”… remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people”

Like many others, all over the connected world, I have been moved by Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. Randy is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who has had an amazing career doing the things that he loved. He’s worked with virtual reality, on interface design and has been part of the brains behind Alice. At 46 years of age, in the prime of his life and with a wife and a young family, he is dying from pancreatic cancer. This lecture is about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. It’s funny, inspirational and possibly one of the most moving videos you’ll ever see. Watch or download it here, read the transcript here (not a patch on the video).

 ”Almost all of us have childhood dreams; for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don’t achieve theirs, and I think that’s a shame.”

Randy talks about “headfakes” which is his word for all the real learning that takes place when you’re doing other stuff,

“OK, and so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely. And the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that
I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important.
And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.”

He talks about the best headfake of all time (which is wrong because there’s a king hit at the end of the lecture) which is about getting middle school girls to tell stories using the programming structures of Alice. The girls get to tell stories and just happen to learn to write software.

It’s a brilliant concept that has made its way into my Ulearn conference presentation later on today.

And speaking of the Ulearners … Conference blogging tips. Some useful tips and tricks to make sure that there is more guts than gush in your conference blog posts.

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