Where did you get that name?
The name Tryangulation is a take on the word triangulation, which is the use of geometry to infer your position according to the relative position of other known locations.
Blog posts are pretty much mini-essays; the English word "essay" comes from the French word meaning "to attempt". I've taken its modern synonym "to try" and superimposed in on the word "triangle". Aside from its use in geometry, "angle" can mean "perspective", "vantage point" or "point of view".
So a tryangle is an attempt to view things from another perspective. Tryangulation then is the practice of using the vantage points of others to confirm our coordinates and map our course.
I use this blog to organize my thoughts about knowledge and learning. Since I started this blog while I was working in a large private school, much of my focus was on the relationship between these concepts and formal education and some of the questions I reflected on were:
- Is education the same as learning?
- Do schools teach students how to create knowledge?
- Do schools teach the skills of learning?
- Why do we continue to emphasize tests when we know that they don't measure what students really need to know?
Now my career has broadened again beyond school, and this blog is shifting to be mostly a journal of my own reflections on:
- What do adults learn, and how?
- What is life long learning, and how do you teach it?
- Does training actually transfer learning?
- How do we identify our own obstacles to learning?
Of course, I will also write about anything else in the universe that interests me!
The image in the banner at the top is of an ancient Babylonian clay tablet from around 1000 B.C. that illustrates a geometric proof. I thought this was a nice way to include triangles in a representation of knowledge, learning and education. The image in the page is of a surveyor's map of the New England coastline showing the use of, uh, triangulation.
