Education

Due to the strikes, we didn’t have round two of the symposium this week, but we did get a trio of interesting and engaging videos to watch. All three focused on education, innovation, new media, and how these three must be combined in order to better prepare us for what the future may held. Each video acknowledges that we don’t know what the future will be like, so each is a form of design fiction in a way.

The first, a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, was entitled ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ and definitively answered this as ‘yes’. Robinson identifies the “extraordinary capacity” for innovation that children possess, but how this is educated out of them through an education system that focuses primarily on industry, and maths and languages.

He explains that this model of education no longer accurately prepares people for what the future will hold, and (somewhat depressingly), claims that “degrees aren’t worth anything”.

But it’s almost impossible to argue with him. We’re all creative as children. We’re not afraid to make mistakes or make fools of ourselves, and we have no fear to try things that we may not be good at or know we will most likely fail. But as Robinson explains, we are quickly taught in education that mistakes are bad, they are ‘fails’.

He says that “we need to radically rethink our ideas of intelligence”, and defines creativity as the “process of having original ideas that have values”.

The second video was another TED talk, this time from Michael Wesch, titled ‘From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able’. This one focuses on the ability of new media in education, and the ideas of two-way conversations and active audiences. He explains the idea that students learn what they do, so what are they learning when they are seated as passive audience members to a dominant lecturer?

The final video was another one from Wesch, a quick four minute clip that details the extraordinary potential of this hypertext that we’ve discussed so much, made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s from way back in 2007.

I think all three of these videos relate directly to Networked Media. The first video seemed to describe exactly what Adrian is trying to combat in this course, and education in general. It plays on the idea of teaching knowledge and know-how, rather than information, and removing the hierarchical nature of teaching. We are encouraged to be creativity in this; we can write on literally anything on our blogs, and get marked on it for it’s quality, not necessarily its relevance.

This draws on info from the Wesch TED talk and how this new media can, and has to be, utilised in education. I particularly liked the quote near the end where he says that it’s ridiculously easy to create and publish things online now (through avenues such as YouTube, Blogging etc), but it’s also ridiculously hard to do it well and properly, in a way that actually engages an audience and promotes further interaction. This is the aim of our blogs; we are trying to create our own content in order to engage with the course and our peers, and this can be achieved through this technique of  ‘hypertext’ that Wesch describes in the last video.