Knowledge Tips

It's Memorial Day. I arrived back in California from ASTD a few minutes before midnight yesterday and am digging my way through hundreds of emails. Most of my inbox is filled with inane spam. I also received dozens of notices of obscene graffiti vandals had posted to my blogs. Animals, incest, and loose women promising to do anything imaginable. Yuck.

It's uplifting to receive something genuinely useful, and the Gurteen Knowledge-Letter hit the spot for me. Consider these links from the current issue:

• Peter Drucker, My Life as a Knowledge Worker

• Scott Peck, The Stages of Spiritual Growth

• Via a pointer from Ross McDonald, this awesome image of the "Metaweb" from Peter Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivak.

• Two sites dedicated to exploring conversation

• John Holt
  "The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it.

  He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient.

  He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

(This is "Copyright 2004, David Gurteen, All rights reserved.")