colleges.blogspot.com

2004-01-01T13:46:00.000-05:00

Literacy

Short rant today. It should go without saying that access to the world's information (as I talk about in my other postings) does require an ability to read. It disturbs me when I read articles that talk about limited literacy throughout the world, but also that we have people who have not learned to read here in America. Undoubtedly, those who have not learned to read are those that are dealing with much more basic issues such as food and clothing. Yet we must figure out how to address this issue. Learning to read is the minimum price of entry to the world's information library ...

2003-12-31T12:04:00.000-05:00

More thoughts about education

In my last blog I offered some thoughts about how important it is for us to improve the ability of our future generations to process the wealth of information and data that will be reasily available to them. It seems to me that it is also important to help them understand how to set and achieve goals. Given a world of limitless opportunities, choices must be made. Knowing how to make these choices seems like it is a priceless life skill on which their success will depend.

Once a choice is made, the next task for coming to generations to master is how to achieve their goal. Generally speaking, this involves:

Setting well defined goals

Mapping each and everyone of the steps to get to that goal

Patiently executing the steps

Bring flexible enough to respond to changing information received during the process without losing track of the goals or the process

Our society is woefully weak on these skills. Perhaps our education system should take a role in addressing this.

2003-10-25T13:09:00.000-05:00

Changes in our education system

Our education system is constantly evolving. It is amazing how different it is from the school system I went though when I was younger. This is a natural process, as the needs and demands of the market place evolve. But get ready for this – as we grow older still, we will see greater and more radical changes. These changes will be driven by the advent of the Internet.

What has changed is that most of the world’s knowledge is readily available online. When we grew up, much of the education process was focused on getting us to remember things. Facts about history, facts about math, etc. This was because the process of obtaining information was more difficult. In today’s world, obtaining a piece of information is virtually trivial. So memorization becomes less important to success.

Education has already made evolutionary steps down the path. My 10 year old son already has computer courses at school (the fact that he could teach the course may be the subject of another blog …). This is an effort to teach him the types of skills that he will need to efficiently find and process information. I believe that we have a long way to go with this process, and much more needs to happen for our schools to be providing an optimal education.

We need to see new types of courses offered. These courses might have titles such as “Efficient Research”, “Information Processing and Analysis”, and “Presenting Research Results”. Mastering these types of topics will be key to an individual’s success, and the continues success of America as the world’s leader in generating new intellectual property.