I love Jamie McKenzie's Questioning Toolkit that leads you through different types of questions and how you can use them in instruction. What I like most is the Unanswerable Questions.
His other article is titled "Questions As Technology," and while it was written in 2002, it still resonates:
Because the new information landscape is streaming by at supersonic speeds, we find ourselves working overtime to “get our minds around” the essential issues, trends and data of our times. Making meaning is harder than ever before.
Supersonic speeds? We open our e-mail and watch a stream of messages flow into our mailboxes. Some of them are correspondence, some of them spam and many of them information “alerts” we have set in motion by subscribing to many of the services that may be tailored to our interests and needs. It is hard to keep up with this torrent.
Quick fixes, wizards and templates abound as substitutes for deeper understanding, but the ultimate answer to information abundance and degradation is unrelenting pondering and questioning. The better we are at interpreting the data and challenging the assumptions behind them, the greater our chances of handling the riddles, the conundrums and the paradoxes that are so prevalent. Questions make it possible.
thanks, this is a great resource for me. We just had this slogan with Nancy Dixon on organisational learning: learning starts by asking questions!
Posted by: joitske | May 25, 2006 at 05:53 AM