Teaching to Power and Powerful Teaching:: Consequences of Extraordinary Enhancements of Abilities to Construct and Communicate Ideas
Whether you’re a teacher or a researcher the combination of weblogging and the proliferation of incredible knowledge-making/communicating tools is causing, I believe, a knowledge and power explosion.
We’ve barely accounted for the change in communication content that derives from the removal of corporate and governmental stranglehold on what information and knowledge is disseminated to whom. The internet, we are seeing, does quite a bit to equalize access to information and to forums in which one can, if one’s argument and information are sufficiently compelling, move public opinion. It’s a big, No!, HUGE, topic but not the one I want to talk about at the moment.
My emphasis is upon the tools for thinking and communicating that are now available that were unavailable, say, twenty years ago. Let’s look at what a professional educator and communicator had 30 years ago: chalk, blackboard, overhead, book, movie. S/he was bounded both in what was learned or constructed and what s/he disseminated by those tools.
We’re only indirectly talking about machines. Yes, this thinking and communicating is done on machines and with the aid of thinking devices made possible by machines. But all of this has magnified our ability to know, to teach, to communicate and to organize– as I will explain below:
The addition of tools for thinking and communicating thought
Now add personal abilities to
- construct and manipulate data-bases,
- converse, with anyone, near or on the other side of the planet, at length and in depth (via discussion groups, blogs, chat rooms, etc),
- access and/or collaboratively construct complex knowledge systems on wikis, and
- construct concept/mind maps (FreeMind, (NovaMInd), or specialized thought mapping systems such the construction of timelines via (Dipity).
With these tools we’ve considerably aided our ability to think and communicate as individuals.
It’s not just that we’ve empowered groups of people to think and decide as a group. We have! (Bravo!!)
It’s that we’ve given tools for thinking and communicating to individuals which considerably enhance each person’s processing, organization communication of complex ideas to others.Individuals with enhanced idea processing and accessing power are working with others who have been similarly transformed.
We should expect a magnified ability for learners to conduct self-directed learning and for teachers to communicate information directly and, more importantly, to aid individuals in their quest for information and skills that give them the power to manage their own life spaces.
If part of the ability to rule is to control information flow and to minimize subject peoples’ understanding and organizing power, then government that aims to benefit the few off the backs and lives of the many will be crippled by
this change. Former stooges will do an end-run around ignorance and become empowered.
I eagerly await new developments. There will be lots of adjustments
In the meantime, Teachers! Get busy learning and communicating using the new tools of enlightenment.
