Mr. Chips or Microchips
Frances Cairncross,
BBC Radio 4,
Dec 30, 2002
Ben wrote to me today to point to a BBC panel discussion (involving Sherry Turkle, David Reynolds, Josh Angrist and others) on the use of computers in education. As Ben pointed out, most of the discussion in the interview and the Slashdot discussion was the usual "the internet's only a tool" type of discussion. But Reynolds makes a good point in the panel discussion when he observes, "the difficulty has been that so far we’ve used information technology really as like a superannuated encyclopaedia. But what people have historically thought was that it’s possible to form new networked communities of learning that would use information technology, not just to acquire existing knowledge, as it were, from an encyclopaedia, but actually to generate new knowledge because the learners would interact with each other." I think that's quite true, but this important observation was for the most part overlooked in the subsequent discussion.
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