Robo

Our higher educational system is flawed in many ways. Two of these flaws particularly grab my attention. The first is that in a digital and constantly online world our universities still require their students to memorize facts that are just a Google-search away. The second is that, at least for the educational system in Europe, these universities produce people with a very restricted worldview, or more specifically: these institutions do not play a large enough role in countering this narrow-mindedness.

Iʼve been reading Jeff Jarvisʼ “What Would Google Do”, in which he looks at how various businesses and institutions can make their step into the “digital age”. One of the institutions he talks about is universities, a specific section of the book which he also put on his blog in February:

“Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There’s no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there’s no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn’t take those courses, too.” (more…)

Recently, I had a long conversation with my mother and grandmother about how hard it is to use new technologies to change and/or better the way non-tech people work. When someone has worked as a clerk for thirty years, he or she won’t accept a new, digital, system being put in to place which alters the way work has been done. I wonder how this problem will evolve as our generation and the ones that come after that will have jobs and find ourselves confused by new technologies.

A pessimist will ask: How much more will the nature of what we do with computers and networks change? In the 1960s computers were used for, well, computing, nowadays they are used primarily as a means of communcication. Will the difference between now and the 2050s be as massive as that shift? If the revolution of the last decade evens out, we won’t have to worry about learning new technologies, because there won’t be anything radically new. Yes, the core technology itself might possibly not bring anything radically new, but the effect of the inventions of the last decades will only be felt when we figure out what cool stuff we can do with those. (more…)