Hayden Vink: Life In The Fast Lane

There was an interesting item on Campbell Live tonight about Small Poppies - an Auckland preschool for gifted children. [If you missed it, you can watch the video]

As a young, proud father, I couldn’t help but wonder whether my son might be a small poppy too. He can’t quite string sentences together yet, but I almost swore he said ’stegosaurus’ or something similar the other day

Later on I jumped online to find out more about the preschool, what it means to be gifted, and how you can tell if your child is gifted or not.

That’s when I discovered this table:

Source: Small Poppies, © Janice Szabos

I think the subtle differences between ‘bright’ and ‘gifted’ are are fascinating, and wonder how much of the difference can be put down to innate capability vs. stimulating and encouraging environment - that is, Mum and Dad (and others) interacting with their child in a way that stimulates or encourages the attributes in the right-hand column.

I reckon there’s a lot to be said for the latter.

Update, 24 Sep 2008 - Speaking of children and learning, this post on “How Children Learn” over at BoingBoing is worth a read. I liked this quote: “The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them.” I think I might order the two books the post refers to.

One interesting outcome of today’s team meeting was a consensus that ‘The Librarian’ was an appropriate nickname for me. It seems my frequent reference to blog posts, news items, and books has made an impression on my colleagues. But I’m quietly hoping that it’ll do more than just earn me a nickname; I hope to encourage a better, smarter practice of media consumption and knowledge seeking.

Here’s why.

We are all time-poor; we never seem to have enough time to spend doing the things we want - or need - to do. As a result, we constantly strive for bigger returns from smaller investments of time and energy.

When it comes to media, we’ve never had more access to it, and more choice, that any other time in history. For most of us, the unfortunate consequence of this is that more and more of our precious time seems to be required just to stay afloat - let alone be in a position to surf and conquer the knowledge wave.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that doesn’t involve caving in, and becoming the metaphorical caveman.

It’s called the bit-literate media diet. And you can read all about it - and several other life-changing ways to improve productivity in the digital age - in a book called Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst. I can’t recommend it enough - seriously, go and order a copy now. 

Essentially, the approach involves creating and maintaining an active portfolio of publications (digital, print and other media) that keeps you informed about what matters most to you - both professionally and personally. Once critical aspect of the approach - and one I pointed out to the colleague who asked if I could just send out daily tidbits to the team - is that creating your media diet is up to you; it’s based on what is important to you, not any other person, publisher or company.

Another critical aspect is aiming to keep the portfolio as small as possible - relying on only a few sources, and spending as little time as possible, in order to be fully informed.

In the spirit of encouraging bit literacy, and to reveal a little bit of the ‘magic’ behind my librarianship, here are the highlights of my current portfolio:

• Daring Fireball
• Seth’s Blog
• 3 News
• Campbell Live
• Time Magazine
• Monocle (print and online)
• Sunday Star Times
• 60 Minutes
• Sunday
• Konigi
• Adaptive Path Blog

My current feed-reader of choice is Google Reader. I’ve currently got 79 subscriptions, and according to its stats I’ve ‘read’ 2,131 items over the last 30 days. I put ‘read’ in inverted commas because I actually skim through most of the items, stopping only to read the most interesting (or eye-catching?) ones.

I’d also be lost without MySky - which allows me to record all of the TV programmes above so I never miss them, and can watch them at a time that suits.

Care to share what you’re eating?