I found an interesting post a few days ago about the cult of the amateur and how there are people who are afraid of this shift – like Keen. It also came up this week when I was talking to a couple of profs who were bemoaning how easy it is for people to get access to the information that they had to slave over. I reminded them that merely having a volume of trivia is nothing, it’s more important to understand the system behind it – something that I was talking about in a meeting this morning.
We were talking about ways of really getting WebCT or other tools to take off – the prof wanted something where you could just dump in the content and the system would then use markup to create questions. We both agreed that this is something that software can’t do right now, but it’s not impossible – the U of Cincinnati has a program that is understanding puns – but even if that system comes to fruition, I don’t think we can ever remove the actual teacher from the equation. We might have a program that can access all that content, and be like many of these online experts, they/it likely will be even longer before there is understanding of the processes behind things.
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