So Much to Learn
The NY Times recently reported about efforts Google and IBM are taking to work with universities to help students become more deft sifters of data:
It is a rare criticism of elite American university students that they do not think big enough. But that is exactly the complaint from some of the largest technology companies and the federal government.
At the heart of this criticism is data. Researchers and workers in fields as diverse as bio-technology, astronomy and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information. Better telescopes and genome sequencers are as much to blame for this data glut as are faster computers and bigger hard drives.
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Interesting article, but I am intrigued that Ahslee Vance (the journo) tells us …
(A petabyte is about 1,000 times as large as a terabyte, and could store about 500 billion pages of text.) About??? … like a kilogram is about 1000 grams-I guess I’m just getting pedantic in my old age, but good grief …
So much to learn indeed – ok so my first post and I muffed it- I sat thinking about it and realized that these are all numbers to the power two aren’t they – then I let my fingers do the walking and see that it IS about 1000 , actually 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes… so apologies to Ashlee Vance et al.
Thanks for your thoughts, Ros. And the follow-up! One thing that continues to trouble me is the way in which I see “learning” becoming “knowing”. It means, for instance, that more experiential approaches to reading, say, literature, are being supplanted by information-based skill development. The latter is important, but the former is equally so, if not vital.
Yes, you are absolutely right. Fortunately my personal current experience doesn’t really reflect this. We are working with the UBD curriculum planning framework, which as you’d know emphasizes understanding and authentic experiences. I guess I’m lucky to be working at locations where this is happening. I sort of thought, naively perhaps , that this was a growing trend. Mind you, after being in the edbiz so long I am aware that there are regular cycles of popular educational opinion favoring either the reductionist view or the holistic view. They are both essential components of any learning , but political forces often present them as mutually exclusive, often intent on placing them as opposing paradigms rather than at two ends of an instructional continuum. Managing the natural tension between the two is what makes teaching such an exciting and creative pastime. The decisions made in determining instructional practices need to be made on a per case basis, knowing the needs of the learner and the context of the learning. … I guess that’s why I still love the job after 30 years.Certainly in the context of my work,the experiential practices have been underused and need developing.
…BTW, is there any chance you could make the font a tad bigger so I can read comments more easily ?