If you are like me, when you crave a treat, it's often cheesecake. And though I have, a time or two, made my own cheesecake, I mostly just want marvelous, taste-pleasing cheesecake. I don't care how you make it.
Cheesecake is a whole which need not be understood in its parts. Don't bore me with the details, pass me a slice of cheesecake! I may or may not ask you for the recipe.
At times, when we consider what might be true in the future, we can learn the most if we accept things holistically. For example, we are beginning to hear about self-driving cars, and Google. among others, has demonstrated technology for them. You could find out a great deal about how self-driving, self-navigating cars will work.
But once you have the idea that cars can drive themselves, the really interesting work is in figuring out what that would mean. Don't bore me with the details, let's imagine what self-driving cars would do for us. I may or may not ask how they actually work.
To put things simply, you often benefit from, once you are pretty sure that something is possible, playing out ideas about how it would shape things, rather than bogging down in the technical details.
I got this idea from professor Mere Berryman, who is an educator, a pedagogy specialist, at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. We met at the World Innovation Summit for Education, 2013, in Doha, Qatar. Thanks Mere!
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UPDATE
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Mere Berryman shared a little more with me:
A M?ori woman leader in New Zealand once said
"Mehemea ka moemoe? ahau, ko ahau anake. Mehemea ka moemoe? a t?tou, ka taea e t?tou."
"If I dream a dream, I dream alone. If we all dream together, we can succeed together"
–Te Puea H?rangi, 1883-1952. [bio]
Image: zingyyellow…! via Flickr, Creative Commons attribution license
