My Course as a Linked Thinking Demo
I've just done a first-pass, "inspectional" listen to the audiobook version of Angus Fletcher's recent book, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, which Heather Heying mentioned last week in the DarkHorse Podcast. It was interesting and I'm going to spend some more time with it. At first listen, I think I was drawn to it because it amplifies on some things I've already been thinking. And also because Fletcher seems pretty reasonable and avoids claiming that logic is worthless or bad (his argument is, it's not the only way we make sense of the world). I've already been thinking and talking and writing a bit about what I find to be interesting differences between data and story, as ways of organizing texts and also as ways of understanding and making sense of the world.
There’s also an interesting relationship between author and reader or between instructor and learner. These relationships are changing, as we move into a fully digital era when many people find themselves playing both roles, moment to moment. It is also becoming more important for people to take responsibility for (and control of) their own learning. As I've been revising my course and text, American Environmental History, I've decided to lean into this a bit. The content that results, I think, will not attempt to be a full-on “How to Become a Lifelong Learner” course; I'll probably revise How to Make Notes and Write to be more like that. But it will incorporate elements that contribute to that goal. Specifically, this includes disassembling complicated ideas into their component parts, so the parts can be examined in more detail. Often we find the same components will crop up in several ideas, so it will be useful to become aware of how to connect ideas and follow webs of interlinking. Of course, this is basically another way of saying that the techniques I've been pursuing in note-making are relevant to the type of enhanced understanding and learning goals I think are becoming more important right now. I will cover this conceptually and also in the design of the content and in the tools we use to annotate and discuss it. So the text should end up being a model of this type of connected-thinking process. It might be useful, as a practical demonstration of how to take some of the ideas PKM experts preach and apply them to an actual course of content. I'll begin rolling this out soon. Probably first to Substack contributors and then, when it's full baked, as a "course" for the general public.