There might have been a time when an educated person could expect to know almost all that was worth knowing (a polymath such as Aristotle, for example), but in modern times, with increasing specialization and the exponential growth of superficial knowledge, this is no longer remotely feasible. There's simply too much information for a single brain, or a thousand brains, to hold. And it's growing daily. Sometimes I sit in my courtyard with a cup of tea and think about all those writers, writing, all those bloggers, blogging. I think about all those words piling up, words written but largely (and justifiably) unread, and it makes my head hurt.
Chuang Tsu, in the 4th Century B.C., wrote: Life has a limit, but knowledge is without limit. For the limited to pursue the unlimited is futile.
Maybe his head hurt, too.
Connectivism, as I understand it, is about process, not content. Today, more than ever, we need to know how to find and store information (I was originally going to write: we need to know how to find and store knowledge, but of course as information grows, knowledge diminishes. And as for wisdom... well, as the Monty Python crew might have said, wisdom is right out.).
Forget committing information to memory. The people who will survive best in the next hundred years, I suspect, will be those who can swim daily in an ocean of information without swallowing a sip.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
"The people who will survive best in the next hundred years, I suspect, will be those who can swim daily in an ocean of information without swallowing a sip."
Gordon, I agree completely. When I teach people how to do my job, they often ask how I know about so many different computer-related things. And I tell them: I don't know a lot about any one subject, but given a project and a deadline I can become an expert in many things, if only for a week.
When thinking about the consequences of being a 21st century generalist, instead of a specialist, I worry about people who only want to do a single trade in their entire lives. By all accounts, they will be the best at their craft, but they will be hard to find.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: I become a specialist for a week by using google, which harnesses the collective frustration of a thousand minds and always yields a clue, if not an answer, to the problem at hand.
Post a Comment