I have been working my way through Srini Pillay’s Tinker Dabble Doodle Try His central idea is “unfocus” as the brain’s DMN–default mode network. It is full of experiments, explorations, and super interesting research info on how we currently understand how the brain works. Recommended as a book you read idiosyncratically. I have made it my own by using lots of color and marginal annotation. Here is a sample page:

This page is where I came up with my response–the five minute revery. This is what amounts to structured unfocus. I know. Oxymoronic. Illogical. How can you structure a mental process that by definition is unstructure? Change the definition to suit you. This is just one way to batter your way through the iron bands of logic and hierarchy. It might be the only way to kill a doom loop.

Here is my first revery (woolgather/feldgang/random walk/daydream):

The key to this kind of work is to be kind to yourself and to angle slowly into the quest. Kind of like slowly re-entering the Earth atmosphere without skipping off and flying into the wild ether. I chose a bit of feedforward as I tried to evoke what the course might be like for a learner in their first semester of the course. My mind flitted from thoughts of first day to ones about we might do at the end of a typical class or the beginning. I suspect I wasted some time here and there, but I consider that a sure sign of something useful happening in a peripheral manner. The blue highlights are various ‘evocations’ I noted on a post-it for this five minutes of woolgathering. The yellow one is “big evocation”, one that folds many of the other smaller ones under its protective wings.

The larger purpose of this exercise is engage with this logic smashing exercise as a pedagogical way into course re-design. Uggghh, such a hideous phrase, as if I, as teacher, was doing all the work and the students were just slot cars on a track.

If you want a deeper dive into the “big evocation” I will update this later today after I work in the garden. Gonna be hot so I need to get the work done earlier that yesterday. I could feel the UV cooking me through my long sleeve shirt.

Update: a ThingLink image that does a bit more ‘splainin’