I just watched Clay Shirky’s speech at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (see part 1 & part 2). Author of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky talks about cognitive surplus, the time and intellectual capital that have spent on Sitcoms for the past 50 years, and are now starting to redirect into the infoverse and other domains, connecting with various places (i.e. Wikipedia) designed to take advantage of that time and intellectual ability (my definition).
Here’s a line that evidently didn’t hit me when I read the transcript for the speech a couple of weeks ago. After telling the story of a four-year-old, who becomes discouraged when she can’t find the mouse on her family’s TV, he says,
Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Substitute Education for Media, and this is a huge statement the coincides with what a lot of educators and education reformers have been saying for a long time.
I just love it when somebody comes up with a way of saying it all in one sentence!
That is a fantastic substitution, David. I may even use it if you don’t mind. However, the more I thought about it, the less enthusiastic about it I became. I think it is a bit of an egocentric slippery slope to assume that unless the learner is central to the learning the learning is pointless. Of course, personal relevancy is optimal, but sometimes I feel that these discussions have been focusing too much on the personal rather than on the learning. What I am trying to get at here is my concern that we may be nurturing the first generation of “spoiled brat learners” for lack of a better term… learners with the attitude “if you don’t let me learn the way I want, then I won’t learn.” Of course, effective teachers should be teaching in relevant and authentic ways as much as possible. However, students still have the responsibility to learn when it is perhaps not their preferred style, intelligence, tool, structure, domain,… Knowledge is always worth pursuing and sitting still for if one truly values knowledge and learning. I think this attitude needs to be part of the puzzle. I am certainly not trying to justify poor and ineffective teaching, but inasmuch as the teacher has the responsibility to teach well, the student has the responsibility to learn well…. even if it is not always his/her “cup of tea”.
I hope this makes some sense as I struggle with the statement. I still really like it, though.