The first reading, “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge” by Miles, Adrian first talked about how though may years of conditioning, we developed an embedded knowledge when it comes to the practices of certain tasks such as finding a particular book at the library and quoting that book in an essay. However, this structurally rigid method is at risk of becoming obsolete thanks to the internet. He goes on to suggest that network literacy will become as natural to us as print literacy has been for so many years. That is an interesting thought as it is not unlikely that more and more will become fluent in network literacy as recently schools introduced laptops and tablets as part of their student requirement. This shift in the method of acquiring knowledge may as well help the next generation of students to become network literates. So many years wasted.
The reading by was interesting. Most of my understanding came from the diagrams I looked up but it think I get the gist of it. Single loop learning is basically the realisation of making a mistake and takes corrective action. Double loop learning is the correction of errors made through modifying an organisation’s policies, objectives and underlying norms. This will ensure that the problem is never repeated. But this can also be applied to a person’s learning as how a person fixes mistakes can have a significant impact on the final outcome as well as frequency of errors made.
The reading “The Age of the Essay” by Paul Graham was pretty much confirm what I had felt for years. I always felt that essay writing in high school was a pointless exercise in repetition as. We were told to think deeply about that subject to come up with original ideas, but that’s where the problem lies. Someone somewhere would produce an identical essay to me now matter how much I reflected on the topic because the question is so restricting. The element of surprise is absent completely from essay writing which to me anyway, makes for some tedious reading for the assessor but if that is what they want then a carbon copy of the same essay they read for years they get. In today’s media we seek story lines that challenge and surprise us. Take ‘Game of Thrones’ for example. Those who are familiar with the show are very aware that any character on any given day can die no matter how important and beloved they are. Those shock twists made the show the most popular show in years.