It has been so long I didn’t take the time to find out sense in what my job is all about. Thought aiming at the best grades and filtering information is good, more time has to be spent teaching students how to read deeper, explore and ask questions.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think the idea of “good enough” needs to be explored further. It’s often gets lumped in with prioritizing but it’s slightly different. Prioritizing is part of it but given the massive amounts of activity and information we deal with every day, it’s important that we determine the degree to which we seek excellence and perfection as well as being happy with less. It may not even make it less important. These skills and analysis is something new we need to teach.

We all walked out of our class tonight feeling overwhelmed already, and it was only class #2! I shared your insights from this entry with my classmates. The hydrant picture provides a fantastic simile, too. Hopefully it will empower them the way it has empowered me. Filters are an important way to keep us sane (and to get what we need without getting so caught up that we forget to eat/go to bed/have face to face conversations)!

Thanks!

Great point. I would be grateful if you took the time either here or on your own blog to flesh out the two more distinctly. Also do you think that both attending and attention are equally as challenging today or is attention a more longstanding issue? Love to hear your thoughts and thanks for chiming in. You indeed are one of my filters.

I think it’s a good idea here to delineate attending and attention. Notice the difference.

I suspect that you’ve become good at limiting your attending. To use a Gladwellian term, I suspect you thin-slice much of what comes your way and selectively choose what to attend to.

The notion of attending requires significantly more cognitive resources. Without being familiar with Shirky’s work, I might posit that another aspect to a filter failure is the need for some to learn to filter out what does not require attending. To put it another way, folks just entering need to learn to skim and not sweat digesting everything.

Those of us with existing filters need to work on “fortifying” as Patrick put it.

Chris

Great “not top 5″ list here. All of the elements you mention that aid in your ability to make information behave for you are strategies that should be shared. Personally, I often feel the need to be “the guy” who shares the links, who has the answers, regardless of topic, and this gets in the way of productivity sometimes. The release of that need, you describe it via the Good to Great reference, is liberating, but like all roles we play in life, hard to relinquish.

Thanks for putting this out there. It definitely has me thinking about how to fortify my filters.
Patrick´s last blog ..Worth Spreading Around

@Jeff,
The challenge for me is helping people recognize what things are the same in terms of reading and extracting meaning and what things are different. I think too often, people focus on the differences and ignore the skills they bring to the table. I’d say begin by establishing the commonalities and then begin to branch out to see differences.

So many great quotes that have me thinking about how students today see the web and why so many educators look at a web site and not know where to click, what to read, or where to go. Last week we spent 2 hours with teachers at our school just looking at how you read a web site. It’s different than a book, or Facebook. Reading for meaning on a web page full of links is different and taking time to teach that will help all of us.
Jeff Utecht´s last blog ..Socialize your Science Data

Teaching itself is a study in appropriate information technology. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I wonder if I could have responded to you in 140 characters or less?
Alan Stange´s last blog ..Projectors