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robertogreco + specialization   48

On Perspective
"A master is often considered a specialist, not a generalist — but I disagree. They are defined by a specific perspective, which they have hone through weaving together many threads of experience and craft.

The richer their experiences, the richer their perspective.

"Japanese chefs are now cooking almost every cuisine imaginable, combining fidelity to the original with locally sourced products that complement or replace imports. When they prepare foreign foods, they’re no longer asking themselves how they can make a dish more Japanese—or even more Italian, French or American. Instead they’ve moved on to a more profound and difficult challenge: how to make the whole dining experience better."

(via this WSJ story on Japanese cuisine)

To know what’s better is to choose where you stand."
better  craft  2012  allentan  experience  perspective  specialization  generalists  specialists 
february 2012 by robertogreco
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle on Vimeo
purpose  living  life  insight  doing  self-discovery  experience  modelessness  causes  craftsman  problemsolving  meaning  meaningmaking  specialization  skills  identity  rightandwrong  ideals  richardstallman  piaget  jeromebruner  alankay  dougengelbart  xeroxparc  terrycavanagh  larrytesler  activism  injustice  justice  morality  responsibility  animation  mediaconnection  teletype  computing  history  analogdesign  electronics  comparisons  data  space  understanding  search  visualization  time  braid  making  ideas  programming  2012  connection  discovery  coding  invention  creativity  principles  bretvictor  from delicious
february 2012 by robertogreco
The Rise of the Generalist « Modeled Behavior
"However, in the information age I can in many cases write a program to repeatedly perform each of these tasks and record every single step that it makes for later review by me. The individualized skill and knowledge is not so important because it can all be dumped into a database."
generalists  2011  karlsmith  specialization  specialists  technology  internet  from delicious
october 2011 by robertogreco
The Technium: Your Two Things
"…2 devices each person will carry are one general purpose combination device, & one specialized device (per your major interests & style)…

At the same time the attraction of a totem object, or something to hold in your hands, particularly a gorgeous object, will not diminish. We may remain w/ one single object that we love, that does most of what we need okay, & that in some ways comes to represent us. Perhaps the highly evolved person carries one distinctive object—which will be buried w/ them when they die.

…I don't think we'll normally carry more than a couple of things at once, on an ordinary day. The # of devices will proliferate, but each will occupy a smaller & smaller niche. There will be a long tail distribution of devices.

50 yrs from now a very common ritual upon meeting of old friends will be the mutual exchange & cross examination of what lovely personal thing they have in their pocket or purse. You'll be able to tell a lot about a person by what they carry."
kevinkelly  totems  possessions  evocativeobjects  objects  devices  future  predictions  technology  specialization  generalpurpose  combinationdevices  beauty  2011  from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco
Jon Kolko » Interaction design and design synthesis. ["The Conflicting Rhetoric of Design Education"]
"We must train generalists. We must train specialists…<br />
Skills of craft, building, and beauty are more important than theory or systems thinking. Theory and systems thinking are more important than craft, building, and beauty…<br />
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We must focus more on ethnography, anthropology, and the social sciences. We must focus more on science, cognitive psychology, math, and engineering…<br />
<br />
It's clear that a change is needed in design education, and it's equally clear that the discourse of this change must advance beyond simply calling well-intentioned designers to action…"
jonkolko  education  design  designeducation  nuance  paradox  generalists  specialization  specialists  craft  making  doing  building  iteration  theory  systems  systemsthinking  well-rounded  balance  lcproject  pedagogy  teaching  learning  from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco
‪Exclusive video of John Jay on creativity‬‏ - YouTube
creativity  johnjay  design  listening  empathy  understanding  truth  advertising  diversity  comfortzone  specialization  generalists  silos  freshness  identity  self  from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco
Community Media - Interactive World: Pathways to Participation - Elite Pedagogy and Revolution
"It is a sad fact that much of what we do in our younger years at school acts as barrier to our future confidence and enjoyment. The main reason is that most people are made to feel that they are failures, or fall short of the required standards.<br />
<br />
The component of play, spontaneity, & expression, are beaten out of us with the rigour of rules & traditions; a culture of compulsion prevails together with a morbid attraction to examination & assessment regimes. Our children suffer anxiety and stress; they become miserable & unresponsive. Retreating to private worlds, they seldom gain the confidence or the creativity to comprehend their suffering; the system's ultimate victory is that the children are unable to construct meaningful forms of rebellion.<br />
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Our obsession with competition, elitism, skills' acquisition, specialisation, and a functional / instrumental approach to learning plays a major role in inhibiting the majority of individuals from participation and creative growth…"
unschooling  deschooling  education  tcsnmy  lcproject  learning  spontaneity  play  standards  standardization  testing  competition  competitiveness  failure  expression  compulsion  rules  tradition  anxiety  stress  racetonowhere  creativity  confidence  elitism  specialization  via:grahamje  from delicious
july 2011 by robertogreco
Moving beyond self-directed learning: Network-directed learning « Connectivism
"To address the information and social complexity of open courses, learners need to be network-directed, not self-directed learners. Social networks serve to filter and amplify important concepts and increase the diversity of views on controversial topics. This transition is far broader than only what we’ve experienced in open courses – the need for netwok-centric learning and knowledge building is foundational in many careers today…<br />
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Most importantly network-directed learning is not a “crowd sourcing” concept. Crowd sourcing involves people creating things together. Networks involve connected specialization – namely we are intelligent on our own and we amplify that intelligence when we connect to others. Connectedness – in this light – consists of increasing, not diminishing, the value of the individual."
learning  connectivism  networkedlearning  cck11  via:steelemaley  georgesiemens  self-directedlearning  self-directed  learningnetworks  deschooling  ivanillich  chaos  messiness  cv  amplifiers  specialization  mooc  cck  from delicious
may 2011 by robertogreco
Athletes are different from you and me
Way too much to pull a quote. Several passages woven together into a tight argument. Classic Carmody from his amazing stint at Kottke.org.
sports  athletes  davidfosterwallace  timcarmody  billsimmons  katiebaker  michaeljordan  hemingway  fscottfitzgerald  tonyhawk  eddiedow  specialization  pathology  behavior  humans  society  dedication  from delicious
april 2011 by robertogreco
Salottobuono > projects > THE LEARNING CLOUD
"Education has often been intended as a social emancipatory tool by which previous social structures can be questioned. As the amount considered necessary to learn increased, so the edu system became increasingly compartmented. Formal & specialized education for the minority will become even more particularized & compartmented, requiring specific structures & facilities, which can be hosted in a circumscribed area as the Loop.<br />
Learning has always taken place throughout life, independent of any peculiar educational structure. Due to the "One country, two systems" policy, learning in btwn Hong Kong & Shenzhen can’t be just a matter of study or curiosity, but has much to do w/ the notion of border, crossing, & the related difficulty to move & to know what’s behind the fence. <br />
By instituting in HK’s boundary closed area a net of sprawled light structures hosting students from all ages, from K to uni. Education & learning for the ‘cross-boundary students’ here could…"
saluttobuono  thelearningcloud  china  shenzen  hongkong  policy  learning  agesegregation  compartmentalization  boundaries  borders  society  education  formal  informal  lifelonglearning  interdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  specialization  generalists  curiosity  unschooling  deschooling  from delicious
march 2011 by robertogreco
Noreena Hertz: How to use experts -- and when not to | Video on TED.com
"We make important decisions every day -- and we often rely on experts to help us decide. But, says economist Noreena Hertz, relying too much on experts can be limiting and even dangerous. She calls for us to start democratizing expertise -- to listen not only to "surgeons and CEOs, but also to shop staff.""
experts  specialization  specialists  tunnelvision  generalists  listening  patternrecognition  decisionmaking  ted  noreenahertz  economics  infooverload  confusion  certainty  uncertainty  democratization  blackswans  influence  blindlyfollowing  confidence  unschooling  deschooling  trust  openminded  echochambers  complexity  nuance  truth  persuasion  carelessness  paradigmshifts  change  gamechanging  criticalthinking  learning  problemsolving  independence  risktaking  persistence  self-advocacy  education  progress  manageddissent  divergentthinking  dissent  democracy  disagreement  discord  difference  espertise  from delicious
february 2011 by robertogreco
The Trouble With Experts : CJR
"By abandoning the assumption that gold-plated credentials equal expertise, the press might even change history. Could journalists have helped to take down, say, Bernie Madoff, before the feds did if they had questioned the sec’s experts more? Shirky wonders.<br />
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And then there’s the chance that authentic experts (not necessarily credentialed experts) could become journalists of some kind. It’s happening already. Take the flock of professor-bloggers masticating the news on the Foreign Policy Web site or economist bloggers like Tyler Cowen. There are journalists who have become experts via either peer or crowd review…To cheaply paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, journalists can’t all be clever hedgehogs, but perhaps some generalist foxes can start growing some quills."
society  journalism  generalists  specialization  specialists  credentials  experts  expertise  autism  jennymccarthy  science  blackswans  tunnelvision  via:coldbrain  vaccines  amateur  amateurism  unschooling  deschooling  clayshirky  from delicious
january 2011 by robertogreco
The following is from Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut (22 January 2003, Interconnected)
"Paul Slazinger…non-fiction…The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity.<br />
…most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team w/ peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb…<br />
…team must consist of three sorts of specialists…Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts of the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.<br />
…rarest…authentic genius — person capable of having seeminly good ideas not in general circulation. 'A genius working alone is invariably ignored as a lunatic.'<br />
…second…highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands & admires the fresh ideas of the genius, & testifies that the genius is far from mad…<br />
…third…person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be…"
mattwebb  bluebeard  vonnegut  genius  innovation  specialists  communication  translation  cv  revolutions  movements  mindchanges  via:tomc  humans  specialization  generalists  trust  explainers  explaining  testimony  from delicious
january 2011 by robertogreco
On Education § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
"The global skill gap arises because neither the high-level specialist within a discipline nor the policy-school graduate is likely to be equipped with the skills needed to solve global problems of a cross-disciplinary nature. The experts provide crucial insights, but their skills are typically focused on generating research, debating ideas, and addressing narrow issues rather than large-scale professional problem solving and management. Meanwhile, the policy graduate typically lacks the grounding in core scientific principles across the appropriate range of topics. The solution lies in training sophisticated science-educated generalists who can coordinate insights across disciplines while managing complex agendas for results."
education  global  interdisciplinary  highered  crossdisciplinary  crosspollination  multidisciplinary  learning  problemsolving  criticalthinking  collaboration  generalists  specialization  specialists  policy  management  complexity  science  academia  from delicious
december 2010 by robertogreco
How College Kills Creativity; Nothing Succeeds Like Failure - The Chronicle of Higher Education [text here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/personal-effectiveness/55236-nothing-succeeds-like-failure-how-college-kills-creativity.html]
"If the sources of genius remain something of a riddle, Robinson is emphatic about what does not contribute to creative excellence: higher education…academy's emphasis on specialization & its "inherent tendency to ignore or reject highly original work that does not fit existing paradigm" is an impediment to creativity…points to several intriguing studies. One, by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psych at UC Davis, suggests that creativity flourishes best among those w/ equivalent of 2 years of an undergraduate education—no less, no more. Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate U, has also looked at the relationship btwn education & innovation. In his 1996 book, Creativity: Flow & the Psychology of Discovery & Invention, he argued that formal education has historically had little effect on the lives of creative people. "If anything," he wrote, "school threatened to extinguish the interest & curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls.""
creativity  education  practice  psychology  mihalycsikszentmihalyi  learning  unschooling  deschooling  flow  failure  colleges  universities  schools  schooling  innovation  specialization  generalists  curiosity  interested  lcproject  formaleducation  schooliness  invention  discovery  adversity  highereducation  highered  from delicious
november 2010 by robertogreco
The Cognitive Cost Of Expertise | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Now for the bad news: Expertise might also come with a dark side, as all those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new knowledge. Consider a recent paper that investigated the mnemonic performance of London taxi drivers. In the world of neuroscience, London cabbies are best known for their demonstration of structural plasticity in the hippocampus, a brain area devoted (in part) to spatial memory. Because the cabbies are required to memorize the entire urban map of London – it’s the most rigorous driving test in the world – their posterior hippocampi swell and expand, leading to permanent changes in the brain. Knowledge shapes matter."
neuroscience  psychology  constraints  jonahlehrer  perception  brain  chess  thinking  science  expertise  memory  plasticity  generalists  specialization  mindchanges  permanence  from delicious
november 2010 by robertogreco
Want smarter kids? Make them study something - one thing - for a long time.
"His idea goes like this: Assign each student a single, specific topic, which he or she will study over and over again, from every possible angle, from early elementary school through high school. Egan, a professor of education at Canada's Simon Fraser University, hopes that by the time such students finish high school, they will be world-class experts on their topics - as well as more effective citizens and better people.<br />
<br />
"People who know nothing in depth commonly assume that their opinions are the same kind of thing as knowledge," Egan writes in his forthcoming book "Learning In Depth: A Simple Innovation That Can Transform Schooling," which will be available in January. He also contends that "a central feature of becoming a moral person is to learn to become engaged with something outside the self.""
kieranegan  learning  education  schools  teaching  specialization  expertise  depthoverbreadth  depth  from delicious
november 2010 by robertogreco
What Are You Going to Do With That? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education [via: http://tumble77.com/post/1389655615/people-dont-mind-being-in-prison-as-long-as-no]
"It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go w/ flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves…

Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life. It means not just going w/ flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success…

Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in w/ everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, & still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out."
humanities  education  creativity  writing  college  colleges  universities  cv  schooling  schooliness  unschooling  deschooling  ratrace  treadmill  racetonowhere  choice  grades  grading  self-esteem  success  happiness  ideas  identity  courage  tcsnmy  lcproject  curiosity  self  williamderesiewicz  risk  risktaking  iconoclasm  safety  convenience  predictablity  control  mistakes  glvo  generalists  specialists  specialization  from delicious
october 2010 by robertogreco
Making Future Magic – a bit about the music – Blog – BERG
"Some of the best bits about working at BERG are how everyone, despite having particular specialist skills, gleefully ignores boundaries, disciplines, labels and predefined processes, and allows themselves space to just run with things when they get excited. Deciding to do the music for the first Making Future Magic film ourselves was one of those moments."
crossdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  specialization  specialists  generalists  berg  berglondon  do  make  creativity  from delicious
september 2010 by robertogreco
How To Raise A Superstar [If true, this is huge endorsement of small, progressive schools where the emphasis is not on competition, but on exposure, experience, and unstructured time, where all students are given the chance to participate.]
"smaller cities offer more opportunities for unstructured play…to hone general coordination, power, & athletic skills. These longer hours of play also allow kids to experience successes (& failures) in different settings…likely toughens their attitudes in general…important advantage of small towns…actually less competitive…allowing kids to sample & explore many different sports. (I grew up in big city,…sports career basically ended at 13. I could no longer compete w/ other kids my age.) While conventional wisdom assumes it’s best to focus on single sport ASAP, & compete in most rigorous arena…probably a mistake, both for psychological & physical reasons…While deliberate practice remains absolutely crucial, it’s important to remember that most important skills we develop at early age are not domain specific…real importance of early childhood has to do w/ development of general cognitive & non-cognitive traits, such as self-control, patience, grit, & willingness to practice"
jonahlehrer  children  childhood  biology  learning  cognition  education  sports  psychology  practice  tigerwoods  performance  competition  urban  rural  tcsnmy  confidence  persistence  self-control  patience  grit  self-confidence  athletics  athletes  variety  toshare  topost  lcproject  unschooling  deschooling  sampling  malcolmgladwell  burnout  specialization  generalists  coordination  success  failure  play  unstructuredtime  from delicious
august 2010 by robertogreco
TeachPaperless: Post-ISTE Thoughts
"It's not enough to be a teacher of math or a teacher of history; we need to liberate ourselves from 1,500 years of disciplinarian categorization and move into a view of education as the preparation of the self in the matters of living.
shellyblake-pock  tcsnmy  purpose  schools  education  2010  iste2010  whatmatters  learning  lcproject  multidisciplinary  interdisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  messiness  schooliness  categorizations  specialization  generalists  life  living  death  love  empathy  compassion  truth  creativity  toshare  comments 
july 2010 by robertogreco
Coldbrain. (Stock, flow, generalists and specialists)
"Generalists...produce content that covers range of topics...necessarily scattershot, & people will dip in & out when content matches their own interests. But if you find a generalist whose interests match your own, it’s all gold. That’s rare.
matthewculnane  snarkmarket  stockandflow  robinsloan  generalists  passion  cv  writing  interesting  interestingness  curation  interested  kottke  daringfireball  merlinmann  specialists  specialization 
may 2010 by robertogreco
enzo mari sixty paperweights
"but there is more. granting the papers months and years to mature, to form geological layers of meditation, also means escaping the oppressive mechanisms of the productive system, the compulsive logic of efficiency at all costs. it means affording oneself the subversive luxury of taking all the required time to develop a good project. it means extending the range of research in order to get an overall picture, acting against the increasing hyper-specialization that restrains creative expression nowadays."
enzomari  objects  specialization  research  productivity  efficiency  compulsivity  subversion  creativity  time  design  office  paperweights 
may 2010 by robertogreco
More Like Us — Meredith Jung-En Woo, Dean of Arts & Sciences and Buckner W. Clay Professor
"there is perhaps something to the argument that we as a nation have become excessively focused on credentials...I sometimes discern this tendency in the steadily upward trend in multiple majors over the past decade. The requirements for more than one major can be strenuous, crowding out the flexibility for students to venture out to new fields, experiment in ways that push the limits of knowledge. In the College, we offer some 3000 course sections, & I wonder whether something essential is lost when students trade in a broad liberal arts curriculum in order to satisfy the new requirements for an additional credential.
credentials  liberalarts  education  creativity  multidisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  generalists  interdisciplinary  unschooling  deschooling  specialization  competition  japan  us  highered  colleges  universities  innovation  tcsnmy  jamesfallows  davidhalberstam  exams  testing  messiness  disorder  individualism  can-doattitude  1980s  1990s  meredithjung-enwoo 
april 2010 by robertogreco
Doorknobs and directors « Snarkmarket
"This is not to say that super-specialization is not a super-smart strat­egy! Being extremely good—the best in the world—at a par­tic­u­lar thing is actu­ally one of the best strate­gies for sur­vival and sat­is­fac­tion. But I just don’t think it nec­es­sar­ily leads any­where other than… super-specialization. It seems to me, look­ing around, that the peo­ple in charge of cities, pub­lic spaces, orga­ni­za­tions, and Spider-Man 4 are the peo­ple who have gone straight at those more macro lev­els like an arrow."
specialization  generalists  cv  robinsloan  snarkmarket  macro  micro  dou­glashof­s­tadter  jeffveen  interdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  detail  bigpicture 
january 2010 by robertogreco
YouTube - OBSESSIVES: Pizza - CHOW
"An oven built by hand, tile by tile. Four pizzas on the menu, with no fancy-pants toppings. Anthony Mangieri does one thing at Una Pizza Napoletana, and he does it the very best way he can."
obsession  pizza  perfection  recipes  food  specialization  anthonymanglieri  slow  simplicity 
december 2009 by robertogreco
Scanners: Refuse To Choose!: How to be an eclectic and quit fooling around
"In case you're new to this subject, Scanners are people who are interested in so many things they can’t bear to limit themselves to just one. The rest of the world seems united in their opinion of this problem: it must be changed. Everyone knows that if you don’t focus on one thing you’ll never get anywhere. And most people seem pretty sure that if you’re interested in everything and lose interest in most things before you’ve completed them, that you are almost certainly lazy, shallow (ever been called a ‘dilettante?), self-indulgent and afraid of hard work. As a result you are un-deserving of respect unless you change your ways."
generalists  specialization  specialists  books  cv  reading  learning 
october 2009 by robertogreco
In Defense of Generalists | The Institute For The Future
"The most pressing problems in science and technology, and more broadly in business and the economy, don't lend themselves readily to specialists' solutions. They require not just inter-discipinary teamwork to make progress, but transdisciplinary thinking - literally, we need people that can have converstaions between disciplinary appraoches to problems inside their own head. In fact, you could argue that most of the gridlock around big problems like global warming, health care, and so on, stem from the inability of narrow specialist and interest groups to speak each others' language, translate heuristics and integrate complex concepts and data. They're too specialized, having become more and more isolated in focused communities, thanks to the web."
generalists  specialists  specialization  thinking  crossdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  transdisciplinary  crosspollination  interdisciplinary  problemsolving  diversity  integration 
october 2009 by robertogreco
Why teach the arts? Art inspires learning | csmonitor.com
"The arts offer both a key educational component & the unique experience of handling each stage of a project – coordinating hand, eye & mind – from inspiration to finishing touches. In contrast, business realities necessitate specialization. Schools also practice specialization, both in the estrangement of various studies & by progressively narrowing the focus. Perhaps because expertise pays, it is not generally the case that the "higher" people go in education, the broader, more interconnected, integrated & holistic becomes their vision. If the arts provide an alternative metaphor applicable to education, it is that elements must balance & synergize. The attractive color, "catchy" musical passage, or favorite rhyme that doesn't fit only weakens the work."
education  pedagogy  art  arts  generalists  specialization  specialists  schools  business  science  learning  tcsnmy  integrative  interconnectivity  multidisciplinary  interdisciplinary  crossdisciplinary 
october 2009 by robertogreco
…My heart’s in Accra » Jonah Lehrer: Outsider Intelligence
"When we’ve got hard problems, we turn them over to experts. That might be the wrong thing to do, Lehrer suggests."
education  innovation  outsiders  jonahlehrer  crosspollination  crossdisciplinary  interdisciplinary  generalists  specialization  specialists  multidisciplinary  problemsolving  criticalthinking  tcsnmy  lcproject  unschooling  deschooling 
october 2009 by robertogreco
THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH | More Intelligent Life
"Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline. Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields. The work in the early 20th century that showed how nerves work and, later, how DNA is structured originally came from a marriage of physics and biology. Today, Einstein’s old employer, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is laid out especially so that different disciplines rub shoulders. I suspect that it is a poor substitute.
polymaths  generalists  specialization  specialists  education  learning  society  culture  history  books  psychology  research  creativity  genius  intelligence  knowledge  ideas  cv  interdisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  multidisciplinary 
september 2009 by robertogreco
unbecoming expert | stimulant - changing things around. . .
"illusion of neat set of bins into which you can place all knowledge & experience is reinforced & rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” & “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) & identity (who you are)...The end goal [should be] to empower a person to approach an activity w/out comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, & open to engagement at many levels...Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” & “artist” & “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly — makers & hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years — or you can make the question irrelevant."
education  categorization  interdisciplinary  identity  hackers  hacking  multidisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  generalists  specialization  specialists  schools  schooling  deschooling  ivanillich 
september 2009 by robertogreco
Relevant History: Paul Graham on meeting time
"Pre-industrial work ... was task-oriented: whether you worked in the fields or town, the rhythm of your working day wasn't determined by a clock, but by Nature and the work you needed to get done. With the rise of the factory system, and the growing specialization of labor within factories, the rhythms of work were defined not by organic tasks, but by machines and the factory itself: you worked a certain number of hours a day, and then you stopped. Work was no longer task-oriented, but time-oriented.
industrialization  time  work  taskoriented  meetings  paulgraham  alexsoojung-kimpang  specialization  industrialrevolution  parenting  timemanagement 
july 2009 by robertogreco
Quotes: Heinlein - Specialization is for Insects [via: http://www.kottke.org/09/07/core-human-skills]
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
education  specialization  psychology  generalists  robertheinlein  specialists 
july 2009 by robertogreco
Liz Coleman's call to reinvent liberal arts education | Video on TED.com
"Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day."
colleges  universities  liberalarts  education  learning  interdisciplinary  crossdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  politics  design  society  future  ethics  lizcoleman  reform  change  gamechanging  expertise  specialization  specialists  generalists  lcproject  tcsnmy  skepticism  overspecialization  knowledge  academia  policy  unschooling  deschooling  benningtoncollege 
june 2009 by robertogreco
Caterina.net: Obsessions and Spare Time Pursuits
"I've often quoted this, from Robert Heinlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." ...quoted most recently in 2003, in another blog post about obsessions, and whether or not it is possible to know a lot about one thing without knowing less of another"
caterinafake  generalists  specialization  specialists  obsession  passion  motivation  learning  administration  management  interviews  jobsinterviews  lifestyle  quotations  via:preoccupations  robertheinlein 
january 2009 by robertogreco
FT.com | The Economists’ Forum | A time for humility
"This, in short, is a time for humility. Why did we mostly get “it” so sensationally wrong? How did something that looks increasingly like the precursor of a slump creep up on almost all of us this year? It is a pretty good question. It is a pretty embarrassing one, too. ... I would insist that one of the big lessons of this experience is that economics is too compartmentalised and so, too, are official institutions. To get a full sense of the risks being run, we needed to combine the worst scenarios of each sets of experts. Only then would we have had some sense of how the global imbalances, inflation targeting, the impact of China, asset price bubbles, financial innovation, deregulation and risk management systems might interact."
economics  crisis  2008  specialization  bigpicture  generalists  martinwolf  analysis  finance  markets 
november 2008 by robertogreco
Adam Smith, Disproved - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
"Adam Smith, in his famous pin factory description, wrote that labor specialization improves productivity. He should have specified which species he was referring to.
generalists  economics  specialists  specialization  animals  ants  insects  adamsmith  sociology  evolution  productivity  science 
november 2008 by robertogreco
robertogreco {tumblr} - Unschooling and Messiness
"Jessica Shepherd reviews the recently published How Children Learn at Home in the Guardian. The review seems to focus more on the unschooling subset of home education and the part that I find most interesting is the comparison to the messiness that often results in creative leaps. It reminds me of a variety of articles that have been emphasizing the importance of random events and cross-pollination or hybridization of traditional fields of study."
unschooling  crossdisciplinary  interdisciplinary  multidisciplinary  transdisciplinary  postdisciplinary  nassimtaleb  glvo  crosspollination  messiness  davidsmith  julianbleecker  nicolasnova  robertepstein  design  learning  deschooling  education  creativity  comments  lcproject  schools  technology  consilience  creative  children  homeschool  research  books  blackswans  tinkering  serendipity  specialization  academia  grantmccracken  lelaboratoire  ted  poptech  etech  lift  picnic  lacma  art  science  medicine  us  terminology  vocabulary 
august 2008 by robertogreco
Larry Page on how to change the world - Apr. 30, 2008
"what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered...our society is not organized around doing that...If you look at people who have high impact, they have pretty general knowledge....don't have really narrowly focused educat
google  innovation  future  energy  business  generalists  creativity  entrepreneurship  environment  risk  leadership  culture  technology  science  education  specialization  problemsolving  world  optimism 
may 2008 by robertogreco
In Nature, And Maybe The Corner Office, Scientists Find That Generalists Can Thrive [see also: http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/jan-apr08/generalists/index.html]
“there are conditions under which it helps to have generalists, especially for fairly small groups...might have to pay them more, they might often do the wrong task, but if you don’t have them, whole notion of specialization leading to greater economi
generalists  business  biology  specialization  math  research  specialists  labor  groups  organizations  management  administration  leadership 
may 2008 by robertogreco
Creative Generalist - Those University Walls
"Universities offer both the most compelling reason to fragment into disciplines and tracks of study as well as the most compelling reasons not to."
education  universities  generalists  specialization  interdisciplinary 
april 2008 by robertogreco
Notional Slurry » There are exactly two ways: one, and many
"In what way am I delayed by paying attention to more, different, inarguably interesting stuff? Gratifying stuff?"..."Called a flighty dreamer all too often, I think increasingly that I stand on the side of realism. I will be finished when I’m dead."
attention  collaboration  ideas  learning  cv  creativity  creative  generalists  failure  future  society  expectations  howwework  method  work  careers  via:hrheingold  gamechanging  culture  specialists  specialization  life  education  academia  schools  schooling  unschooling  freedom  allsorts 
march 2008 by robertogreco
Bush-U-Like « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
"doctrine of computational ubiquity some forty years downstream...and frank description of the memex as outboard memory augmentation...Vannevar Bush as belonging properly to the history of ubicomp."
ubicomp  memex  vannevarbush  hypertext  del.icio.us  ubiquitous  memory  information  infooverload  specialization  search  taxonomy  tagging  tags  internet  web 
february 2008 by robertogreco
The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
*more fun, in most serious existential sense *Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence, not fear of unknown *Boredom is failure *In world of dogmatic specialists, generalist runs show *Jack of all trades, master of none = artificial pairing
generalists  entrepreneurship  confidence  diversity  specialization  jobs  learning  life  skills  philosophy  perspective  careers  work 
december 2007 by robertogreco
Bob Sutton: Grumpy Specialists and Upbeat Generalists: An Old Post Turns Hot
"Generalists...hard to interrupt, once interrupted...weaker, shorter negative reactions...have alternative paths to realize their plans. Specialists...easier to interrupt...stronger, more sustained negative reactions...fewer alternative pathways to realiz
specialization  specialists  emotions  change  mood  generalists  psychology  work  ideas  administration  management 
october 2007 by robertogreco
Creative Generalist - Everything is Miscellaneous
"perhaps the part of this most relevant to the generalist discussion is how the third-order diminishes experts' exclusivity over defining relevant knowledge"
davidweinberger  generalists  tags  tagging  knowledge  experts  information  specialization  web  internet  taxonomy  classification  folksonomy  socialnetworks  complexity  sorting  libraries  culture  wikipedia  statistics  groups  identity  self  clustering  marketing 
september 2007 by robertogreco
onomastics: Definition and Much More from Answers.com
"1. a. The study of the origins and forms of proper names. 2. b. The study of the origins and forms of terms used in specialized fields. 2. The system that underlies the formation and use of proper names or terms used in specialized fields."
names  words  history  etymology  linguistics  english  specialization  naming 
september 2007 by robertogreco

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