

This is bullshit - we must move past the one-way lecture to collaboration - dood
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/03/08/tedxnyed-this-is-bullshit/

======
henning
To a certain extent this seems like ignorant webcock bullshit.

In many fields, in most cases, there actually is one answer, especially at the
K-12 levels that much of education is directed toward. 2+2 = 4. There is
nothing to collaborate on or debate in that. There's not time for students to
spend hundreds of years going through the process of complete a priori
discovery that pioneers in fields of knowledge did.

I'm saying there's a side to this that this post completely ignores and is
reminiscent of typical Web 2.0 douchebaggery that is obsessed with rejecting
everything old.

Textbook linear algebra and Bayesian statistics are an important part of some
of Google's key technologies. I don't understand the complete failure to
recognize value when you see it of the kind this post displays.

I am aware of Seymour Papert's ideas about "guide on the side" vs "sage on the
stage" in teaching and using new educational technology to make students own
their own knowledge. The author of this post is not, or else does not want to
acknowledge the people he is aping.

Edit: I think unconferences are a great idea! Recognize when the audience has
a lot to contribute and when it's time for one person or a panel to do the
talking. Adapt to the situation at hand. I completely support that. What a
revolution in American life it would be if we could imbue our children with
real intellectual curiosity! Just don't make things so one-sided is all I'm
saying.

~~~
dood
_2+2 = 4. There is nothing to collaborate on or debate in that. There's not
time for students to spend hundreds of years going through the process of
complete a priori discovery that pioneers in fields of knowledge did._

This isn't at all what he is saying, I think you misunderstood (or I did). The
key points, as I understood the piece:

\- Avoid duplicating effort, instead add value, "just as journalists must
become more curator than creator, so must educators"

\- Rather than educate based on a factory-line mentality, engage with the
audience/students, in order to help them learn more effectively, "instead of
giving tests to find out what [people] learned, we should test to find out
what they don't know. Their wrong answers aren't failures, they are needs and
opportunities."

\- Instead of getting students to memorize answers or techniques, focus on
helping them learn how to find answers and understand techniques, "Google
sprung from seeing the novel. Is our educational system preparing students to
work for or create Googles? Googles don’t come from lectures."

~~~
loup-vaillant
This remind me Dr Tae: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698600>

~~~
dood
This is a great video.

------
skmurphy
This quote by Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's head of product management was a
great one:

"In the real world the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably
determined by the lessons you glean from the free market."

------
h34t
What's wrong with a single individual presenting a well-conceived, poignant,
in-vivo essay about the topic they are the best person in the world to
explain? I have yet to meet a crowd or committee that can tell a coherent
story.

One-to-many speeches may be overused in education, but I think TED gets them
very near exactly right.

------
morisy
One of Jarvis' best in a while, particularly his defense of why his TED talk
was still a one-way bullshit lecture: Ego.

------
endlessvoid94
I think he's right...but....doesn't there need to be a basis for that creative
thinking? It seems to me that the early "memorization" of stuff (elementary
school and middle school) is pretty essential. It's pretty hard for MOST
people to understand calculus without first being able to solve 2x + 3 = 15

~~~
chrischen
I think it might be interesting to study when the optimal time to learn
addition would be. Different people might learn at different paces, so letting
people learn naturally might be a better way for these things to be introduced
at the optimal time, rather than forced at some suboptimal time. I think
that's the main benefit in free-form learning, and that's to optimize learning
by interest.

So for example rather than forcing all kids to learn addition in first grade
(or is it earlier?), we could introduce them to more general topics, and allow
a bigger range of time for the children to naturally approach those topics. So
the some children might develop an interest for it at 3rd grade or 2nd, etc.
But it would be optimized by interest, and school would serve the purpose of
creating the interest (to induce learning), rather than forcing the learning.

------
ankeshk
Collaboration doesn't scale.

You can't have 500 people in a room all discussing one topic. Well you can -
but it won't be efficient. And people will actually end up learning less.

I think - past 30-35 people, collaboration starts losing its value.

But yes - if there are only 20-30 people in the room - collaboration works
better than the lecture format.

(Paulo Freire actually taught English to Brazilian farmers in less than 60
days by using a collaborative approach instead of a lecture approach. His
techniques are worth studying. But his techniques don't work for TED type
events where huge audiences show up.)

