The Edge has just published the responses to its annual question - which is the title of this post. I have just managed to read through the first dozen essays (you can find them here), and found two that I think are particularly interesting for we teachnologists, one by Jonas Mekas and one by Kevin Kelly. As a teaser, here's an excerpt from Kelly's essay:
"(The internet) is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it. Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think."
Enjoy! JR
Are You Sacrificing Your Joy and Playfulness?
3 hours ago
I've now made it through another 10 essays or so, on page 2. Marissa Mayer's and Brian Eno's are two more worth noting, because of what they say about the nature of learning, and of knowledge. An excerpt from Eno's essay:
ReplyDelete"I notice that the idea of 'expert' has changed. An expert used to be 'somebody with access to special information'. Now, since so much information is equally available to everyone, the idea of 'expert' becomes 'somebody with a better way of interpreting'. Judgement has replaced access."
Yet another gem, which speaks directly to the issue of distraction with which we have been wrestling. Howard Rheingold (http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_2.html) talks about new literacy skills (are these things we should be teaching?), saying:
ReplyDelete"Those people who do not gain fundamental literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness are in danger of all the pitfalls critics point out — shallowness, credulity, distraction, alienation, addiction. I worry about the billions of people who are gaining access to the Net without the slightest clue about how to find knowledge and verify it for accuracy, how to advocate and participate rather than passively consume, how to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu, how and why to use those privacy protections that remain available in an increasingly intrusive environment."