Handschooling is the individual engagement of knowledge

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Posted on 25th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Schools we now have

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It is fascinating to watch educators who blithely ignore the emergence of individual control of learning as it is empowered by mobile devices. In the report below from Associated Press, religious leaders in Iran have imposed restrictions on teaching by revising course content and eliminating courses at universities. The boy in the picture above is connecting to websites of his own choosing from anywhere on earth.

So far, the fact that they do not all have mobiles that browse the web is the major reason every kid on earth is not yet accessing knowledge the way the boy is. That is changing fast. Governments, such as China, also still have some capacity to block and censor the web.

Over the next few years, which do you think will choose what a student learns: 1. The mobile-owning student with individual direct access to open knowledge online? OR 2. The educators who shape the curricula at universities and attempt to block internet content they disapprove? Iranian Abolfazl Hassani apparently thinks it will be the educators who control what a student studies:

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.

The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran’s conservative leadership — women’s studies and human rights.

“The content of the current courses in the 12 subjects is not in harmony with religious fundamentals and they are based on Western schools of thought,” senior education official Abolfazl Hassani told state radio.

Hassani said the restrictions prevent universities from opening new departments in these subjects. The government will also revise the content of current programs by up to 70 percent over the next few years, he said.

Internet in hand is the cognitive denominator

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Posted on 30th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles

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What smartphones, tablets, netbooks now have in common is putting the open internet in your hand. For all the varieties of configs and features, it is the web browser that equalizes learning. This world-connecting, world-changing cognitive denominator is in the process of doing two fabulous things:

  • Bringing everything know by humankind into the hands of each member of the young global generation,
  • Bringing that knowledge to each of them equally — quite literally from the same virtual page.

Prompted by all the iPad chatter this week, Michael Malone has posted an interesting article today called “Tablet Dreams” in which he traces the techie decades old dream of creating hand held tablets. Malone muses as to why the dream has persisted:

Perhaps it’s because they harken back to the natural human tendency to write and draw on the nearest flat wall or stone or scrap of wood. Or maybe it’s a kind of cultural memory from the days of cuneiform writing on slabs of drying mud, or marking with chalk on a piece of slate in a one room schoolhouse. Whatever the reason, the dream of a smart, interactive tablet is almost as old as electronics itself.

As these techie dreamers diddled with digital chalk and chisels, something else — something wonderful — happened. The serendipity is something Stuart Kauffman might call an “adjacent possibility”: the array of dream tablets has in common that you can touch them to display, lo, nothing less than the accumulated knowledge of our species. That, folks, is quantum leaps beyond marking with your finger in a wet tablet of mud, or for that matter, with chalk on the boards in schools.