In his essay, “Why School?” Will Richardson examines’ the value of school with the abundance of learning opportunities and choices provided to today’s globalized student. The way students access the curriculum and knowledge, and process it, is changing. He argues that instead of trying to find ways to improve upon traditional methods, there is a need to look at “doing school” differently and “re-envisioning” teaching as well as assessments (Richardson 2012). Although this approach poses much in the way of challenges and even runs the risk of devaluing human knowledge or blurring the distinction between human knowledge and memories with computer memory, I agree with his position. To borrow a phrase from writer Clive Thompson (2007), maybe we should “outboard” memory in order to better prepare our students for today’s challenges. Why rely on memory and learned knowledge when Google is within a hand’s reach? The problem here is that learners need to have some schema or prior knowledge to know what to do with the abundance of resources and data.
According to Richardson, there are six unlearning/relearning ideas for educators to support. These include: Share everything, discover rather than delivering the curriculum, talking to strangers, mastering learning, working for real audiences, and transferring the power (Richardson 2012). Of these, educators should commit to teaching students how to be learners and how to apply the information being “out-boarded” from Google memory. Perhaps, nothing motivates this better than real work for real audiences, especially with how “public and shared” information has become. In terms of challenges this world of abundance affords, not all online interactions are safe and some are dangerous, misleading, or lack knowledge. Finding the right “strangers” to connect and collaborate with online, avoiding the wrong ones, and knowing how to decipher the abundance of information is something that needs to be “learned”.
References:
Thompson, C. (2007, September 25). From Your Outboard Brain Knows All. Retrieved September 9, 2014, from http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson.
Richardson, W. (2012). From Why School? Retrieved September 6, 2014.
According to Richardson, there are six unlearning/relearning ideas for educators to support. These include: Share everything, discover rather than delivering the curriculum, talking to strangers, mastering learning, working for real audiences, and transferring the power (Richardson 2012). Of these, educators should commit to teaching students how to be learners and how to apply the information being “out-boarded” from Google memory. Perhaps, nothing motivates this better than real work for real audiences, especially with how “public and shared” information has become. In terms of challenges this world of abundance affords, not all online interactions are safe and some are dangerous, misleading, or lack knowledge. Finding the right “strangers” to connect and collaborate with online, avoiding the wrong ones, and knowing how to decipher the abundance of information is something that needs to be “learned”.
References:
Thompson, C. (2007, September 25). From Your Outboard Brain Knows All. Retrieved September 9, 2014, from http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson.
Richardson, W. (2012). From Why School? Retrieved September 6, 2014.
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