Handschooling is stunningly exciting and hopeful because every youngster on earth will soon have individual access to knowledge. Grumpy posts here about Obamaschool are not the real spirit of this website — but knocking us off of the socialist track is necessary before the new individualized learning can emerge.
The image above — half of which is now in the sidebar — illustrates the conjunction of the two main factors of handschooling:
- what is know by humankind and needs to be learned by each new generation has moved online where it is mirroring its cognitive network structure, and
- individual mobile devices are now available by which each student can individually connect to the global knowledge commons the network has created.
The most deeply interesting subject is the networking of what is known online. There is so much chaos and conflict in education that it is very hard to get focus on this core phenomenon. Yet the fact that knowledge itself is a network and that almost suddenly it has found a new medium — the internet — in which to nestle itself conforming to its own cognitive structure is astounding. This event ranks with the invention of language, writing, and printing. This migration of what is known by the human species into a spontaneous virtual medium is most spectacular because no one thought it up. It just happened. Until we reconfigure schooling around the networking of knowledge in the open internet, we are spinning our pedagogical wheels. Finding and connecting ideas in this medium is the core around which we will invent the future of education.
Antoine RJ Wright says:
How do we – tech-enabled educators – teach students, and even parents, how to evaluate what they find? I talked about this recently at MMM linking to a piece at the Britannica blog – we are basically walking in an era where teaching students how to evaluate resources is just as important as teaching them to read, write, compute, and type. Where do we get our basis for the methods to use behind “discoverability,” and who is leading the charge here?
23rd February 2010 at 6:19 pm
Judy Breck says:
Great question! It is the big question, with a very exciting answer. I have responded with this new post:
http://handschooling.com/2010/02/24/findability-is-the-future-not-methods-for-search/
23rd February 2010 at 7:38 am