Creative Thinking - an analogy of sorts?

I have been reflecting overnight on Mitch Resnick's session from yesterday about the shift from the information society to the knowledge society and now the sea-change to something he calls the creative thinking society - powerful stuff. I began to think about how we acquire knowledge and this analogy came to mind - it may be way off the mark but here goes...

Consider a hard drive and how data is written to it...

Data is written to different parts of a hard drive in a fragmented way... could this be analogous to the way content is written to a student's memory? Once in a while, or quite regularly if you're efficient, the blocks of data on a hard drive needs to be defragmented - perhaps in a "content is king" environment, our student's memories need to be "defragged" too; so that all of the connecttions between the data are connected together and the blocks of knowledge are assimilated into something that has meaning? Perhaps this defragmentation occurs at different times for different people?

Inspiration

Today I have taken my first steps in the brave new world that is the blog. The inspiration and catalyst for this blog were the two speakers I heard today at Alan November's Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston as well as Steve Dembo (Chicago), the first true blogger I have ever met:

Dr Mitch Resnick and Will Richardson (and Steve) - gentlemen, thank you, you really have inpsired me in different ways and I will always be grateful.

I have been attending this conference for the past three days and have learned so many new things as well as making many new friends as well as re-acquainting myself with old-friends from last year's conference. Particular highlights, other than the aforementioned inspiration from this morning were the opportunities to hear Dr Chris Tan (Tuesday) and learn how to Podcast with Cyndy from Apple on Tuesday.

I hope to populate this blog over the coming days with my reflections on what I have learned and how I plan to take things forward.

Three Men in a Boat - that's me in the middle!