Michael Gorman, who has held about 50 positions as head of library services, worries in a recent series of blog posts about Web 2.0, that the internet in general and Wikipeda in particular are ruining our education system.
“Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials? Would any sane person pay fees to take university courses that are taught by people who may or may not be qualified to teach such a course?”
Danah Boyd, a Doctoral candidate at Berkeley, responds to the article, and summarizes my thoughts perfectly. I’d like to highlight one of her more brilliant thoughts.
Challenge Academic Authority
In high school, an ‘A’ paper meant that you had done the reading, accurately assessed what the author meant to say, and then summarized the conclusion. Possibly, if you went to a High School as academically rigorous as mine was, you learned that all papers require an argument of some sort. Nonetheless, every paper that I’ve written or read in high school is a narrative and not an argument.
In college, you learn that sources cannot necessarily be trusted, and then a more interesting paper might be a rebuttal of an argument, even if that argument is made by an accomplished person. Even in that 30-volume encyclopedia that is probably still sitting in my living room, we find incorrect information. When we do, we should realize that a human wrote the entry and another human edited the entry, and those humans make mistakes every day of their lives. Ms. Boyd puts it far more eloquently than I could.
“Knowledge is not static, but traditional publishing models assume that it can be captured and frozen for consumption. What does that teach children about knowledge? Captured knowledge makes sense when the only opportunity for dissemination is through distributing physical artifacts, but this is no longer the case. Now that we can get information to people faster and with greater barriers, why should we support the erection of barriers?
It took me 19 years to learn that the core of knowledge is entirely dynamic. No one knows everything, and in truth no one is really absolutely certain of anything at all. That is ok. In fact, that idea should be fundamental to everything we teach. We do not know that creationism is right or wrong, nor we do know if evolution explains why everything is how it is. But we kind think about it, study it, pursue it further.
Read her article. She is both well-written and, in the case, correct.
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