I consider link rich sites like The Marginalian to be paths to adventure through learning.  Typically, I have blazed a lackadaisical trail through these spaces, skimming the site and then clicking on links willy nilly.  I would like to be able to shift into another gear where the whole post becomes a syllabus for learning.  In this case I want to learn more about Simone Weil.

I read quite a bit of her in college and then life got in the way.  Time for a table flip.

 

Now the question is this:  how do I go about a more orderly approach to someone else’s “sweepings”?

First, I use the Chrome LinkGrabber extension to scrape all the url’s from the page

Next, I copy and paste them into an Etherpad writing space.  You can use any space at all, but I like Etherpad because they are easy to embed as below:

 

If you noted, you can see I have titled this a “course”.  And that is how I think of it–it is an adventure of links illuminated by someone else’s beacon (Maria Popova) and re-viewed through my lens.

Third, this “working through” is a time consuming process that requires gathering, making sense of, and sharing.

I like to gather in an analog manner.  By that I mean a notebook of some sort.  I fill the notebook as I move through the links–skimming, slow reading and deep reading. Usually I abandon the project before I start exploring too many secondary sets of links (represented in the etherpad by a text indent).  As I began my exploration of the Simone Weil post I discovered more about Melissa Prichard and Annie Dillard. Yes, it is ‘turtled’ links all the way down.

Here is my blank analog adventure book, a Kokuyo, college ruled Campus notebook.  The paper in here won’t bleed through gel or fountain pen ink and is of a quality to die for.  I can imagine running my hand along first page of the notebook below. So smooth.

I don’t have a master plan from this point on, but I trust that the “course” will come to me, come what may.  I suspect that as I work my way through what I already have in the existing etherpad that the expansion might become (see my optimism here) exponential.  I don’t think that concerns me since I am in business of adventuring for my own purposes. I am quite sure I will share with you as I go.

Perhaps it can grow into a larger community of those interested in Weil’s idea of “grace and attention” where each of us grows our own syllabus centered on a question that needs to be answered:  is attention the rarest and purest form of generosity?  It could, of course, be any mutually agreed upon quest.  As Bill Waterson said in the last Calvin and Hobbes:  it’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring.”