Two brilliants talks on education
December 21st, 2007 by David Weinberger
Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.
Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:
What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.
Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.
(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)
I’m not sure if these are great examples of applications of your book to education…frankly, I was hoping for something new from each of these keynotes. Instead, it’s about the same thing that technology folk have been telling educators for awhile: use the new stuff and it’ll make your students jump higher, run faster.
And, to suggest that “having students teach other students” is another over-used phrase that sounds good in theory, but is really impractical. For example (and it’s an extreme one): imagine one of the tech greats (e.g Bill Gates, Steve Woz or Steve Jobs) in high school teaching other students…it wouldn’t happen. Why? Because sometimes really smart people just need to work by themselves (it’s called “rebellion”).
Overall, I’m hoping for a better mash-up with the ideas of _Everything is Misc_ and education (and we didn’t even define which level…sorry about that). Thanks for the post…got me thinking on Xmas evening whiles _It’s A Wonderful Life_ was on.
Peace,
Chris
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