like John Maeda’s view, I realized that the less I was taught, the more I learned.

It still seems like the opposite should be true, though…