Spark Card: Humor Yourselves

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“If you can’t have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.”
- MG Taylor Axiom

"No ha-ha, no ah-ha."
- My version of the same


Humor plays a huge role in our ability to solve problems.  When two or more ideas come together in an unexpected way, they can cause surprise and delight -- our minds reframe. Humor can help us realize totally new emergent ideas.  

Jokes are a good example of this, where two seemingly conflicting ideas come together and are resolved by "getting the joke." At the moment you get the joke, the tension from the initial conflict dissolves in laughter.

 Take a few minutes and share some jokes with each other.

Now, take a few minutes and create some jokes about the ideas you are playing with.

This is the second in a series of Spark Cards being published to the Tomorrow Makers Journal. 

From the Inside-Out...

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"I never teach my pupils;
I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."  Albert Einstein

I have been listening to an interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book, Musicophilia. He mentions that much more of the brain is recruited for music than for language.  There is no one spot where a neuroscientists goes to access music from the brain.  Music pulls from many, many parts.  Music, Sacks asserts is innate, even for those who like myself, are musically challenged.

I recall hearing about a prisoner who kept himself sane by understanding the idea that "Once one gets deeply into a subject, he discovers that it relates to everything else in the universe."  In deed, this soldier's mind was able to take untold learning journeys that kept him not only sane, but enlightened under the most awful of external realities.  No one told him what to learn next, or how to connect. His mind took him on these explorations.

Both of these stories reveal the awesome innate abilities that each of us have inside us. Yet, almost all schooling assumes that learning comes from the outside and fights its way into our brains so that we can grow up knowing what we need to know...

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One Laptop Per Child

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"Beginning with Seymour Papert's simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So, working together with teams from Pentagram and Red Hat, we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities." From the One Laptop Per Child website, 2007

 
olpc-1.jpgI have my own OLPC computer now. It sits on my desk beside my MacBook.  It looks like an interesting toy ... something that you might get at Toys R Us. And yet, it is extremely sophisticated in its simplicity.  It is indeed a disruptive technology, not because of its design and power (which is powerfully advanced) but because of how it is designed to be used.   Right from the start, the designers of the laptop assumed that children know how to learn and they learn best from each other or by emulating others. They learn because they are curious, playful, and interested in life.  The OLPC does not assume that learning is a scarce commodity ... that only the wealthy can afford to be well educated. In fact, it is distinctly against the model that says children learn by being taught by a teacher.  To me, it is a wonderful experiment, and if it can scale, I am betting that it makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of how and why learning happens.

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