Fire and Knowledge

Steve Hargadon argues that Web 2.0 is the future of education. I disagree. Of course it will influence and change education to some extent, but will it be the future of education? Unlikely.

Steve says Web 2.0 will help move education “from formal schooling to lifelong learning.” People have been devoted to lifelong learning long before the Internet. The Internet does make some information easier to retrieve, but many people do not take advantage of this, just as many people didn’t take advantage of books on their shelves. I’m not convinced the Internet is going to change this too much. Hopefully I’m wrong here, though, because it would be great if more people were interested in lifelong learning.

I took a quick look at Classroom 2.0, which Steve recommended for learning about education and Web 2.0. On the homepage was a teacher asking this question:

I’m looking for a new project for my (online) students in an Ancient Civilizations class to deomostrate their knowledge of the material we’ve been learning. They’ve written numerous blogs, they’ve created PowerPoints, and I’ve offered podcasting or videos( but haven’t had too many students intersested in in these). I was thinking of a comic strip project to where the students show how the geography of the area has played a very important role in determining how the society developed and what technologies evolved. I’m having trouble finding a comic strip generator that students can use their own clip art or has appropriate pictures for this assignment. Anyone have a suggestion? or other ideas for web 2.0 projects for this class.

Now it would be hard for me to find a better demonstration for my skepticism. This is a teacher for “gifted” students. She misspells demonstrate and interested. She’s having her students write “numerous blogs,” which I assume she means blog posts, which I assume must be something like very short, undemanding essays. And a comic strip generator? Good God. Has it really come to this?

This is, in essence, a teacher asking how to do the basics of teaching. How can your students demonstrate their knowledge of a subject? You have them write papers and debate with other students. You ask them questions. Yes, there are creative ways to have them learn. But if you want them to create a comic strip, you can have them draw it on paper. But, alas, that doesn’t have very much to do with Web 2.0 and flashy websites and cool technology.

Can Web 2.0 help education? Possibly. But it can also hinder it, as we see with the teacher’s question above. I suppose teachers really exist who are having their students mess around with comic strip generators and powerpoint and podcasts instead of writing and reading and debating. And I thought I got a lousy education.

So I don’t think the future of education is Web 2.0. I don’t think nifty websites can replace the classroom, reading classics, writing essays, memorizing, debating ideas, doing painstaking research, or running experiments.

The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell, 408 pages.

Summary: After intercepting alien radio waves, Jesuit scientists are sent to the planet Rakhat on an anthropological mission of contact. They travel on an outfitted asteroid and arrive many years later. While learning about the sentient species and their cultures, things go terribly wrong. Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the mission, and he doesn’t want to explain why.

It’s an interesting, easy, disturbing read. The friendships that are formed by the main characters make the reader long for similar companionship in life. The priests are shown as real people with real struggles (though perhaps a little too much so).

The most weighty questions addressed are the existence, goodness, and plan of an omnipotent and compassionate God. Is everything that happens the plan of God? Fr. Sandoz, after much doubt and wrestling, comes to believes this. And as he comes into the culmination of God’s plan, he is spiritually broken when it turns out to be his worst possible nightmare.

Anne, the doctor, also struggles with the age-old question of theodicy. For example, after a teammate dies, she says:

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for all the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when [death] happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blaming the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer … novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.” (198)

I’d cautiously recommend this book. The vulgarity can get annoying and feel forced, but the book is challenging and perspective changing. It made me wrestle through theodicy along with the characters. If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering? “Perhaps we can’t understand the answers,” says Fr. Marc Robichaus in his eulogy for Alan Pace,

“because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.” (201)

And yet, we press on.

The Intellectual Devotional seems like a great way to learn something new each day from a different discipline. Here’s the blurb:

Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection—collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same—a collection of 365 lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each nugget of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: History, Literature, Philosophy, Mathematics & Science, Religion, Visual Arts, and Music.

[Huck’s voice] is not Mark Twain’s voice. It is the voice, we can only say, of a great genius named Huckleberry Finn, who inhabited a somewhat lesser genius named Mark Twain, who inhabited a frustrated businessman named Samuel Clemens.

–Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 73.

Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

“It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee….

Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.

“It’d be nice to read it again at some point,” Meyer continued, as if that were a perfectly natural thing to say.

–The Onion, “Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book,” January 19, 2008.

When asked about Amazon’s Kindle, Steve Jobs replied:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore…. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

He’s wrong according to his own statistic. If 40% of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year, 60% read one or more books. Everyone I know reads a little, and many read multiple books a month. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has sold 117 million copies and it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s a lot of books for people who don’t read. And if “the whole conception is flawed,” why is the Kindle out of stock? It seems reality has the audacity to disagree with Steve Jobs.

So it wouldn’t surprise me if Steve changes his tune in a few years and releases an elegant e-reader. I hope somebody does, because it doesn’t exist yet.

Christianaudio.com has some Wendell Berry fiction available for download (not cheap, unfortunately).

Kindle is Amazon’s attempt to make an e-reader that someone would want to crawl in bed with. It’s a nice try, but it’s incredibly ugly and clunky looking. They should have worked with the Apple designers, because that thing looks straight out of 1985.

When there is a beautiful leather-bound e-book reader that is intuitive, DRM-free, doesn’t have dozens of buttons, lets me underline words, write in the margins, and doesn’t look like a technological dinosaur, let me know.

Update: I like John Gruber’s conclusion:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.