Barefoot In the head

If you think so....

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Sunday, December 19, 2004

Education?

Imagine if you had a handheld device connected to the Internet that you could look at quietly under the table or something.

Suppose you were pretending to be a civil engineer and you actually don't know anything about the subject.

How long could you pretend?

I think if you know some basic science and had a good connection to the Internet, you could pretend to be a civil engineer (or a doctor, or a biologist, or anything!) for quite sometime. Maybe even months or years, before you are found out.

The handheld connected device could do to education what the calculator did to arithmetic.

The question is, if you know how to use a calculator, do you need to "know" arithmetic?

If you have google, do you need an education?


3 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Ah the famous Chinese Room experiment. In reality only the most charming would get by.
And no, I am not a charming spambot

July 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM  
Blogger Petit Lainy and Grande Nghia said...

uhm, I personally don't think Google can replace education.
It is true that all knowledge that is taught through education can be found on Google. But it applies to everything else too!
Without education, who would give the children direction in the learning and application of knowledge. I am only 22 years old so I am certainly not as sophisticated as you do. But an apparent example is my half-brother and sister (who I only visit once in a while) only know and are interested in playing games until I told them about the existence of emails.
So I would say that, Google would change the nature and content of Education, not replacing it.
And if possible, I would like to discuss with you a little bit about HIW because I and my friends are considering whether it is practical to implement that in Vietnam, my home country.

September 7, 2010 at 7:16 PM  
Blogger vik said...

Hi,
I saw you talk on TED... Seems delivering education to the needy simple.....I stay in Bangalore..... there is lot of construction happening here. I see a lot of migrant workers & there family.... setting a computer just for browsing should not be a uphill task here....I just want to set that & experiment..... if you can share some knowledge, it would be very helpful..
Thanks

September 11, 2010 at 7:12 AM  

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