Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (Basic Books, NY, 1980.)
http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/gears-v1.pdf
The MIT Learning Creative Learning class challenged participants to write about our personal childhood gears: aka objects as children that taught us about the world. My personal gears varied with different phases of my life, but the constant that ran through them all is the gift of time--what seemed like endlessly free unstructured hours that could be used for puttering and tinkering in the world around me. My first object was the woods that surrounded my house. The neighborhood kids and I would leave the house on summer mornings and wander until dinner time. We would build dams in the stream, fish with sticks, pick flowers, make forts and encampments, climb trees, pick berries, name and otherwise own our wild environment.
As I got older I extended and deepened my outdoor wandering to include identifying plants and flowers and learning home arts like weaving and dying using native materials. I went on to become the public information officer for the Univeristy of Colorado Dolores Archaeology Project, the largest ever funded by a single government. Here I found like minded adventurers--people who knew plants and environments deeply. It was a natural extension of my love of natural environments.
There are so many more gears, but really, the power of my gears lay in having the time to expore on my own the world as it presented itself to me at various stages of my life.
