I really liked this TED talk I heard last night on my local public radio station about reinventing the encyclopedia game for the 21st century, feeding curiosity, going down rabbit holes, learning new things, etc. Without realizing it, I’ve pretty much been playing his exact game on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet for years now. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s revelatory. Sometimes it is actually just a distraction from other better things to be doing.
The way he pulls together so many random things in his talk, in an almost poetic way, has inspired me to restart my previously infrequent #WhatWeLearnedToday posts. It has also apparently inspired me to expand beyond the world of 140 characters, a place I haven’t been for a while. I wanted to tweet my thoughts about this TED talk and I soon discovered I had a bit more to say than could fit in one tweet. I had kind of forgotten that there are other platforms and means of sharing things that are not bound by the strictures of Twitter or Facebook, so here we are. For nostalgia and to give a better idea of what I am talking about, here are some of my previous twitter-bound examples where I explored random items of interest and then bothered to share about what I learned to anyone who might care:
