So I lucked out and got a chance to chat with NECC keynote speaker David Weinberger for about 45 minutes before he gave his address yesterday. Steve Burt from Clarity had set it up and he invited me to tag along. (Hopefully, he’ll be posting the audio soon.) It was, um, hard to put into words, actually.
A summary of his address is posted on his blog, (David Warlick blogged the speech here as well) and there is no doubt that he has a powerful vision of the changes that are taking place due to the web, and what it means for education. Basically, he said that we have to change the way we think about what knowledge is, from something that is absolute to something that is constantly evolving. The idea of socially created and negotiated knowledge is so different from our traditional concept of something that is necessarily right or wrong. That, he said, was the application of mathematical knowledge to all other forms, a mistake that early civilizations made. But today, when everything is connected, when knowledge is “drag and drop,” he said that “the idea that we need the best possible knowledge doesn’t stand” any longer. That in most disciplines, there can be many answers that are good enough, and that the “system of power finds that very difficult” to deal with.
The idea, then, that the best curriculum is set by one person or entity is “hugely problematic.” In fact, he said, knowledge has been a social experience forever, and to try to remove that aspect from it “drains the blood” from it. Humans can’t get to perfection as the Web has made abundantly clear. So we have to stop trying to fit everyone into the same scope of knowledge. Making the change to a time when schools stop evaluating how individual students remember knowledge and instead evaluate how groups of students contruct knowledge is going to take a generation, he said.
He covered most of this in his keynote, which I think left most people in the audience with a head full of questions. This is not easy stuff for educators in general, I think, the idea that we don’t own the knowledge. It’s what is making it so hard for many schools to adopt these tools in the first place.
But what made the interview much different from the address was his deep frustration and depression, really, over where he sees the Internet heading. Yesterday’s Grokster and Brand X cases were the latest in a series of events that he said may spell the end of the Internet as we know it. It’s much more complex than what I can put up here now, and I’ll try to get the MP3 available. At the very least, at some point I’ll transcribe it. But suffice to say it was an opinion that he wasn’t ready to share with the NECC audience, and one that I think he sincerely hopes he’s wrong about. And frankly, so do I.
More later, I hope.
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