Friday Five: A Metaphor is Worth a Thousand Pictures!

Introducing a new series on this blog – Friday Five – where I will curate five articles (with excerpts)/quotes/tweets shared on my personal learning network each week that I found particularly useful, and hopefully you will find some of them valuable too!

Noam Chomsky on The Purpose of Education

“In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry?”

Such a relevant question for the anxious times we live in where success is not assured by what certificates/degrees you carry but by the value you are able to create out of what you know. A great read!

Quote by Dr Peter Fuda ‏on Twitter

“If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a metaphor’s worth a thousand pictures.”

Finding right visual metaphors for the message has been a constant (and worthwhile) struggle when creating visual notes. 

The Untold Costs of Social Networking – Luis Suarez

That’s why blogging is so important nowadays for knowledge Web workers. It’s our home turf. It’s the only online space left out there where we get to set the rules and facilitate the conversations, as they happen, with your various different networks and communities, but without having an intermediary that you know the moment you make use of it is going to abuse your rights (whatever those may well be), whether you like it or not, because, after all, we are the product, remember?

There is always a hidden cost of mindlessly pursuing newer social network platforms when the value you and your community will derive out of it is not clear. For me, blogging has been a constant pursuit for last 10 years and Twitter is where I engage, interact and share.

Do You Need a Mentor or a Network? – Christy Tucker

In a networked world, our lifelong learning should take advantage of the availability of the network. In fact, you can probably learn more from a network than from a single person, even if you only learn a small amount from each individual in your network.

While I have had mentors in my life, I must say that I have learned the most from the communities that I engaged with. Your personal learning network keeps you updated with the latest thinking in your area of work, but the value of a good mentor cannot be undermined. I feel that we also need mentors to contextualize what we learn and enable us in delivering value to our organization/communities through our knowledge.

Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful – Gabriel Weinberg

Around 2003 I came across Charlie Munger’s 1995 speech, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, which introduced me to how behavioral economics can be applied in business and investing. More profoundly, though, it opened my mind to the power of seeking out and applying mental models across a wide array of disciplines.

This is an excellent list of mental models that I will refer very often. A must read if you are interested in how we think, judge and decide and what derails us.

– – – – –

In the picture: Open Hand Monument, Chandigarh, India (Via my Flickr Photostream)