Cammy Bean has a great post about accidental learning. Cammy quotes from Yo-Yo Ma's presentation for NPR:
Every day I make an effort to go toward what I don't understand. This wandering leads to the accidental learning that continually shapes my life.
- Yo-Yo Ma
I've found that I often follow links (not just on the Internet) to discover new things. Just the other day I was listening to Jimmy Buffett's CD Don't Stop the Carnival. It was not a regular music CD, but it seemed to tell a story. So I searched Wikipedia to find out more about it and discovered it is based upon a Herman Wouk book by the same name. Buffett and Wouk colloborated on turning it into a musical
Normally I would not think about reading a Herman Wouk book because I am conditioned to think that he writes war stories (Thank you ABC which produced Winds of War and War and Rememberance mini-series.) The only war-related theme in Don't Stop the Carnival occurs at the beginning when it is described how the United States came into possession of the island during World War II.
After that it is the story of the adventures of Norman Paperman, a New York PR man who decides to slow down after he suffers a mild heart attack by running a resort in the Caribbean. I am now deeply engrossed in a book I would not have known even existed if I had not decided to find out the reasoning behind the unusual CD.
2 comments:
Wikipedia has certainly enabled many learning accidents. In the past, you might have had the curiosity, but not the means to immediately gratify said curiosity...
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