Dick Sblog

I’ve just caught up with the vIII of Howie DiBlasi’s YouTube video, ‘Did you know?‘ (I’m a bit slow here, it was released last year). I don’t think it’s as good a presentation as the earlier one but it reinforces some key points. Here are a couple:

“this year 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10power18) of unique new information will be generated. That’s more than in the previous 5000 years”

“Technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4 year course, half of the first year’s content will be potentially out of date by their third year of study. By  2010 it’s estimated it will double every 72 hours”

[That's assuming we haven't screwed the planet irretrievably, by then, of course.]

This reinforces the point made by George Siemens in his collectivism blog, which is that there is simply too much information around for any one person to handle, knowledge is now in the network – how else can we begin to deal with it?

It also reinforces for me the value of the approaches to complexity offered by Dave Snowden and his colleagues at Cognitive Edge, including their methods for deriving statistically significant evidence through the analysis of narrative, by exploring patterns in metadata. Thus removing the interpretive bias introduced by expert analysis of raw data. This human approach to sense-making offers some hope to me in a world increasingly dominated by real-time, automated analysis carried out by machines programmed by nerds.

The Cognitive Edge approaches also lend weight to the value of social networking environments as tools for effective knowledge exchange. A factor that underpins the need for schools to embrace such technologies rather than blocking them out of their networks on the grounds that kids waste time on them or they utilise too much network resource.

‘Do you know?’ v3, includes some quotes by Alan November, the educational technologist which emphasise “the necessity of students learning with others around the world and stress that 3 skills are needed to teach our children:

1) To deal with massive amounts of information

2) To engage in global communications

3) To be self-directed and understand how to organise more and more of their own learning”

I agree with all of these and, as you’ll know, am an advocate of developing the skills network collaboration. However, there are some interesting questions to be asked around the issues of self-directed learning/knowledge is the network/learning to know where to find knowledge. These all depend on kids having sufficient basic skills to know what it is they need to know. A simple ‘key skills’/'basic skills’ approach isn’t enough – this may provide the basics of the 3 Rs and keyboard skills – but surely there is a need for some definition of basic skills in particular subjects too. After all, if you are a geologist, you can’t go looking up the fundamentals of the subject each time you are faced with a problem – so, where’s the boundary between knowing [information] and knowing where to go/who to ask [to find out more information]