Kevin Kelly is an extremely smart guy whose writing is generally both
instructive and thought-provoking. In a nice recursive loop, this piece
is, at more than one level, an instructive and thought-provoking one on
how to be instructive and thought-provoking. Nice.
The line that had most resonance for me: Every technology is biased by
its embedded defaults: what does it assume?
Udhay
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19FOB-WWLN-Kelly-t.html
Achieving Techno-Literacy
By KEVIN KELLY
Published: September 16, 2010
This past year my wife and I home-schooled our eighth-grade son. One
school day, he and I decided we would make fire the old way — out of
nothing but plant materials and our own hustle. Our son watched a
seemingly endless series of instructional survival videos on YouTube as
part of his research. He chose the bow method based on our physics class
about friction. He then constructed a bow from a branch in the woods,
carved a stick for the spindle and added a fiber string. It was mighty
tough going. We spent hours refining the apparatus. He was surprised by
the enormous amount of bodily energy required to focus onto a very small
spot, and how a minuscule, nearly invisible bit of fuel, once sparked,
can quickly amplify into a flame and then a fire. Chemistry, physics,
history and gym all in one lesson. And, man, when you are 13 years old
and Prometheus, it’s exhilarating!
The Education Issue
One day our student would dissect and diagram the inside organs of
flowers; the next he’d write short stories or poems and then revise
them; and the next day we’d solve logic problems with algebra, then he’d
work on plans for a chicken coop and maybe we’d do a field trip to a car
factory. He also went through eighth-grade textbooks in history,
grammar, geometry and the like. This type of home-schooling is really
nothing special. Our son was merely one of more than a million students
home-schooled in the United States last year. Our reasons for
home-schooling were not uncommon, either. We wanted to create an ideal
learning environment. For the previous seven years, our son was enrolled
in challenging schools. His grades were excellent, but the amount of
homework was grinding him down. The intense high school he was planning
to attend promised even more work. He asked if he could be home-schooled
for his last year before high school, and by a quirk of life, this was a
year our schedules would permit our role as home-school teachers.
Now that the year is done, I am struck that the fancy technology
supposedly crucial to an up-to-the-minute education was not a major
factor in its success. Of course, technology in the broadest sense was
everywhere in our classroom. There was an inexpensive microscope on the
kitchen table and an old digital camera to record experiments. There was
a PC always on for research. Our son was also a big user of online
tutorials. Of particular note is Khan Academy, which offers nearly 1,600
short high-quality tutorials on algebra, chemistry, history, economics
and other subjects — all created by one guy, and all free. The Internet
was also essential for my wife and me as we researched the best
textbooks, the best projects, the best approaches.
But the computer was only one tool of many. Technology helped us learn,
but it was not the medium of learning. It was summoned when needed.
Technology is strange that way. Education, at least in the K-12 range,
is more about child rearing than knowledge acquisition. And since child
rearing is primarily about forming character, instilling values and
cultivating habits, it may be the last area to be directly augmented by
technology.
Even so, as technology floods the rest of our lives, one of the chief
habits a student needs to acquire is technological literacy — and we
made sure it was part of our curriculum. By technological literacy, I
mean the latest in a series of proficiencies children should accumulate
in school. Students begin with mastering the alphabet and numbers, then
transition into critical thinking, logic and absorption of the
scientific method. Technological literacy is something different:
proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to
an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm.
We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only
impossible, it’s not very useful. Rather, we need to be literate in the
complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.
Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the
popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge
could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology
means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t
be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the
kind of literacy that we tried to impart:
• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the
more powerfully it can be
