Charting the Course of Teaching and Learning in a Networked World

Are you a Refractive Thinker®? Do you follow the crowd, or does the crowd follow you?

The term "refractive thinker" has been popularized in recent years, and I'm curious if YOU would consider yourself a refractive thinker!

They are insatiable with their curiosity, and not satisfied within current conventional parameters or the prevailing wisdom. They are frustrated by provincial thinking or analysis. They do not follow the crowd. Instead the crowd follows them. (You can check out the link below for what is now defined as a "refractive thinker"!)

http://www.refractivethinker.com/footer_template.php?article=7

How about you? Do you prefer to not only test the limits but expand well beyond them? Do you have any personal examples, or ones you have witnessed...

- Dr. Cheryl
Beyond the Box Thinkers on Facebook

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Permalink Reply by Adam Bostock on September 1, 2010 at 3:26am

I'm a big fan of [wise] innovation, and so I guess I could be called a "refractive thinker".

(I don't believe in change just for the sake of it. Change usually brings positive and negative impacts; so it's worth first asking whether the change will be beneficial.)

History has shown that the crowd rarely follows the innovative pioneer (at least in the early stages). Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book about inventions and inventors: people did not believe the proposed inventions were possible. Today we take all of those inventions for granted. But here's the really interesting thing: "experts" in the relevant fields also thought the proposed inventions were impossible! It seems that the inventors live in a lonely place.

There's also a big leap from invention to successful innovation in the market place. A technically superior invention does not always result in success. That's left to successful marketing and the whims of the public. Even Google - one of the most successful innovators - has abandonded a few of its technological innovations because people did not adopt the idea (for whatever reason).

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