The definition of knowledge has changed. In Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford’s “Six Provocations of Big Data,” the authors encourage us to ask how “Big Data can change the meaning of learning” and some of the people answering their question are impoverished Indian children.
In his Ted Talk, Dr. Sugata Mitra addresses his experimental approaches to elementary education all over the world, showing evidence, that in many cases children without any formal schooling or training are overcoming language barriers, learning complex biochemical curriculum, and even pumping out record high test scores. Dr. Mitra’s students aren’t attending expensive charter schools or studying under certified teachers, they’re simply being left alone in a room with high speed internet access. In one example he tells a story in which he walked into a classroom of grade school students in Italy. The children didn’t speak a word of English, nor did Dr. Mitra a word of Italian, however, after asking questions on the blackboard in English such as “Who was Pythagoras and what did he do?” the children were not only answering his questions in a matter of minutes but correcting his spelling.
This leads us back to Big Data and the shifting paragon of learning. If these Italian children, without any prior knowledge of a foreign language, were able to solve problems presented in English in only a few minutes, why should the educational institutions waste their time and money trying to teach kids something they can accomplish so easily? Access to Big Data such as Google or Wikipedia is changing the way we think of intelligence, knowledge and learning. It seems as though, memorization, one of the traditional methods of learning is almost rendered obsolete with new technologies. It’s important to ask ourselves whether it’s still necessary to spend years of ingraining facts, dates, and formulas into the minds of students, when it’s all just a few clicks away. I’m pretty sure that at some point while growing up every one of us cried out in despair “Why do I have to learn how to solve this stupid math problem without using a calculator?” and if your teachers were as naively sensible as mine they would of said something like this “Well your not always going to have a calculator with you are you son?” and then I’d say something like “But I’m never even gonna need to know this in real life!”
Anyway...the point being we do have calculators with us all of the time, our smartphones are translators as well as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Technology has advanced to a point that’s shaping all aspects of human life. It’s doing it the same way the alphabet did. Before writing, an oral culture taught their children poetry and rhymes to remember stories or retain information, when technology advanced the modes of learning did too. Has the computational turn made traditional models of learning obsolete? Should we spend our lives packing our brains with information that’s available at our fingertips?
As knowledge and information begin to become more conglomerated, the definition of knowledge becomes less and less defined by ‘what we know’ and more by ‘what we are capable of learning.’ I think Mitra’s comment, “If there’s stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head?” illustrates my point very well. I myself am frustrated when a large test comes around and a large portion of the questions boil down to essential historical trivia which could easily be obtained via a smart phone in a matter of seconds. So in response to your first question, YES; most current educational models rely on teaching concepts via textbooks and lectures when it is generally (in my opinion) more easily understood via wikipedia and youtube instructional videos. As for your second question, NO; while some (most) things are good to know off-hand for sake of common knowledge and trivia, most things need not be drilled into our memory. Why bother when; (a) things that require looking up most often are not extremely pertinent or obscure facts, and (b) if they are somehow pertinent, they are often too complex to be understood fully, hence the internet’s utility in distilling complex topics down to more easily understood concepts. Both cases however, support the idea that self-inspired learning is a more potent form of education than traditional teaching methods.
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