The Wireless Age - Teachopolis.org

sponsors

Places

The Wireless Age

Breck, Judy (2001). The wireless age: Its meaning for learning and schools. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

INTRODUCTION

Schools don’t just teach academic knowledge---they also nurture and acculturate.
Schools don’t just teach ideas—they teach opinion, application, and practice.
The author thinks “the great age of knowledge has just begun.”
QUOTE: “One of the great surprises that will soon emerge from the confusing, seemingly impenetrable Internet of today will govern the shape of future education across the planet. It is being formed from a very small percentage of the total pages on the Internet and is the subject of this book. The combination of these very special pages will become a web within the Web, and it is a grand idea indeed.” P.xiii

PART I: KNOWING ELEGANTLY

Chapter 1: A Good Idea

This book may not be logical; paradigm shifts seldom are, except in hindsight.
An idea is a piece of thought, a mental representation. They are the building blocks of thinking.
The Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant illustrates the lesson that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, ideas come into being by connecting and structuring things, so we can think of ideas as the connections between things and the structure of those connections as well as the things themselves. Add in observation and experience and the result is that the whole of what a mature person knows is a “wondrous web”.
The human mind is very good at finding patterns.
Some ideas are so important that one needs them even to survive; others are time-tested wisdom; and still others are the cutting edge thoughts that may become tomorrow’s time-tested wisdom.

PART II: CLUMSY COMMUNICATION

Chapter 2: Mirrors

Animals communicate. Evolution also communicates, through the survival of the fittest. But humans excel at creating “mirrors” that reflect the contents of their minds to other minds.
Oral traditions, stories, narration have been used as mirrors for ideas for thousands of years. Writing is much more precise but much more recent.
Art has been used to mirror ideas since long before civilization. Art also excels at communicating profound or complex ideas.
In addition to narrative writing, other written tools have emerged---e.g., the hierarchical “tree” diagram used to denote phyla, families, playoffs, etc.

Chapter 3: Media

Media used to be a lot slower than it is today. Also, the older the information, the less accurate it tends to be.
The terms “divergence” and “convergence” will be important terms in this book. Divergence means from one to many. While convergence means from many to one.
Diasporas (the spreading of peoples) is one effective way to spread ideas. However, it is not particularly efficient.
The diversity of world languages impedes the spread of ideas.
(Discussions of the Ancient Greeks & Egyptians, Alexander the Great…)
The Library at Alexandria exhibited convergence by aspiring to copy all known books and welcoming international scholars. The library was lost, but the ideas remain.
The Industrial Revolution produced an explosion in means of communication, from photographs to telegraphs to radio to records to broadcast and cable TV.

PART III: THE GREAT CHANGE

Chapter 4: Digital Soup

Imagine one bowl that holds all your communications media: books, notes, music, radio, TV, telephone, fax, etc. And what’s more, blends them all into the same substance. That’s a computer and the Internet (or it will be). And the substance? 1s and 0s---the basis of everything on a computer (what elegance can come from gates that are simply either open or shut!).
Analog devices are easier to grasp than digital ones.
Most of the hype about the Internet has surrounded its impact on three areas:
- Technology
- Communication
- Business
So far, there has been little focus on a fourth area: ideas.

Chapter 5: Hyperwebs

We’re used to using trees as an organizational tool for ideas. Outlines and syllogisms are also treelike in their structure.
Hyperwebs are like tree diagrams, but are more complex. Trees are usually organized only on one dimension, whereas hyperwebs permit multiple simultaneously dimensions of organization.
Hyperwebs are vastly more interconnected. In a tree diagram, a node is linked to at best a few others. But every node on the Internet is potentially connected to every other node!

Chapter 6: Hypermirrors

What if computers weren’t called computers (whose root word means “to count”)?
Behind the scenes, it’s all computation. But we interact with interfaces, and these can be made very intuitive. In fact, most of the biggest advances in computing have been advances in interfaces.
The faster and better computers get, the more they reach beyond math and word prcessing.
Computers have become indispensable for scientists, printers, accountants---why not educators?
Even today, much of the talk about computers in education centers around how to more efficiently perform traditional tasks like administration (e.g., tracking attendance, grading), preparing reports (word processing) and tutoring. The talk doesn’t center around ideas.
There are two major ways computers assist learning:

Reflecting ideas that are to be learned—i.e., giving access to knowledge
Assist our thinking about what is to be learned---i.e., allowing us to drill down, explore, and connect.

“The potential for relating digitized knowledge meaningfully has barely been noticed.”
Something to think about: look at how the Internet has revolutionized the study of geneaology.

Hopefully, that’s enough to give you the flavor of this interesting book. Here are the other chapters:

PART IV: THE GOLDEN HORIZON