Thinking on the web.....
I've been thinking a lot recently about the ways in which the web has changed the way I learn. One of the most striking changes is the way it helps me to precipitate ideas. You know - the ones on the tip of my brain....
In the olden days, ideas like these might take days, weeks, months to reveal themselves, and sometimes they'd just slip away. Thinking about how I work on the web, I've come to realise I have developed methods that speed up the process, and give me a much better success rate! I start with a whiff of a thought...maybe I've got a few sketchey terms in my head, a faint outline. I pop them into google. "ideas, meme, precipitation, "new ways of learning"' If I'm lucky, someone out there has already put in the effort to develop a more concrete meme..in this case no...OK, then I'll read the articles, papers and blogs that include similar words or strings. Maybe one of them touches on a theme that rings bells, usually there'll be a sentence or two that seems to move closer to what I was thinking. I borrow the sentence and do another search. I repeat this circling process over and over again until I either find content that expresses my idea or is coming close enough that I can fill in the blanks.
If I get stuck, I'll do some word searches in wikipedia, and thesaurus.com. I've also started searching google images, professional image libraries like Corbis and even video:YouTube - as a visual learner, being able to tap into such a huge source of visual stimuli is a dream come true.
Once I have the idea, I'll usually email it to myself so it's in wriitng and I can look at it with fresh eyes. If I think it's worth it, I blog it. Writing here seems to be the best way to fully bake an idea because at that point, I find myself viewing the idea from the perspective of a reader - and that's when I'm most critical!
These approaches work so well for me that nowadays I'll boldly follow some entirely tenous thought that pops into my head, Blink-style, just to see where it leads!
Does anyone else work this way? Or some other way specific to the web?
OK, I admit: I have no idea yet how this relates to location-based learning, but deep deep down I have a feeling it does...and I'm confident I'm only a few searches away from the answer.....