On The Back of My Napkin
I didn't even get to read Brain Rules and my wife has already bought The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam which is being buzzed about as one of the growing number of business books that educators will find relevant.
I can identify with Roam's belief that we're all equipped with some natural talent for visual thinking. Unfortunately, most of us haven't been encouraged to develop it.
It's visual thinking done simply. Roam says that, "Visual thinking is 20% vision science, 20% cognitive science, 20% psychology, 20% information visualization, 20% show and tell, and about 5% poker."
The Back of the Napkin encourages you to present ideas visually with good old whiteboards and flipcharts, and, for the small audiences, a legal pad or even the napkin of his title.
You may have seen Josh Landis and Mitch Butler on CBS-TV shows like Sunday Morning doing their "Fast Draw" animated explanations with dry-erase markers, or explaining super-delegates on the news using with their whiteboard. At first, I thought it was the folks from Common Craft which has a great series of videos about tech things simply explained.
If you don't have the Roam book - or you're not convinced it's worth picking up - you can watch this video where Roam shows how to use simple drawings to work visually through a problem, and another video of Dan on Fox Business.
My own intro to his ideas was the Flash movie on the Back of the Napkin website and through some posts on Dan's blog.
I used to be against using business books/ideas/practices in education (especially students as "customers"), but the past few years I'm seeing more and more connections. Why? I doubt that business is becoming more educational, so I guess it's that education is becoming more like a business.
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