This is the first in a (theoretical) series of keepers — interrelated items shared by people I follow.

The keepers:

• Julie Dirksen said, “Add ‘brain games’ to the myth pile” with a link to A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community (The Stanford Center on Longevity).
• The SharpBrains blog offered A Brain Teaser for Each Cognitive Ability.
• Mark Oehlert shared a link to Models of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Models, by Simon Roberts, at Perspectives, an ethnographic blog.
• A post at Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid E-Learning Blog led me to a collection of e-learning examples shared by people in response to the weekly e-learning challenge.
• And, reinforcing the video I posted yesterday, a 2012 Learning Solutions article by David Kelly, Is Content Curation in Your Skill Set? It Should Be.

Why I’ve kept them, why I’ve posted:

The Stanford and SharpBrains selections both deal with the brain. On the one hand, Stanford’s countering the simplistic attitude that doing X will keep senescence at bay.

The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of older adults about impending cognitive decline.

The technology of enchantment is the most sophisticated we possess. Under this heading I place all those technical strategies, especially art, music, dances, rhetoric, gifts etc., which human beings employ in order to secure the acquiescence of other people in their intentions or project…to enchant the other person and cause him/her to perceive social reality in a way favourable to the social interests of the enchanter.

Says consultant Roberts, “We’d like to think that our interests are coterminous with those of the people we advise…[However…] In pursuit of certainty in the face of uncertainty, is it not sometime the case that the enchanter becomes the enchanted?”

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The e-learning challenge examples, for me, move from brain theory to workplace practice. Although I don’t work with Articulate, much of what gets done through the challenge can serve as a stimulus or even a model to get me out of far more conventional ruts. What’s more of a challenge than asking–and trying to answer–“How did she do that? How could I do that? How could I do something different now that I’ve seen that?”

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I really enjoyed David Kelly’s comparison between curation and photography. Decades ago, as he says, “photographer” tended to mean someone with a lot of technical skill and a lot of technical equipment. Mere mortals took snapshots, not photographs.

…Just as tools exist today that enable the average individual to take a quality photo, tools exist today that enable an individual to curate information.