THERE IS NOTHING WRONG HERE

I was one of about 80 people that tuned into the Will Richardson interview of Clay Shirky today. Will used Ustream to conduct the interview so that it would be streamed live and recorded for later viewing. Of course a chat was going on along with the interview, and Will invited questions from the “audience”. As most Internet technologies are today, it was glitchy and at one point Will lost his Internet connection and had to reboot.

The interview only lasted about 40 minutes and Will only got to two questions. Clay is a very practiced speaker and was to the point in the discussion. The topic of the discussion was about how the concepts in his book affect education. The main point I got from the interview, which I plan to watch again, was that we have had a revolution in the way knowledge is transferred or taught.

If you wanted to learn from Plato you had to go where he was and speak directly with him. After he died there was no way to easily access his teachings and his knowledge died with him. As writing further developed a limited number of book were written, but they were still difficult to access and not many people could read them. Transfer of knowledge was still limited in time and place. When the printing press was invented it made books more available and time and space became more flexible. You had access to knowledge from people who were not even in your country or alive, but direct access to the alive person was still very limited. It could be years before a book became available new knowledge may have been developed by the time the book was published. The telephone, film and TV has made access to knowledge and education even more immediate and accessible. But, from most people the access to knowledge still happens in an education setting.

Clay is suggesting that the reason for physical schools is that it is the most cost effective way to distrubite knowledge to the greated number of people. He goes on to say the a “tectonic shift” is occuring in the way groups are formed, business is conducted and knowledge is trasnfered because of the Internet and social network tools. Today’s interview is an example of the breaking down of the time/place/access to knowledge. Clay was in New York City, Will Richardson was in New Jersey, I was in Belchertown, MA, and the other 80 participants were all over the world. We all participted in a live event that was coordiated by one person for free. Beside observing the interview we were able to ask Clay and Will questions and there was a chat going on with the 80 participants. I did not have to sign up for a class with Clay Shirly at NYU or travel to London to attend a lecture. I am reading his book now and I have read his blog and watched two recordings of lectures he has given. I doubt that I would have had access to the video recordings of his lectures before the Internet. Even if a televison station would have thought it was worth their time and effort to record his lecture, the recording would have been show once or twice and then put in a vault some where at a university for some curious grad student to view it in 10 years.

As the the cost of orgaizating access to distributed knowledge decreases, will students be satisfied with having to travel to a central building to sit in rows and listen to a one-way conversation of a pre-determainded curriculum?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 7:56 am and is filed under Books, Teaching, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.