One way to weed those out is to begin with the most basic question we can formulate. Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats calls these “naive questions.” Geochemist Hope Jahren calls them “curiosity questions.” Whatever the label, they are, in essence, the kind of question a child could come up with.Progressing from such questions requires us to dig deeper and slow down our thinking — which, in turn, may reveal to us unknown unknowns or information we may have missed last time we explored the topic.

We can be bolder about asking questions in public and encouraging others to pursue their curiosity, too. In that encouragement, we help create an environment where those around us feel safe from the shame and humiliation they may feel in revealing a lack of knowledge about a subject, which can round back to us.

Many people, myself included, can find asking questions to be daunting. It fills us with worry and self-doubt, as though the act of being inquisitive is an all-too-public admission of our ignorance. Unfortunately, this can also lead us to find solace in answers — no matter how shaky our understanding of the facts may be — rather than risk looking stupid in front of others or even to ourselves.

“Hij kwam tot de conclusie dat leerlingen drie keer op een andere manier met de leerstof in aanraking moesten komen om de materie te begrijpen”

The state of current technology greatly impacts our ability to manipulate information, which in turn exerts influence on our ability to develop new ideas and technologies. Tools designed to enable networked thinking are a step in the direction of Douglas Engelbart’s vision of augmenting the human intellect, resulting in “more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insolvable.”

Divergence and emergence allow networked thinkers to uncover non-obvious interconnections and explore second-order consequences of seemingly isolated phenomena. Because it relies on undirected exploration, networked thinking allows us to go beyond common sense solutions.

Networked thinking is an explorative approach to problem-solving, whose aim is to consider the complex interactions between nodes and connections in a given problem space. Instead of considering a particular problem in isolation to discover a pre-existing solution, networked thinking encourages non-linear, second-order reflection in order to let a new idea emerge.

Interdependence and Regeneration2c5c7 A very important feature to be noted from the discussion in this section bears upon the interdependence among the various types of structuring which are involved in the H-LAM/T system, where the capability for doing each type of structuring is dependent upon the capability for doing one or more of the other types of structuring. (Assuming that the physical structuring of the system remains basically unchanged during the system's operation, we exclude its dependence upon other factors in this discussion.) 2c5c7a This interdependence actually has a cyclic, regenerative nature to it which is very significant to us. We have seen how the capability for mental structuring is finally dependent, down the chain, upon the process structuring (human, artifact, composite) that enables symbol-structure manipulation. But it also is evident that the process structuring is dependent not only upon basic human and artifact process capabilities, but upon the ability of the human to learn how to execute processes--and no less important, upon the ability of the human to select, organize, and modify processes from his repertoire to structure a higher-order process that he can execute. Thus, a capability for structuring and executing processes is partially dependent upon the human's mental structuring, which in turn is partially dependent upon his process structuring (through concept and symbol structuring), which is partially dependent upon his mental structuring, etc. 2c5c7b All of this means that a significant improvement in symbol-structure manipulation through better process structuring (initially perhaps through much better artifacts) should enable us to develop improvements in concept and mental-structure manipulations that can in turn enable us to organize and execute symbol-manipulation processes of increased power. To most people who initially consider the possibilities for computer-like devices augmenting the human intellect, it is only the one-pass improvement that comes to mind, which presents a picture that is relatively barren compared to that which emerges when one considers this regenerative interaction. 2c5c7c We can confidently expect the development of much more powerful concepts pertaining to the manner in which symbol structures can be manipulated and portrayed, and correspondingly more complex manipulation processes that in the first pass would have been beyond the human's power to organize and execute without the better symbol, concept, and mental structuring which his augmented system provided him. These new concepts and processes, beyond our present capabilities to use and thus never developed, will provide a tremendous increased-capability payoff in the future development of our augmentation means.