Posts Tagged ‘informal’

educating people not consumers

Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken has a good discussion of formal vs informal education, and of the difference between creating consumers and creating people. Participating in culture is the way to the latter. Which brought to mind this quote: “The only thing you should learn from school is that you do not belong.” (The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman)

computational literacy and the gibsonesque present

After an 8am class on instruction in which we started to learn about treating lessons as products to be designed, I attended a colloquium by Michael Twidale about Computational Literacy & Metacognition (here are my rough notes).

It was a pretty excellent talk about the way we teach people how to do computery things. What I liked best about it was that Dr. Twidale was coming at this from what he called an Engineering point of view as opposed to a Science point of view. The idea that rapid prototyping in research might be more useful than studying precisely how things work at a point in time is something I’m very sympathetic to. I especially loved how he discussed the unintended effects of different technologies that go beyond what their designers had in mind, such as Twitter revolutions and large touch-screens enhancing learnability and interaction because of their poor usability for one person. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the famous William Gibson line from Burning Chrome “…but the street finds its own uses for things.”
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