High Cognitive Minds

I always have so many possible blog topics floating through my head that I really appreciate it when someone saves me the trouble of developing one of them. It's even better when I find that they look at a subject very much the way I do. Sometimes I get a case of "I wish I'd said it first," but not too often, and certainly not in the case of this blog post I discovered a few days ago.

Education is changing in a lot of ways, and the internet is responsible for much of the change. Unfortunately, the public education establishment remains determinedly a decade or so behind the times, but for anyone who's perfectly happy learning on their own, the web is a resource of endless riches. Mellory notes that "So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things." She goes on to develop an idea that I've thought about quite often, that the apps and technologies begin to create something entirely new rather than merely a new version of something old. Her January 17 post is supposed to be the first of several on the topic of converging technologies and their influence on education. I haven't had the time to track down any followup, but it should be worth the effort. In the meantimes, here's a post worth reading for anyone interested in the broader issues in education.

http://mellory.blogspot.com/2006/09/evolution-of-online-autodidact.html