From David Weinberger via elearningpost - Just as we need more critical thinking and collaboration - we go the opposite way
I've let my Marxism studies lapse ever since the breakup of the USSR killed all the good job opportunities for career communists, but somewhere someone talks about the dangerous period when the old guard becomes even more old-guard-ish as the forces of reform become well nigh undeniable. And that's where we are in various fronts of the digital revolution.
You can see the same basic movement in three areas: corporate Net use, the media and education.
It's easiest to see in education, especially if you have kids in school. The connectedness of the Net has clearly changed the way our kids learn. The default for many of them is to do their homework with whoever else is on their buddy list. Collaborating on assignments just seems natural. What doesn't feel natural to them is memorizing stuff. Committing to memory the state capitals or the order of the presidents makes as much sense to them as memorizing your address book does to you.
This isn't simply a change in the list of Things to Memorize. It actually is part of a larger change away from the "container" view of knowledge that says that just as we judge a book by the richness of its content, so too we should judge people as knowers by how much knowledge they contain. In the age of connectedness, though, Web pages are judged by how many other good pages they point to, and children who can retain lots of content ought to be lauded for their memories but ought not be confused with ideal learners.
Yet, how does our educational system react? Our governments--national and state--impose more and stricter standardized exams that test our children's retention of standardized content. Weeks of class time are given over to this testing, and, worse, the entire educational system is bent to a very old idea of what constitutes intelligence. We are teaching our children an idea of learning and knowledge that not only grinds their curiosity into the floorboards as if it were a cockroach, but that also ill prepares them for the work world they'll be entering.
In short: As connectedness transforms knowledge, our education system is swinging--running--in the other direction.
