Friday, January 06, 2012

Education 101



According to Alan November , education will rapidly become irrelevant in the connected age of the net if it is not properly integrated with tech. In listening to a talk he gave in my home town, I learned quite a bit on why education in this country is hurting, primarily due to politics, fear, the urge to control and profound ignorance of what tech is really all about, something rather disconcerting when considering just how pervasive technology is becoming. His definition of technology happening after one is born is apt because a child born in 2012 will have no idea what a PC is, a notion Arthur C. Clarke expanded upon in 3001, The Final Odyssey,  where people would have absolutely no idea how any tech worked due to 1; the sheer complexity of same and 2; the level of integration of it to man, something Ray Kurzweil talks about in great detail in  The Singularity is Near.


November also introduced a practical way to better search the web using Google Operators, website URL modifiers yours truly knew a little about but have never used in trolling the net for nuggets of gold such as the ones seen in this post. This will change without question :) While talking about this, November brought up the issues of trust, competency and empathy, core attributes kids and adults alike must have in abundance in order to intelligently deal with the ever increasing flood of information (bogus/otherwise) issuing forth from the web, the construct that is changing how we do business on planet earth.


Click on the picture to get November's tips on how to search, something kids and us adults should know when mining for info on the net.

"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?" - Arthur C. Clarke

1 comment:

Ana said...

Thanks for sharing.
I feel like reading the book now. It is scary and I think that that human beings as we know are in danger.