Blink: An Intellectual Adventure Story

May 28, 2007

As Tommy commented after we posted Distancelearningville, “You can tell that school is winding down!” I took this brief amount of time after student projects are finished and before summer training begins to read a book. Yes, not a blog, not an RSS feed, not a website, but an actual BOOK! I was tempted to re-read The World is Flat 2.0 (but 3.0 is coming this summer!)

I decided instead of reading all the Amazon reviews and seeing what others were reading, to just pick up the first book that caught my eye. I had a copy of some Oprah book in my hand when I saw one called, “blink”. I picked it up and it had that “good-book-feel” and for some reason, I tossed it in the basket and brought it home. I read it in two days!

Funny thing is that it is about rapid cognition and how we know without thinking…and the good things and bad things about “thin-slicing”. I couldn’t tell you why I thought this would be a good book or why I bought it, but I did and it can best be described as an “intellectual adventure story”.

Three big ideas from the book:

1. Experience brings judgment, a powerful way of knowing things very quickly.The term he uses is “thin-slicing”.
2. Sometimes good people are trapped by circumstances of time, distance (or nearness), and physical appearance which can derail judgment.
3. In the world of instantaneous information, we often mistake information with understanding.

My initial thoughts related to this book are

1. It is funny that I bought the book without knowing anything about it and it is a book about “knowing without thinking”.
2. When I first found Janine, Ken, and Bennie’s work online describing 1-2-3 VC, I knew that it was what I was looking for as a staff development model for videoconferencing.
3. I am hoping that someway we can figure out exactly what it takes for videoconferencing to be utilized effectively in a building. If you read the book, I am thinking about the Cook County Hospital example here. How they distilled the myriad of information related to a person possibly having a heart attack down to four things to look for to make the decision. I would love to be able to work with buildings/districts and say, “Here are the four most important elements to have in place to get the most use from the equipment and the most benefit for the students.”
4. I was fascinated by the collection of stories that illustrated how some things we just KNOW and cannot articulate how we know. I was also amazed by the stories of the orchestras and how the demographics changed once they started using screens so that the person’s gender could not be determined.
5. Sometimes knowing less can lead to understanding more. This one I need to keep in mind when I develop training…I tend to put waaaayyyyy toooooo much in. Less is more. Less is more.

Anyone else read Blink yet? I would love to hear your thoughts or just a comment and let me know what you are reading or what you plan to read. For now, I am back into summer training mode!

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