Go up to any adult with
a good life, no matter what his or her station, and ask if a
teacher made a difference, and you’ll always see a face light
up. The human element, a magical connection, is at the heart of
successful education, and you can’t bottle it.
My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven
educational regime.
Trusting teachers
too much also has its perils. For every good teacher who is too
creative to survive in the era of “no child left
behind,” there’s probably another tenacious, horrid
teacher who might be dethroned only because of unquestionably bad
outcomes on objective tests.
And part of the exploration is suggestions. Some people live in cultural enclaves that don't have readily available "culture."
Education — in the broadest sense — does
what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths
memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans
compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations,
creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else
on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time
swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is
education.
The future of education in the
digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of
the information we pass between generations can be represented in
computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when
we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect
of the human condition newly bland and absurd.
The crucial choice of which intergenerational
information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not
made by educators or curriculum developers but by young
engineers.
Some of the top digital designs of the
moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the
underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings.
That is false. We don’t know how information is represented
in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by
neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we
might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at
this moment, we don’t.
So as an educator I should not use my professional judgements on what technologies I should try to use to help my students understand the intergenerational material that is so important?
We are tempted by the demons of commercial and
professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do.
In addition, professional EdTech speakers.... AKA sell-outs.
We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble
papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and
composing on a blank piece of screen.
Is this REALLY any different, at a rudementary level then what happened in the past. It is just easier to copy and paste. The stupid prompts teachers use should garner the need for thought. It is just that teachers continue to use the same dumb prompts in a world where Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha can provide the easy answer.
What is wrong with this is
not that students are any lazier now or learning less.
What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a
human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount
of access to information will do them any good.
I don't see this as a technology issue, at all. This is a teacher issue. This is an educational issue. This is a systemic problem that if we took all high tech tools out of the schools this would STILL be a problem.
I am a technologist, and so my first impulse might be to try to
fix this problem with better technology.
People applying technologies can solve a problem though. The ultimate example is the Printing Press and what that did to promote education around the world.
So Learning is a leap into the unknown, but we cannot use technology, which produces unknowns, to leap into the unknown of Learning? Am I missing the point?
Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships
are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual
circumstances. More spaceships, please.
I honestly was not agreeing with Lanier, by and large, until this last statement. He really is a Papert-kinda-guy just by that last statement alone. Computers should transform pedagogy and the curriculum. Computers do not have to serve our 20th century curriculums and make people believe that if a computer is involved that this is 21st century learning.
a partner architect at Microsoft Research and the
innovator in residence at the Annenberg School at the University of
Southern California
“They are pack rats. They keep everything, and they actually have three copies of everything that goes in there. People have no idea they literally have a mirror of the online world and three copies on Google’s computers,” says Cleland.
“They have no respect for other people's valuables. They are a serial scofflaw of copyright policy, of patents, of trademarks, and of confidential information.”
"Is it possible to be quoted shrugging my shoulders?" asks Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich when Fox News requested the company's comment on Cleland's book. "Everyone knows that Mr. Cleland stopped being a neutral analyst years ago and is now paid by Microsoft and AT&T to criticize Google full-time."
is a consultant to some of Google's competitors, including Microsoft and AT&T.
Cleland refused to confirm it or reveal the names of any of his clients
"What happens is that Google is the company that most successfully takes advantage of the Internet," says Levy, who does caution that "there's a real concern because they do have a lot of information about us, and I think Google should be as transparent as possible. In most cases, I think they are pretty transparent about what they have on you and how it works."
On Tuesday, South Korean authorities reportedly raided that country's Google offices to investigate if the company "has been illegally collecting private data."
"I don't think there's ever been a U.S. corporation that has had so much control," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in Washington, D.C., who also teaches Internet privacy law at Georgetown. "It would be like a company producing automobiles, providing oil, and building the highways ... We're in a similar situation today with the Internet and Google."
"Any company with the power of Google has to be watched," says Levy. "But I don’t think Google is a company which is intending to take over the world in some sort of negative sense."
But Cleland's version of Google argues that it does.
"Google says overtly that they want to change the world," Cleland says, warning that "Google is leading us towards a collectivist society, a planned economy and one world government."
"The more you learn about Google, the more troubled you will become."