Re: Wolfram Alpha
Günther Greindl wrote: Kim, great post, thanks! I second that! cheers, mirek Kim Jones wrote: Let's keep it simple. Schools and universities (globally identifiable as 'the education industry') have traditionally fulfilled the role of fountains of knowledge. .. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Wolfram Alpha
Kim, great post, thanks! You may enjoy this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html As to your laughing friend, I also know some such people, they have in truth not understood what science is about: asking questions, being critical (especially self-critical!); science is a method, an algorithm for arriving at knowledge, never the current canon of knowledge (which will be an old hat in a decade). People which laugh at everything that does not fit into their world-view are not scientific, just dogmatic. They believe in textbook knowledge from college times, which may be the snapshot of scientific modelling at a particular time, but, it's still not the _idea_ of science. Cheers, Günther Kim Jones wrote: Let's keep it simple. Schools and universities (globally identifiable as 'the education industry') have traditionally fulfilled the role of fountains of knowledge. This is fine, up to the point where we realise that we no longer need to attend these places if all we want is knowledge (accumulated expertise, understanding of a field, the specific technical low-down necessary to gain a foothold in a certain area.) Increasingly the Internet fulfils this function in a direct and powerful way. It also presents a lot of pratfalls as well - as Brent was very hasty in pointing out, but then I would call 'using the Internet responsibly' a skill that probably cannot be learnt easily from the Internet. This is an example of what I mean when I say education should now teach skills rather than knowledge. I am not talking either about the vocational skills that many employers hotly desire from the education sector although nobody could deny that those skills should be taught as well. Above all what needs to be taught is the skill of thinking. Not compartmentalised, specialised, academic thinking, but OPERACY - how to get a result in a real and changing world. Bruno has referred (in his 'amoebas dissertation) to the value of posing questions in a childlike manner. Children have not yet submitted to the brainwashing known as academic specialisation. He has uttered a profound and above all, a useful truth in mentioning this, IMO. Have you ever tried to stand upright on a carpet that somebody is pulling along the floor from one end? Difficult. Ever learnt to ride a surfboard? Similar skill. The world around you is changing fast and you must strive to maintain some kind of relation to it that is useful. My point is that education fails badly to teach this kind of skill. Every banker, every businessman, every politician, every company boss, every worker, everybody in fact is flying by the seat of his pants right now but education remains smugly complacent about it's self-serving tradition. Kids go to school and learn to memorise a bunch of stuff, they sit for exams and in so doing mandate the school to set those exams and teach the stuff in the first place. The more you think about it the more circular it seems. It's not for nothing that we talk often about the 'education bubble'. By this we mean that in a certain sense, education is not the real world. The teacher puts something in front of the student. The student reacts to this using the vocabulary of knowledge taught up to that point. This means the teacher is always ahead of the student which is what lends the teacher their air of authority. In the 'real world' it isn't as simple as that. You have to invent initiatives and use risk-taking strategies to get ahead, increasingly we must do this on a daily basis now to even survive. There is no school subject, for example, that teaches economic survival following job redundancy, yet millions of people are facing precisely this dilemma right now. In a certain sense their education has taught them little of real value. Don't forget about the archway effect. This states that if a number of brilliant people are sent under an archway, then it is highly likely that from that archway will stream a number of brilliant people. You have to be brilliant to get in to Harvard. They don't take in the class 'dunce' in these institutions. The institution thus benefits more from the quality of the students than the students benefit from the quality of the institution. Because of the unavoidable tradition of historical continuity in education - which grew up, after all in the church, the least likely institution to welcome any form of new knowledge or innovation - education is marked by all the drawbacks associated with an overweening respect for 'historical continuity'. It is difficult to break with the patterns of the past. Teaching, education - call it whatever you want, was for a long time in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities who founded the vast majority of our elite educational institutions (not ULB - a good point in its favour) and so
Re: Wolfram Alpha
Kim,
this seems to be a so far undiscussed domain and I have some concerns.
First off: the English usage mixes up 'education' with 'teaching'. Schools
have a task to transform unformatted teen-beasts into constructive beings,
what I call 'education'. That may be a very controversial thing, because the
aim of such transformation may be questionable (by many) - e.g. in the
Ottoman Empire the education of the Janissaries produced uniform and
brainwashed efficient killers. But this is subject to intelligent
evaluation.
Secondly: relying on 'online' provided knowledge eliminates the shame of the
student (Sorry, teach, I did not do my homework) - which is a powerful
educational momentum in raising responsible people. More importantly the
'piped' ('wired', or rather: 'wirelessed') science is uncontrolled and
depends on the choosing skill of the 'pupil' - if he so decides.
There are benedits (besides weaknesses, of course) in having a 'live and
knowledgeable' teacher who verbally and demostratingly interacts with his
pupils. Benefit: experience and accumulated knowledge plus the chance to
simultaneously educate (see above). Weakness: the choice WHAT is to be
included in such 'knowledge' to be taught.
I fully agree with 'creative thinking' to be included. What happened to
those who have no resonance to the selected versions of it? (They may be
very talented in different domains). E.g. in a music school 'composing' may
be considered the 'creative', what only a fraction of talented musicians can
muster (master?). How many Eifels. Fultons, Bunsens were among the many
million engineers who were instrumental in developing our advanced
technology? Creativity should be encouraged, not made a fundmental in
'education'. Disciplined well-founded professional knowoledge should
prevail.
This maybe a bit conservative position of mine has a side-line to feed it:
electronic libraries cannot replace a hard-copy self-stored one and this is
obvious to all who worked with old fashioned libraries successfully. The
main benefit: if you can stand before the shelf of the particular topic and
browse SOME similar-topic BOOKS you get ideas what you can check
instantaneously in a neighboring book - or in the same book sticking your
finger to the page where you were. No Googling from 3,467,390 (or more)
entries. Electronics is good for checking and responding once the topic is
fixed. Even in responding you get only to a select audience, not as with an
experienced teacher, who 'knows' the different schools under divers keys.
All that is hard to explain to the generation which never did efficient
research using old fashioned hard-copy libraries' lit-search. Whoever did
not experienced better will not accept that it can exist.
I wonder if Bruno would like to give a list of URLs to youngsters and tell
them: here is math/physics, learn it! - I will teach only UDA and further.
I appreciate the efforts vested into AI - as preparatory for the time when
we really (will) know the I (intelligence and its workings) to make an
artificial approach for its mechanisation. Maybe a better contraption is
also needed for such than our present binary embryonic - level toy.
John M
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 8:59 PM, Kim Jones kimjo...@ozemail.com.au wrote:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10240m=41581
Universities and schools should now re-invent themselves. We no longer need
any institution to dole out knowledge because all (non-fuzzy factual)
knowledge can be downloaded from the Net.
Education can now only have a future by teaching skills - meaning: what you
DO with that knowledge, also how to invent the future without having to
continually compare every new idea to existing knowledge - the current
paradigm and way too slow. Time is running out fast.
Hint: teach creative thinking
Huh? What's that? Don't we already do that? etc.
cheers,
Kim Jones
There are no *surprising facts about reality*, only *models* of it that
are *surprised by* facts
Email:
kmjco...@mac.com
kimjo...@ozemail.com.au
Web:
http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music
Phone:
(612) 9389 4239 or 0431 723 001
--~--~-~--~~~---~--~~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Everything List group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Wolfram Alpha
Let's keep it simple. Schools and universities (globally identifiable as 'the education industry') have traditionally fulfilled the role of fountains of knowledge. This is fine, up to the point where we realise that we no longer need to attend these places if all we want is knowledge (accumulated expertise, understanding of a field, the specific technical low-down necessary to gain a foothold in a certain area.) Increasingly the Internet fulfils this function in a direct and powerful way. It also presents a lot of pratfalls as well - as Brent was very hasty in pointing out, but then I would call 'using the Internet responsibly' a skill that probably cannot be learnt easily from the Internet. This is an example of what I mean when I say education should now teach skills rather than knowledge. I am not talking either about the vocational skills that many employers hotly desire from the education sector although nobody could deny that those skills should be taught as well. Above all what needs to be taught is the skill of thinking. Not compartmentalised, specialised, academic thinking, but OPERACY - how to get a result in a real and changing world. Bruno has referred (in his 'amoebas dissertation) to the value of posing questions in a childlike manner. Children have not yet submitted to the brainwashing known as academic specialisation. He has uttered a profound and above all, a useful truth in mentioning this, IMO. Have you ever tried to stand upright on a carpet that somebody is pulling along the floor from one end? Difficult. Ever learnt to ride a surfboard? Similar skill. The world around you is changing fast and you must strive to maintain some kind of relation to it that is useful. My point is that education fails badly to teach this kind of skill. Every banker, every businessman, every politician, every company boss, every worker, everybody in fact is flying by the seat of his pants right now but education remains smugly complacent about it's self- serving tradition. Kids go to school and learn to memorise a bunch of stuff, they sit for exams and in so doing mandate the school to set those exams and teach the stuff in the first place. The more you think about it the more circular it seems. It's not for nothing that we talk often about the 'education bubble'. By this we mean that in a certain sense, education is not the real world. The teacher puts something in front of the student. The student reacts to this using the vocabulary of knowledge taught up to that point. This means the teacher is always ahead of the student which is what lends the teacher their air of authority. In the 'real world' it isn't as simple as that. You have to invent initiatives and use risk-taking strategies to get ahead, increasingly we must do this on a daily basis now to even survive. There is no school subject, for example, that teaches economic survival following job redundancy, yet millions of people are facing precisely this dilemma right now. In a certain sense their education has taught them little of real value. Don't forget about the archway effect. This states that if a number of brilliant people are sent under an archway, then it is highly likely that from that archway will stream a number of brilliant people. You have to be brilliant to get in to Harvard. They don't take in the class 'dunce' in these institutions. The institution thus benefits more from the quality of the students than the students benefit from the quality of the institution. Because of the unavoidable tradition of historical continuity in education - which grew up, after all in the church, the least likely institution to welcome any form of new knowledge or innovation - education is marked by all the drawbacks associated with an overweening respect for 'historical continuity'. It is difficult to break with the patterns of the past. Teaching, education - call it whatever you want, was for a long time in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities who founded the vast majority of our elite educational institutions (not ULB - a good point in its favour) and so established the traditions of education. I often harp on about the need to teach 'creative thinking' in my posts. Note that by this I do NOT mean artistic thinking but generative, innovative and risk-taking thinking generally. Critical thinking was and still is of paramount importance in the ecclesiastical world since it has proven the most effective weapon against heresy and deviation and since that world consists of concept edifices that must have internal consistency and validity if they are not to be overrun by outside ideas that would cause them to appear relativistic and thus to risk collapse. But all that is very far from the practical, messy world in which people have to think (often with very inadequate data) in order to solve problems and bring
Re: Wolfram Alpha
Kim Jones wrote: http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10240m=41581 http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10240m=41581 Universities and schools should now re-invent themselves. We no longer need any institution to dole out knowledge because all (non-fuzzy factual) knowledge can be downloaded from the Net. Along with an enormous amount of fuzzy, non-factual ignorance. Education can now only have a future by teaching skills Like B.S. detection. Brent Meeker The internet is a pornography delivery medium occasionally used for other purposes. --- George Carlin - meaning: what you DO with that knowledge, also how to invent the future without having to continually compare every new idea to existing knowledge - the current paradigm and way too slow. Time is running out fast. Hint: teach creative thinking Huh? What's that? Don't we already do that? etc. cheers, Kim Jones There are no /surprising facts about reality/, only /models/ of it that are /surprised by/ facts Email: kmjco...@mac.com mailto:kmjco...@mac.com kimjo...@ozemail.com.au mailto:kimjo...@ozemail.com.au Web: http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music Phone: (612) 9389 4239 or 0431 723 001 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Wolfram Alpha
Certainly wouldn't disagree with you, Brent but I'm just wondering whether it's ever worth bringing out your yellow Positive Thinking hat before you automatically reach for your black Negative/Cautionary thinking hat? Please go right ahead and invent a bullshit detector ( a real one - not a bullshit one as they already exist) and I'll be one of the first to congratulate you. Perhaps Steve Wolfram (and the Internet) deserve a bit more of your consideration than just this? best regards, Kim On 10/03/2009, at 12:24 PM, Brent Meeker wrote: Kim Jones wrote: http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html? newsID=10240m=41581 http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=10240m=41581 Universities and schools should now re-invent themselves. We no longer need any institution to dole out knowledge because all (non-fuzzy factual) knowledge can be downloaded from the Net. Along with an enormous amount of fuzzy, non-factual ignorance. Education can now only have a future by teaching skills Like B.S. detection. Brent Meeker The internet is a pornography delivery medium occasionally used for other purposes. --- George Carlin - meaning: what you DO with that knowledge, also how to invent the future without having to continually compare every new idea to existing knowledge - the current paradigm and way too slow. Time is running out fast. Hint: teach creative thinking Huh? What's that? Don't we already do that? etc. cheers, Kim Jones There are no /surprising facts about reality/, only /models/ of it that are /surprised by/ facts Email: kmjco...@mac.com mailto:kmjco...@mac.com kimjo...@ozemail.com.au mailto:kimjo...@ozemail.com.au Web: http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music Phone: (612) 9389 4239 or 0431 723 001 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
