NECC: The New Shape of Knowledge - David Weinberger Keynote
This keynote ‘lecture’ focused on a new paradigm of knowledge. What was knowledge? What is knowledge? And what do these changes mean for us in education?
Our old paradigm of knowledge:
*We assume that there is one knowledge. You’re right, or you’re wrong.
*Knowledge is neatly organized in places such as libraries.
*We need experts to know the knowledge.
*Those experts will have power, acting as the gatekeepers. The user is passive - a non-contributor.
The new paradigm of knowledge:
*Knowledge is not perfect. There is never just one ‘right’ answer.
*Knowledge is messy. It is not stored in one place like the encyclopedia Brittanica, but instead is limitless, linkable, and seemingly all over the place, exemplified in Wikipedia, with over 607,000 articles from everyday people, and linked in a tangle of links.
*Nobody ‘knows’ the knowledge. Through conversation we seek out and sift through knowledge, making our own understandings. Everyone becomes an expert to some degree because they can offer some nugget that can help us shape our thoughts. Thinking becomes external.
*The role of the gatekeeper has diminished to practicially nothing. No longer do just a few have the knowledge, now everyone is a contributor.
It seems to me that we can overlay this thinking onto our own present educational system and see why we need to move in the direction of learners taking more control of developing their own understandings. It is no longer about one gatekeeper, the teacher, shifting the one knowledge from one container to another. Kids need to be participating in conversations, using tools like blogs, wikis, and chat to connect to the mess of knowledge out there and derive their own meaning. What we as the teacher need to do is help our students organize and navigate through that information. As ‘experts’ in our various content areas, ask those tough questions. Not the right/wrong questions, but the questions that challenge their thinking and allow our students to play with that knowledge they have discovered.
Weinberger is quite a liberal. You can see that by reading his blog. And he didn’t resist sharing his didain for the Bush administration and basically the conservatives as the gatekeeper of the ‘one’ correct knowledge. He made a statement about their obsession with accountability and testing which I thought was pretty priceless: “Accountability is accountibalism, eating our young alive!” We can no longer keep testing our students in the ‘old’ model of knowledge while the new model surrounds them, and will no doubt continue to change. What a disservice to them.
Are there any absolute rights or wrongs? Are these ideas always open for conversation and challenge? And is it that conversation that confirms those ideas, at least for the moment, as either right or wrong?
Next entry: NECC: The Drive for 2005
Previous entry: NECC: Teaching Thinking with Technology