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Bet you never thought of the adjective "cool" when writing your syllabus. In case you want to start, this syllabus is very cool. I will be following this class as they publish their writing openly. I am optimistic that the teaching & learning will be pretty cool.

" This course is not one in which an instructor feeds you information and you regurgitate it for a good grade. You (the student) and I (the instructor) are almost certainly going to disagree on some things, and that's just fine (see the Grading section below). It's probably easiest to think of this course as a small, independent publication/think tank focused on the concept of 'cool'. Your job is to look carefully and thoughtfully at the world around you, and produce a series of essays that would help a potential reader understand your stance on what 'cool' means to you. You'll be using the process of writing and editing to help you define, and refine, that stance for yourself. You're also responsible for helping your fellow writers do the same. " h/t Stan

One thought on "How does it feel to think?"

Profile photo of Yin Wah Kreher Yin Wah Kreher
January 19, 2015 at 3:45 pm Edit

I don't think in music. It's fascinating that you can identify a particular tune that guides (facilitates?) thinking. When I need heavy mental effort, I need total silence. :-) It's interesting how different people think and feel when they think. Like you, I've never thought about my feelings when I think. It's after thinking that I may feel various emotions, or not. Feel free to drop by my thoughts on this. I wrote a post on it: http://justywk.blogspot.com/2014/06/thought-vectors-how-thinkaholic-feels.html

Yin Wah Kreher says: February 13, 2015 at 8:10 pm Edit I love how you are thinking. I can see your thoughts connecting from "I used to think…" to "Now I think…" There is also other dimensions of comparative thinking going on here. Keep on thinking and sharing your thoughts!

"The Reality Editor is a new kind of tool for empowering you to connect and manipulate the functionality of physical objects. Just point the camera of your smartphone at an object and its invisible capabilities will become visible for you to edit. Drag a virtual line from one object to another and create a new relationship between these objects. With this simplicity, you are able to master the entire scope of connected objects."

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

Good tutorial on getting started in Wikipedia

2nd tutorial in series - see links lower on page for other tutorials

If you flip that to a gdoc, I'll throw some more stuff in there.

"There are five "perpetuity"s in the 15 volumes, and definitely none of them are that quote. There are no instances in which "Thoreau" and "beard" appear together, nor any variation of neckbeard. There are only a handful of references to Louisa May Alcott in the set, and none of them are that anecdote. So I think you can consider it conclusively debunked. "