This is bullshit - we must move past the one-way lecture to collaboration | Hacker News Reader

This is bullshit - we must move past the one-way lecture to collaboration

buzzmachine.com

13 pointsdood12 comments

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.

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."

I know for me the traditional school system was of little use to me in a scholastic sense where at around age 13 I taught myself to program. From there on in it taught me nothing I couldn't (and did) teach myself.

What it DID teach me however is important social interaction skills, patience and gave my parents some much needed breathing room. ;)

I also taught myself programming/CS as a teen. Funnily enough, I later ended up teaching my computing classmates because the real teachers were so bad.

One teacher was so bad that one of his lessons actually removed my understanding of some CS concept I had understood for years.

This remind me Dr Tae: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698600

This is a great video.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

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