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What is the point in playing chess if you let a computer give you the answers and all you do is move the pieces?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 June 2013, 09:20

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The act of playing chess, and the process of thinking it through is the joy and the learning.

  • What will be the point as or once all the answers are online?
  • Where we let algorithms and the Web provide the answers?

Does this mean that anyone can be a doctor so long as they have a smartphone in their pocket and a good connection?

Knowledge acquired is how learning occurs.

  • The learning process is necessary in order for the brain to make sense of it (or not)
  • And we do so, each of us, in an utterly unique way.
  • Less so because of when or where we were born,
  • But because we were made this way.

'Je suis comme je suis, je suis faite comme ca'.

Our DNA is unique and the brain it constructs also.

Not hard considering considering:

  • There are some 98 billion neurons in there.
  • And every neuron has some 10,000 connections.

It is this mass of interconnections that makes us both ridiculous and smart,

Able to think in metaphors, provide insight, solve problems, conform, deform and inform.

And fall in and out of love.

Enthusiams bubble up like farts in the wind.

Life is like a game of chess

We are its players and pieces whether we like it or not.

It is the sense of participation and control that makes life worth living.

Which suggests that absolute machine power - Google-eyed algorithms could be no better than prison.

Life is not a game though

And we are more than merely players.

There is no need to strut and fret our hour upon the stage.

Unless ...

It is a story we tell, defined by our actions and responses

A rollercoaster of our own making.

There is no need for noise and tension,

where we can be cool in war and love.

 

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Design Museum

Activity Systems - what sense do you make of them?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 7 Aug 2011, 03:57

I tried start a discussion on Engestrom in the General Forum.

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To make the subject my own I drew up the activity system on MDF then laid out some chess pieces. Ideally I would do this outside, on a beach perhaps, with people and objects.

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This is how I'd develop a concept board in three dimensions, with real instruments.

I've done this with a Youth Theatre before developing a script for a video, the entire process enabling me to get my head around the subject so that any audience who then view the product of my work get it too. (hopefully).

This is web 1.0 thinking, telling. Web 2.0 should engage your audience earlier in the creative process, so that it is a collaborative, shared, and these days a fluid, even an open outcome.

 

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