An Approach to Education

One of my thoughts about the future is that, with respect to education, teachers will become more important as facilitators for knowledge, for the transmissions of core values in society (whatever they might be), and for the human presence. Other than that, the teaching of the subjects themselves will be all about technology and immersive experiences.

By facilitators of knowledge I mean – critical enquiry of the knowledge that learners acquire and applications and the learner’s own contributions.

I suspect that in that future, every kid will be able to pursue their own passions, through the customization of their own syllabus and curriculum. That means every kid will be able to learn slightly different things, even construct their own synthesis between different areas of knowledge. The trend with education has always been the introduction of more complex material at a younger age. In time to come, I suspect kids in kindergarten would be able to learn quantum mechanics/relativity. Who knows?

Prospects for Education

I wait in excitement the day the first classroom in Singapore gets a multitouch screen. And I hope the first classroom will not be those upper-tier schools, but a school in a neighbourhood, in the weakest class, where students will become interested in learning again, and come to school with the daily expectation of being blown away by another powerful demonstration of technology not just to teach, but also to express.

I believe that technology empowers people to express and create, no matter the medium. I think of this interesting thought when schools become the temporary monopoly of high-brow technology in any community, where even ordinary folks would go to schools and interact with the tech. I know this is a bit far-fetched, and considering that interaction with tech – that’s for the library and for the community centres. Nonetheless – when that technology is democratised, when schoolkids and scribble on their own multitouch pad and rich people will be messing around with supercomputers…

With technology empowering the forms of expression with young people, the onus will be upon the teachers to teach and guide – that onus will never have been greater, because of the double-edged character of tech. I expect frequent abuses of the tech, then, teachers might have some master switch of some sort to incapacitate a student’s tech if the student is found to have committed wrongdoings. But I believe that the young kids will come round, and learn to use the tech in beneficial ways… or so I hope.

That means more lessons for teachers on how to use the tech creatively and expressively. Once again, tech is only the means to an end – the end, which is, to impart knowledge in a way that students will want to do so on their own, to find their own contexts and meaning in the knowledge that they have acquired. Some sort of an assessment – in the form of examinations will still be required, to assess the students’ capacity to internalise the knowledge, and maybe more interesting questions, for example, how to test falsifiability of concepts they have learnt (what to look out for if what they learn is wrong and how to confirm rightness/wrongness)…

Learning to learn – I think that’s the real way of learning. And I think that’s where teachers need to be trained as well… Not as pompous know-it-alls, but people with the passion to learn and the passion to teach that attitude – that philosophy…

I wish I could put the new Al Gore video, but since I can’t, well…

Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t support the video embedding, so there’s a nice video on TED but I can’t show. Its by Al Gore, and in it, he makes an even more compelling case for the climate crisis, and that ‘we’ meaning everyone, as a generation.

Here’s the video…

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/243

But the rest of the entry isn’t going to about the video. It’s about TED. And it’s not about TED, its about all these cross-disciplinary talks and collaborations and what it means for the future for all of us. It’s going to be the new way to live work and play, and people need to know about all these exciting thing that are happening.

A simple idea about buses and routes

Have you ever ridden on a bus and constantly looking out of the window to see if you are on track to your destination?

Well, there ought to be a simple solution somewhere, and I thought that it would be cool if bus users could know about the landmarks they might see along their routes, as in, pictures they might see along the way and correlating the landmarks that they see with the bus stops nearby.

Of course, this is assuming that people remember bus routes with landmarks…