Speaking of time, I had a meeting yesterday to discuss a bid for some loot from the Association of Learning Providers to produce some e-Content. Due to lack of time, we decided not to bid (5 days to put it together and we are all up to our eyes). But the funding call set me off on a rant.

On July 25th 2008 the official google blog carried an item about passing a milestone – they had indexed a trillion pages on the web. That’s 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. Now, by anyone’s standards, that’s an awful lot of content and that was over a year ago.And that discounts print material, of course.

So, why on earth do we need more content when we’re awash with the stuff? Most of it’s drivel, some of it’s dangerous (plain wrong or malicious) and all of it is out there to be found, copied and pasted.

I’d suggest that we don’t want more e-Content. What we want is for our young people, colleagues and peers to know how to critically evaluate the stuff that’s out there, make sense of it and work with others to use it.

More e-Content, pah! And why pay for it – after all I’m adding more of it for free – maybe someone can make sense or use this bit. Or add a bit more content in response.

Among her many comments she says, “…most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost”.

“Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary,” Greenfield said. “Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades.”

Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

I couldn’t agree more.

You can read a summary of her research here

“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 For students starting a 4 year course, half of the first year’s content will be potentially out of date by their third year of study.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]