We have a winner!

With over half of all votes cast, Jason Finley’s haiku on metacognition is the clear winner in the academic haiku contest!  Congratulations, Jason! 

Here’s his haiku one last time:

Wield your mind better:
offload thinking, and improve
metacognition.

“Exceeding Cognitive Limitations: Metacognition and Offloading onto the Environment.”

I think one reason this poem was successful is its resonance with time management themes that David Allen and others have helped popularize, such as writing everything down and clearing your pyschic RAM.  Jason elaborated on this in the comments yesterday:

…I consider a lot of this time-management related stuff to fall within my interests.  You’re absolutely right: writing things down constitutes offloading a cognitive task onto the environment.  You might be freeing up attentional and/or working memory resources, or alleviating yourself of some of the burden of prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future).  I rely heavily on such strategies and am interested in studying the costs and benefits more closely.

The metacognitive side of things might be when you realize that even though some information is salient and easily accessible now in the current context, you may well be overestimating your ability to retrieve it from memory in some future context.  So you can thus attempt more robust encoding and rehearsal strategies, or offload that info in a thoughtful way, or both.  (Made-up example: you could envision yourself leaving for work Monday morning and stopping to grab the muddler you borrowed from your co-worker Gilbert, and/or set an automatic reminder in your computer’s calendar to flash a message on your computer screen that morning, or even put the muddler in one of your work shoes.)

Come to think of it, I could see this poem making it into the margins of David’s next book (maybe your people should talk to his people, Jason).

Thanks for the memories

What can I say?  This contest far exceeded my expectations.  I thought the entries were brilliant, I met a lot of new people, and I even learned about a useful source for my own work (thanks, Miriam!).

So, a huge thanks to everyone who participated.  Thanks for making this so successful!