Blink and Reflective Practitoner - an initial comment

As I quickly read through the first few chapters of Blink and its story about the not-so-right statue, and how months of technical analyses could not detect the fraud that a few experts felt the moment they set their eyes on the artifact, I saw the similarities between what Gladwell is writing about the unconscious adaptive and Donald Schon's notion of reflection-in-action. It makes me wonder why we are relearning something that has been said, mentioned, debated and researched by the academic world 20 years ago. It is like this notion is totally new. But it is not. Perhaps it is the failure of academics to write best sellers of theoretical concepts which gives the impression that it is something novel. Perhaps we need more Gladwells and Godins in academic writings to turn important theoretical contructs that might have huge practical implications to education. 

Community and its Analogy

Reading Block's book on community, when he mentioned the need to understand the fabric of community, I started to relate this to the fabric of the universe and how the gravitational pull of large cosmic objects will pull and affect other smaller objects much like how the our sun pulls together the 8 planets to orbit around it. This is because the gravity of the sun shapes the fabric of space into a curvature that forms the orbits that the planets travel on. The sun also nourishes the planets around it and most successfully on earth. So a community of practice is somewhat similar to the solar system where its members interact with each other peripherally from a safe distance, pulling and pushing each other through ones gravity of influence while all the time orbiting in a predictable manner around the core interest of the sun which undoubtedly provide the strongest gravitational pull. Thus, nurturing the 'nuclear force of the sun' is vital for the health and the continuous existence of the 'solar' community of practice. What is this force in terms of a community of practice or a collaborative practice?