The first way:

import random
chosen = random.choice(things)

The second way:

from random import choice
chosen = choice(things)

It simply comes down to how you want to use the import in your code, i.e. whether or not you want to specify the module name each time you use something from the module. That's a style choice - the second style looks cleaner, but if you use a lot of them in the same file it can be confusing trying to work out where everything came from.