Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is probably the most famous university prof in the world, or at least he will be soon. Millions have read seen his articles videos in academic journals on Youtube, most famously, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, and more recently Information R/evolution.
The latest looks at students and their strange relationship with our academic institutions and models, which were designed before the telephone, not to mention the iPhone.
How new is it, I wonder, that teachers can't understand the world their students inhabit? It's always been true to a certain extent, but the disconnect previously was mostly cultural … here it seems to me more environmental, and so fundamental. The mechanisms for communicating are changing, has changed (communicating the big ideas, facts, thoughts, as well as the minutia of of daily lives), and with pervasive computing and constant connection to the web, the way we think is changing too. For better or worse doesn't really matter, it just will change.
1. fact-learning: what is the value of memory when all the facts we might need to remember are available at our fingertips?
3. plagiarism: copying is so easy now. instead of demanding that people not copy, maybe we should raise/change the standards of what we expect work to look like, assume it will be copied and pasted, and require that it be relevant in more important ways (see #1 above) … I see the parallel with with wikipedia/britannica question. if the info itself is free and available on wikipedia, then if britannica wants to be relevant, maybe it's just going to have to think harder about what it can do better than wikipedia. ditto with schooling. maybe we need to move *beyond* "plagiarism is bad" to something more meaningful.
4. lecture halls: what are big classrooms for? i rarely went to many of my big lectures when I was in university – all that info was in the textbook, so why attend a dry lecture with a bad prof? it didn't make sense to me then, and it seems crazier now. in the case of small classes I have a different opinion.
5. discipline: here I mean mental discipline. I notice this myself, with online distractions everywhere, I often find it hard to concentrate and apply the long-term discipline needed to Get Things Done. Part of how I have adapted is by trying to harness that lack of discipline, a prime example being LibriVox … which I once joked should have as a motto, "powered by procrastination." This is the area that "worries" me most, because it's the thing in my own life that concerns me. maybe we need to start thinking more about how to use unfocused, ambient mental energy for important things?
6. radical changes: while I think the changes in technology mean we need some radical rethinking of education, radical changes are always dangerous, you never know what other side-effects might overtake the initial effects. we need to be careful. if only someone would invent a way to have instantaneous feedback from multiple sources in an open intellectual system, it would make things easier!
a) critical thinking: ability to think critically about problems, this means ability to see a problem, to understand it's context and history, and to be able to analyze various options and decide on the one that seems most likely to "work". this is as true in science as in humanities and arts.
b) clarity: are we becoming less clear in our thinking and writing? losing the discipline of writing clearly, for instance, is bad news. the open web results a enormous amounts of unclear/undisciplined writing … so, are we really losing that skill, or is it just that there is far more writing and thinking being captured than ever before, and hence we see more of the unclear stuff – where before only the clear stuff got into writing? does clarity really matter? (yes). what's to be done? or does that ask the wrong question?
Just some notes to ponder.
And also, more out of curiosity, I wonder how humans will adapt to these big changes that are only scratching the surface?
Would you become a teacher hugh? Hurry up cuz i have one going to uni next year and one entering high school this year and it would be good that the sproutiest of the two gets you as a teacher ;) oh yeah! you met the little hipster!
actually thinking hard about getting a masters/phd and going into academia.
Socrates was suspicious of literacy (it seems he was illiterate) claiming that writing things down would weaken people's memories – and he lived at a time when education consisted of being able to recite Homer. It seems that the Internet is at the other end of this same arc. Or, perhaps not the end.
The only good thing I ever got out of education was the chance to meet some very interesting and clever people, which made me want to be clever too.
But I don't think I was ever taught anything – I was too arrogant to be taught. All I wanted was access to data – I already knew what I wanted to find out, and knew that if I was left alone with the data for any period of time, I would get there. And the clever people inspired me to want to know the subjects that interested me as thoroughly as they knew the subjects that interested them.
What all this lacked was any desire on my part to make this quest for knowledge applicable to any profession or field. And when my education ended abruptly (due to sudden emigration) I was at a bit of a loss.
Education is this country (UK) is about more than education, as such. Having a degree is a proof of membership of the middle classes. People, 20 years ago, would spend their grants on booze, (having chosen a university on the basis of its social life) and shave a degree in English. They would then use the qualification to get an office job, and never read another book. This always seemed a total waste of 3 years to me, let alone of money, and lecturer's time.
i did get a fair bit of good out my formal education. there is something to be said for being forced to do something valuable that you would never do on your own (say, reading kant; or really working thru an abstract algebra problem, figuring out the proof).
My memory is completely and utterly useless.
When I was young, I had to write everything down in a notebook or I'd forget it within an hour. Tests that were based on fact recall were the worst, I routinely failed those. Thankfully, I'm not a complete moron so I did quite well with anything I could reason out. I was forced to learn to think quickly.
Much like the invention of writing, the invention of PageRank seems to have accelerated the deterioration of memory. And that's not so bad, because memory is imperfect. It's far better to be able to know how to find something you should know and look it up with perfect recall. And then be able to piece that blob of information with a bunch of other blobs of information to get something new.
It frees up the brain from the menial task of digging things out of your messy memory and lets you spend more time thinking about how to combine things you don't even know with the things you already do.