foto: flickr Enjambre nació como un espacio de reflexión y discusión en torno a las nuevas tecnologías y su impacto en la educación desde la vereda de la inexperiencia en temas de educación dura. Nació más desde la intuición que desde la pericia, un poco capturando la noción cada vez más extendida de que nuestra educación está en crisis y que aquello supone la llegada de problemas cada vez más profundos en el futuro cercano. Desde esta perspectiva, encontré un pots de Seth Godin (célebre marketero, autor de Purple Cow y otros bestsellers y gran blogger) sobre la prohibición del uso de Wikipedia para trabajos escolares que me pareció particularmente lúcido. El tipo es experto en marketing, ergo, su lucidez viene más por su capacidad de hacer de lo evidente algo atractivo (usando una retórica quizás algo épica) y del sentido común que desde la experiencia escolástica. Aquí abajo encontrarán al post en inglés y al final un link al post original. The wikipedia gap I wonder who the first teacher was who said to his class, "Okay, we have ball point pens now. No need to use class time to learn how to use a fountain pen." I heard from two people this week (one is 11, the other twice that) who were forbidden to use Wikipedia to do homework. When I was in b-school, I admit that I discovered a shortcut. I had to write a long paper on Castro. I went to the magnificent Stanford library, found a great book on Castro, opened to the bibliography and found ten sources. Which I then laboriously paged through, spending hours and hours in order to find the facts I needed. Then, facts in hand, I was able to do the actually useful part... I synthesized some new ideas and wrote a paper. Apparently, going through the act of finding the books, sorting through them, reading a lot of chaff and eventually finding the facts is an essential skill for an 11-year-old kid. And for a college sophomore. Essential enough to be responsible for 80% of the time they spend on the work itself? Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn't be. I don't know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas, the faster and more insightfully, the better. Until just recently, law students had to learn a painstaking process to look up cases by hand. No longer. The academy realized that teaching students to be great at Lexis was a smart idea. Please don't tell me that Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia or one that can't be trusted. Perhaps it can't be trusted if you're prepping for a Presidential debate, but it is sure good enough to help me learn what I need to learn--which is how to quickly take a bunch of facts and turn them into a new and useful idea. Here's what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing. Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.

Post original

Si bien el post puede ser algo trivial, resume muy bien una intuición que todos andamos acarreando adentro, al mismo tiempo que la última frase le pone el toque apremiante que el asunto merece. Más que en busca de una lección, me decidí a citar a Godin porque se me hace que: 1- No importa el prisma desde donde se mire el asunto, el problema se ve negro el 100% de las veces. 2- Será en la integración inteligente de esas miradas que se encuentre el comienzo de una solución sustentable.

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