education building

A great video on joho blog today, will kick off a new category for education.building on, organization. While discussing his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous, the guru of the topic goes off a bit on his public school system. Fortunately, I had the time to watch the whole thing and pulled out a great quote. He describes the way he sees his own kids using the web to do homework, and the incongruence with the testing methods they are evaluated on.

“..and they are doing their homework together of course they are, but they’re getting graded individually, and they’re getting tested more and more and more. They separate the tables, they all face forward and they get their little books they write down what they know as individuals.

This is a radically different view of knowledge. What they are being told is, to ‘know is to be equal’. I mean this is an old rant right but it’s getting worse. They are being told that ‘to know’ is have content shoved into your head and be able to write down answers, whereas they’re doing the right thing online outside of the view of teachers, who think they are doing their homework by themselves, they’re not. They’re learning socially.” timecode 22:28 - 23:05

If you keep listening from that point, he responds a bit to the issue of testing and suggests ways that social software may be able to create new ways of teaching and learning.
This software will be a new focus here, particularly in the area of organization. For digital resources to be useful for academics, some new proficiencies in managing these assets are needed such as tagging, and the capability to navigate between the many formats information can be displayed in and converted to.