Genius. [Thanks Jim]

OK.  So might be fun to respond to Ewan’s challenge.  Will certainly be sending a link to the Parent’s Association.

“This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?”

from WSJ.  Bit one-sided, and no “facilitation tools angle” but I liked the way he put the joyful memories bit.

We belong to a culture of “knowledge”, a culture of certification. The self-taught genius, the high-performing maverick, though we may regard them with awe and envy, we don’t encourage our children to follow that risky path. We see the safe route as a plodding journey of toil along a well-traveled path, jumping through hoops placed low enough for the perservering questor to finally gain that piece of paper that says “I sat in that seat; I listened in that classroom; I read those books.”

We call this “learning”. We see the intelligence quotient as a mark of the size of your internal encyclopedia, the sheer amount of facts you carry around. We applaud this kind of intelligence. In fact, intelligence, of the high-forehead brainy variety, in no way connotes competence.  Expertise, and competence, diverge in our cultural mythology here, in a rather bizarre way. An expert in an academic field may still not know how to have a simple conversation, or tie their shoes, or cook a meal.

From a fluency perspective, we only measure your competence, not your intelligence. We measure it in many ways.  By the grace in which you do things, your comfort in challenging situations, and by your sheer curiosity. The more questions you carry around inside you, the shinier the glint in your eyes as they dance around, the more respect we have for you as a thinker and doer.

Notice the distinction there; in our modern culture we mostly value the amount of facts you carry. In a fluency-based learning culture we value the amount of questions.

Sounds nice.  But am beginning to disagree with the either/or style of these types of approaches.  Whether it’s Hesiod saying that memory is the mother of the muses, cognitive scientists pointing out that good questions need good facts. (Points 1 to 3 here), or that attention and memory are inextricably linked , there is more than enough to suggest that actually memory and the old style Gradgrindian learning can and should play some sort of role.

I suspect that the real distinction needs to be not between facts and fluency, but between either-or and both, between black and white and grey.

Interesting article @ Wired.  [Thanks Stephen for the pointer].

“Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

Explaining that this type of writing is valuable is the hard part.

Very good and worth a watch (as Alec points out)