posted by [identity profile] thespian.livejournal.com at 07:52am on 2004-07-17
don't think I can, though. See, the way this search went, I thought "Hmm. I was reading about that a couple hours ago, though it was in terms of space allotment for cattle. How did they refer to that? (grab book, riffle through it) Ok, just 'you need to figure 5 acres per cow here.' Ok, let's feed 'acres per cow' into Google. Oh, look, that turns up a lot of stuff related to 'acreage per cow' instead. let's see how that does. Ok, lots more, and lots of PDFs from the government; that's more likely the official type term. Ok, then, let's toss acreage into Dictionary.com's thesaurus, see if that comes up with anything. Oh, domain. That's a good one. Let's see. 'domain support gecko'. Hmm. Not quite right, but...Oh! That google snippet for that page refers to 'sustain'. Much more likely to be that. More scientific sounding word. 'gecko space sustain'. Well, there's a quote that indicates this is likely the right path, I'll give him that."

This is dull, and suppositional, and I'm not sure I could actually explain to people how I skim 20 result summaries and pull out an idea from there and say 'aha!', and it also has to do with Sheer Amount of Crap in Stephanie's Brain that makes me say "hey, they were discussing something similar to that in an incindental, throw away conversation in that book earlier..."

So basically, I'd need to learn how to teach people how to have a brain that makes connections as randomly as mine does.
 
posted by [identity profile] blumindy.livejournal.com at 08:13am on 2004-07-17
This is exactly how I do it, too, and I also find the intuitive part hard to explain. It's a matter of saying "You just go with the idea that feels right" and I admit that is unsatisfying as wither student or teacher.

I'd also love to be paid for this ability. :-)

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