Comments on: 21st-century skills: Downes’s OS for the mind

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By: Daily Bookmarks 10/01/2009 « Experiencing E-Learning

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By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:33:45 +0000

Howard,

I’m glad you got prompted. And, scattered though my thoughts are here on the Whiteboard, I’m pretty sure you’ve made the first use of “Wittgenstein,” unless I’ve got him buried somewhere in the quote file.

I suppose there’s some sense in which knowledge is for knowing, a sort of cerebral collector pattern. But it seems likelier to me that, no matter how obscure or how particular the items in the collection are, the choice (the activity that got them stored) originated mainly with the individual. The crux there, as the Bardie said in a different context, is “the moving Why they do it.”

3 x 3 may be a low-level fact, but we know that in most human cultures, 123 x 987 is a higher-level one. It requires concepts and understandings that are part of engaging in the world.

What I don’t know about is: okay, so facts as themselves aren’t essential–now what? I’m thinking of my children, who (fortunately for me) are grown. What would I do if they were all school age? Would I homeschool? Private school wouldn’t likely be a option. I have friends as well as colleagues I admire who do have young children, and so for them this isn’t (so to speak) academic.

Working through Stephen’s article (and considering it in terms of other things I’ve read lately) has me thinking about cart-and-horse conceptions. I may mutter about this in a future post.

By: Howard

Howard — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:04:44 +0000

Dave;
I’ve been thinking around these ideas recently. Thanks for the prompt. I’ve related it to some of the folks of my past studies:
1. Wittgenstein’s idea of deed before word or (said in another way); “the meaning of a word is its use”.
2. Bakhtin’s idea that, because a word’s mean is linked to its use, it never has the exact same meaning twice, it always mean something a little bit different.
3. An idea I got from studying Vygotsky, that knowledge is not for knowing, but for doing things.
You can say that 3X3=9 is a fact, but its meaning is still derived from how it is used, and it becomes humanly important in what this statement allows us to do.
So what does this mean. To me it signals that, rather then listing a core set of facts or even a core set of knowledges, we instead should ask, “What do people want to be able to do”? Still, just like in words, we never do the same things twice. (This is especially true regarding making assessments of what people can do. Here’s where the real devil is in the details) I think common core begins to breakdown by the teenage years. People just want to follow different directions.