Knowledge is, undoubtedly, extremely important. Indeed it is only through knowing things that we can make connections and develop our own understanding. After all, learning is fundamentally about making connections between elements of knowledge. It is nothing new to note that there has been a pradigm shift in ease of access to information and that so much of the world's knowledge is now Googleable. I was struck by the excellent video that Chris Betcher made on Google voice search (below), not only from an assistive technlogies perspective, but also from the perspective of how easy it was to access such a vast array of information instantaneously.
Interestingly, this incredible technology really goes to show how much we need to work with kids on finding and exploring ungoogleable questions. Thanks to Google's mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" we have knowledge at our fingertips, or more precisely on the tip of our tongue thanks to Google Voice Search. The role of education must be to help kids evaluate, hypothesise, create and apply their knowledge, ask and attempt to answer questions with ethical shades of meaning, look at the world around them and ask why, how and what can I do about it. Knowledge is no longer the currency in education, it is much more about the mindset, skillset and toolset needed at any given time to learn successfully and more importantly to create the world around us. So how are we doing this as educators? Discuss...
