Learning to Change - Changing to Learn [video]

Can't remember who facebook'd or tweeted this video (it might have been Sascha Pallenberg) but I found it to be quite inspiring and well done:

My favorite quote is definitely:

"It's the death of education, it's the dawn of learning."

;-)

Seeking a routine

On my way to work today I thought about how much routine I've had in my life for the majority of the past 6 months. In fact I haven't had such a regular routine since I finished my year of compulsory social service back in 2004. The reason why I'm emphasizing regular here is simple: I might call drinking beer and hanging out with friends in front of our student residence (spring 2005 was awesome!) or working until dawn and subsequently sleeping until 11:30 a.m. a routine but I fear the majority of society would disagree with me there. Not that it's been that bad in the past 2 1/2 years. However I still rather seldomely managed to go to bed before 3 a.m. and in my eternal quest to approximate my sleep to 6 hours / night I often don't get up until 10 a.m. or so.

But in the past half year I've pretty much followed the routine of a 9-to-5 office worker and always had to get up by 7 a.m. Now I can tell you that when getting up at that time I'm hardly more than a vegetable for the majority of the morning. However it's still quite good to have a regular routine and it feels great to go to lunch having been at least somewhat productive already.

So now the goal is to find a reasonable compromise which gets me through the upcoming university semester starting at the beginning of October. My current thinking is to try and get up around 8:30 which sounds more or less doable. With the goal of ideally sleeping 6 hours and knowing that I cope quite well with 4 1/2 hours of sleep that gives me enough time in the evenings and nights to get things done. With my old routine I consistently seemed to be most productive in the late afternoons and between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. If I could add 2~3 hours of actual and productive work in the mornings then I'd be very happy indeed.

Of course there's always a (big?) difference between theory and practice but I certainly hope to achieve my goals. I just set myself a reminder on my mobile phone to re-visit this topic 2 months down the road, it will be interesting to see where how things go until then.

Something to keep in mind

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management at Google posted some interesting thoughts on the official Google blog the other day. In an entry called "Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning" Rosenberg talks about the importance of "non-routine problem-solving skills" for knowledge workers.

Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process.

He goes on to mention:

It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.

Not that this is a terribly new or exciting insight but it's definitely an important one to keep in mind when you look at things like education and learning in your own life.