One kernel I took away from something Adrian mentioned was that a significant problem in an age of distributed expertise, is that if you can’t ask good questions, you can’t find good answers.
I have always been an inquisitive person – something which my parents will vouch for as they spent many, many, many years tirelessly answering my questions that sprung up continuously throughout my days as a young’un.
After thinking about it, I started to realise that questions are not as straightforward as they may seem.
Image via flickr
Good questions lie somewhere in between the search to know what and the search to know how. Adrian said that this is also the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. He suggested that traditional models of learning now need to be less about knowing what and more about knowing how. This is a tricky thing to do though, when most of our experience of institutional education concentrates solely on the knowing what part – with essays and tests focusing on the content, and not the act of forming the knowledge about the content.
Graham tells us in his reading on the essay:
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association “formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course.”…It’s no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we’re now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.”
So what do we do about it?
In week 5, Adrian had some suggestions including teaching kids to learn by doing. I agree wholeheartedly, as a strong kinaesthetic learner myself.
We need to relearn how to ask good questions.
When we ask the good questions, we’ll get the good answers.