Mathemagenic

While trying to find things related to my previous post I came across a few posts I forgot I wrote. While reading this one I became mesmerized by "madly letting go" in the quote from Donella Meadows:

I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

I'm getting more and more convinced that letting go is one of the key skills in whatever 2.0 - web, business, science, life...

While working on my methodology chapter I realised that my interest in using alternative writing styles (e.g. authoethnography) in reporting research is also supported by knowing that storytelling is an effective way to share knowledge from my KM work. Now the problem is that I was never seriousely into storytelling research, so I don't have any research-based arguments for that. Any pointers are very welcome!

From what I can recall it was something about the power of contextual cues in the story that trigger all kinds of connections in our brain.

Some randomly related things that I thought about:

• The effectiveness of online communities vs. databases of best practices (personal context, specifics, interactivity).
• Engagement as on of the Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing
• "The interspersed questions prompt learners to process the material in a manner that is more likely to give birth to learning" (mathemagenic processing).

See also: a collection on how storytelling communicates complex ideas by Steve Denning