Metacognition: Mindbook

     It all starts with a plain white page in a sketch book.  Nothing to go off from.  Everything is to be created from the small brain inside my head.  With very few guidelines and so much freedom, it is almost more difficult then when I am given step by step directions.  The assignment has the possibilities of being super creative and amazing, or just down right terrible.
     On one specific mindbook assignment, the map to you, I was faced with a challenge.  The prompt left me with so many ways of interpreting it, that it was very difficult to start.  I started to think of different shapes I could map my life out on.  Eventually I came to the conclusion that a winding road would best describe my life because somethings are never ending.  Although picking the shape was hard, it was not the most difficult.
     The most difficult part about this assignment was choosing ten emotions, events, or places that described me.  Some people love to talk about themselves and brag, and know who they are inside and out.  Yeah, I am not one of those people.  It took me forever just to come up with five elements for my mindbook assignment.  I really got stuck once I got to number eight.  I feel like that should have been the easy part of the assignment.  Most people would have gotten those element written down in a minute or two.  Why was this so hard for me? Is there something wrong with me? I found myself at the point where I was asking one of my friends some ideas of what describes me.  Other people know be better than I know myself.
    I wish I could understand myself a little better.  I wish I knew all of my strengths and weaknesses.  It would make life so much easier.  It takes me a little bit longer to think and process information when I am not an expert at the subject.  Once I get those core ideas out though, I can really get going.  It just takes me a while to get all of my ideas formulated.  Just like it did for this mindbook assignment.  Once I finally got those ten elements, I was on a roll.
    The way I think might take longer at first, but it does always pull through in the end.  It would be a lot easier and faster if all my ideas just came to me right away.  Overall, my thinking has never let me down.

Blogging Around

     In the first comment I responded to Jessie's blog post Best of the Week: The Elusive Big Idea.  In her post she reflected on the article The Elusive Big Idea.  She explained how she thought that the internet and all of the new technology that we have has prevented our generation from coming up with the "Big Idea". Or in other words, it is making us become less creative people.  She also went over how we tend to overlook how things originated because we are so focused on the new thing.

     I would have to agree with everything you said here.  I think that the internet and certain web sites really are preventing us from being the next big thinkers.  We are so dependent on facebook, pinterest, and other web sites like that, it is so easy for us to just look up a cool idea rather than create it ourselves.  I feel that another way that computers are doing harm on us, well at least for me, is that I have become so dependent on spell check.  I am so bad at spelling and I think the reason for that is because of always writing on Microsoft Word.  All of these great inventions took great thinkers to come up with them, yet they are also preventing us from being creative as well.

     In my second comment I responded to Katie Dwyer's post, It matters: Creativity or Plagiarism.  Her post was about how there is a very thin line between creativity and plagiarism.  She wrote about how while you may think your just being creative, there is a great chance that you are really copying what someone has already done before you.  She explained how using someone else's idea and being creative are so similar that it is really hard to tell the difference.

     I would have to agree with a lot that you are saying. When all the teachers read the same exact rules in every single class, honestly, nobody listens. They make it sound like every idea we have ever heard can never be used again because we can not copy. The only way we get smarter is by learning from example. No one has completely original ideas, because they are always using past examples to form what they create. Honestly, for the most part, no one is purposely plagiarizing, they are just using examples. Now, on the other hand copy and pasting a paper and saying it is yours is going a little over board, and that is more of the focus of plagiarizing. Overall I think the whole plagiarizing idea is drilled down a little too much at the beginning of the year.