Education 2.0
December 5, 2008 – 10:07 am | by Daryl TayI picked up an article from Read Write Web in my feeds talking about how education is evolving, and basically that the availability of data on the internet suggests that we may not even need to memorise things for education like we used to.
To some, this might suggest that Gen Y might be getting lazy, but to me, it’s freeing up the brain to really work on other issues that can’t be as easily solved with a Google search.
One thing I never understood in my freshman year, was why I had to memorise how to create a balance sheet, when I wasn’t even an accounting student. Even if I was an accounting student, I refuse to believe that graduates leave school, get a job at an accounting firm, and sit down to create balance sheets without referring to anything because they memorised it in freshman year.
What I find more challenging, and relevant, is asking my how things apply. Or I might have all this data, but what does it mean? How do students analyse a situation from different angles and begin to think critically about issues.
Perhaps there will be some professions where memory work is still the key, but for the rest of us, probably not so.
More importantly, in response to this issue: are our educators ready to face the new wave of students who have mountains of information at their fingertips?
[Mark also picked up on the same issue and you can read his take on it here]
Tags: accounting, availability of data, balance sheet, digital natives, education, Gen Y, google search, millennials, read write web
7 Responses to “Education 2.0”
By the fiancee on Dec 5, 2008 | Reply
well, as an IS student i couldn’t understand why i needed accounting. then on my job interview for an IT position, my boss asked if i knew any accounting because we needed some basic knowledge of how a ledger works.
you don’t know what you need, or don’t need. till maybe sometime later..
By Daryl Tay on Dec 5, 2008 | Reply
true but the point is you could’ve known the structure and had a textbook (or a wiki page) instead of memorising the accounting, correct? the emphasis is on learning correctly rather than memorising and rote learning..
By Derrick Kwa on Dec 5, 2008 | Reply
Definitely, I’ve been saying this for a long time now – the formal education system is over-rated and outdated. And it has to be changed. There’s a lot that has to be done about the education system.
It’s great to see people questioning it.
As for whether educators are ready to face it – well, I think that will come in time. And it goes beyond just educators – are the parents ready to accept it? It goes deep into society’s culture, and that’s something thats’ going to be hard to change. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though, right?
By tyn on Dec 9, 2008 | Reply
Hey Daryl – it’s Tyn from Comm 333. Great blog, so many good points, I’m learning lots!
As for this subject, I’ve been thinking it for quite some time, inspired by a very similar first-year experience.
We have all the information we need at our fingertips. We have applications and scripts and logarithms that do things (like balance sheets) for us. (We just have to check them over, so we do need to understand them in an applied sense.) And whether we like to admit it or not, we all have a reasonable expectation that we will continue to have access to them for the rest of our careers. Granted that, we need to stop wasting our time with memorization and start learning how to take information (whether its numbers, opinions, or widgets), “convert it,” and make good decisions with it. This world isn’t going backward (well we’ll see what the economy does; probably not much.)
When the cavemen figured out fire did they sit around and practice lighting them (okay, maybe for a bit), or did they go out and see what they could use it for?
By cneil on Dec 9, 2008 | Reply
I only partly agree with this perspective. Students should still expect to memorize things in school. Though the information is available on the internet, you can’t teach many subjects such as Geography, Computer Programming, or English grammar without some degree of memorization.
Sure there are always maps available, but at the pre-tertiary level kids still need to memorize where countries are located in order for their minds to make meaningful connections. A professional programmer just wouldn’t be efficient if he or she had to constantly flip through a book every second he or she sat down to work. Perhaps the process of learning Pascal in college gives programmers the appropriate mental tools to work with future programming languages. In the same manner, you’ll never master mechanics if you haven’t memorized the coordinating and most of the subordinating conjunctions.
The challenge that the abundant availability of information gives to teachers and students is in assessment. It is no longer useful to grade solely over rote memorization. (I’m not sure it ever was.)
The challenge comes in creating assignments that can be objectively assessed that require students to use the material that they are supposed to learn.
If you made an A in the class just because you could create an accounting sheet, then that was a useless exercise. If you got an A in a class because you could balance a hypothetical account with the accounting sheet, then that is an acceptable educational practice.
By Daryl Tay on Dec 10, 2008 | Reply
@Tyn: Hey thanks for dropping by! Yes I think once a basic understanding of the subject is grasped, moving forward to really think about the applications and/or implications is the most important in education.
@Cneil: I agree largely that some subjects still lend themselves to memorisation and familiarity. I don’t particularly agree than grammar is one of them though. I only started really learning about the proper “terms” of tenses and verbs, adverbs, nouns etc late on in school, but I knew how to use them intuitively from reading, writing and hours of grilling from my mom. Does that mean I didn’t “learn” how to use grammar? Or perhaps I learned it better because it wasn’t drilled into me in a formalised manner?
Certainly I’m not in favour of students going for say, a debate without memorising facts to back them up, and it would be useless for a History student to finish school without memorising dates. But how many of us need to memorise the index/match function on Excel, when all we need to do is understand which parameters are important for the function, bookmark a help page to jog our memory, and refer to it when we need to?