The "Writing and Inquiry in the Digital Age" rolled on this week.  Profound and rich.

I have been reading an article with my students this week by Steven Johnson about tinkering and innovation.

In the article Johnson calls up the work of Stuart Kaufmann's "the adjacent possible".  Johnson paints a simple metaphor toward understanding how Kauffman's term plays out in cultural, biological, and chemical terms.  The metaphor is that of a series of doors.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace.

It has seemed like a mansion this week in our shared course:

Kevin Hodgson:  Diigo, Think Binder, Searcheeze,

Janet Ilko: digital textbooks and curation

Troy Hicks:  Curation and its discontents,  Eli Pariser's idea of the "online filter bubble",  the curator's code of ethics, annotations and their possibilities in assessment.

Katherine Frank:  daily blog posts, the confluence of annotation and curation, Digital IS as a rich, "go-to" source.

Christina Cantrell:  modeling how to "ride herd" on P2PU course, guiding questions-how does curation relate to 'learning to perform in the world’?,Digital IS Knot article,  her own use cases from Pinterest and Diigo.

Jack Zangerle:  Assessments and third part annotation, great analogy between Hunger Games and assessment.

Joe Dillon:  Bringing analog and digital annotation together.

All of these doors the open further into larger and more potent adjacent possibles. They inspired an outflow of content from me that I am certain I would never have created without them, including:

1. new ideas and connections on screencasting and digital annotation for a summer tech academy sponsored by the Kentucky Writing Project,
2. new thoughts provoked by Howard Rheingold's five key literacies  (Attention, Participation, Cooperation, Critical Consumption, Network Awareness) at SXSW,
3. Harry Potter and Delores Umbridge (AKA Arne Duncan),
4. Diigo/Evernote/PasteboardRecorder workflow share,
5. Assessment as left brain tyranny and great Einstein quote, " The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant."
6. lots of responses to Christina's pushes to use/participate in Digital IS,
7. deeper inquiry with group on annotation and its connections with curation, and
8. a personal committment to create a resource/collection/discussion for Digital IS.

I acknowledge with gratitude the help of everyone above for opening many new doors and their adjacent possibles.  What will next week's bring?