The Future of Search is Verbs
Flickr,
Sept 22, 2010
This post has been lurking at the back of my mind for a little while now, and I may as well let some of it (and the link) bubble to the surface. First, the bit from the post: "when people search, they aren't just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person." That's not quite true - the search I just conducted, for example, was to find a blog post I had read earlier. But then again, I wanted to create this newsletter entry. So there's a bit of point of view about it.
Now for the surfacing of the bubble. I've had two intertwined threads running through my head all week, both related to this point:
- first, that we have no basis for the discipline of 'education', that is, no entities that we all agree we are studying, no base reference against which we can evaluate educational theory
- second, we have been defining learning according to what is to be learned (learning objectives, outcomes, competencies, knowledge, facts, etc.) while what learners in fact want is not to learn per se but rather to do
Now for the surfacing of the bubble. I've had two intertwined threads running through my head all week, both related to this point:
- first, that we have no basis for the discipline of 'education', that is, no entities that we all agree we are studying, no base reference against which we can evaluate educational theory
- second, we have been defining learning according to what is to be learned (learning objectives, outcomes, competencies, knowledge, facts, etc.) while what learners in fact want is not to learn per se but rather to do
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