Just a few random thoughts here, all touching on the idea of learning, or failing to learn, or the need to keep on trying.
As infants, and on up through some young age, we learn almost entirely by trial and error, with most attempts ending up in failure. But we keep on trying. Then we reach some magical age where we're embarrassed by failure, and then we either quit trying as hard, or we cover up the failures. Why is that?
Every now and then, some new technology comes along, that we don't fully understand. If it's something were "supposed" to understand, that old embarrassment thing factors back in, and we have to learn it when nobody is looking, or pretend to know more than we do. Or we could try a line like "I don't know anything about that, should I?" Nah... Then Steve Jobs and friends introduce something completely different, like the iPod, or iPhone, or iPad. Nobody knows anything about the new technology, but somehow, there's no embarrassment. There's even the fun of learning it. Trial and error (and failure) is OK again. How can that be? More importantly, how can we reintroduce that concept everywhere?
Finally, I want to propose that it's perfectly OK to NOT learn something the first time. Maybe it's even better! This concept was inspired by Bill Seaver's story of going to third grade twice. When I advanced from the 7th grade to the 8th grade, I change school systems. Even though my grade level went up, many of the subjects I took actually regressed to levels I'd previously completed. Amazingly, I suddenly started making really good grades, and this continued throughout high-school. The second time I took those nearly-identical subjects, I guess I really "got it."
I guess the point I want to make here is that there is always a need to learn more, and good "systems" (hardware, software, design, whatever) make learning easy and non-threatening. Even "safe." How can we make that more common?
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