Saturday, April 04, 2009

brief listing of arguments that support radical educational change due to technological innovation

Which is the best way to argue for the necessity for radical educational change based on underlying technological innovation?
  1. The pencil analogy (Seymour Papert)
  2. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points (Alan Kay)
  3. Disruptive innovation and Creative Destruction (Clayton Christensen)
  4. Four funerals and a wedding (Damian Conway)
  5. How the printing press changed the world (historical analogy)
  6. The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan)
  7. In all of history there are only 5 media for storing knowledge: DNA, Brains, Hardware, Books, Software (Philip Armour)
  8. The Singularity (Raymond Kurzweil)
  9. A new literacy (James Gee, Andy diSessa)
Change is happening anyway but we also need philosophers of change who can articulate some meaning in these changes. The arguments I like best are those to do with new and powerful ways in which knowledge can be represented. Here is a sample from alan kay, who combines a few of the above threads:
Another guess I made long ago—that does not yet have a body of evidence to support it—is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization.
- http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_8.html#kay
I forgot to mention "21st Century skills"

No comments: