Do
you believe in magic?*
The present topic of this particular
column wasn't the originally planned topic. It was a very recently posted article
by Jaron Lanier that compelled me to take my chances and jump into the Web 2.0
in education fray. Lanier's article doesn't deal with education, but to my mind
the issues he raises bear a very direct relationship to the attitudes underlying
the unsubstantiated belief in the immense educational promise of Web 2.0. However,
for some not fully explicable reason, as this column wrote
itself that main catalyst somehow was pushed farther and farther into the
background. Be that as it may, wherever it ultimately finds itself in the overall
format of this column, it's very much a significant part of its conceptual construction.
Lanier's article, posted in Edge, is titled
DIGITAL
MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. He writes about what's
been called The Hive Mind, and what he identifies as the dangers of that mindset.
Lanier focuses primarily on the Wikipedia and on social bookmarking sites. Among
other things, he tell us that he has:... participated
in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance
to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've
seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered
opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs
of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of
inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old
ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.
Although
Lanier points to numerous cases in which the Wikipedia is inaccurate, he emphasizes
that the purpose of his article isn't to point out these inaccuracies, but rather
to ask why it is that users of a source such as the Wikipedia seem rather unconcerned
with those inaccuracies. His answer (which meets quite a bit of criticism in a
series of rebuttals, also on Edge) is that too many of us have become enamored
with the promise of the collective mind-set. We seem to have developed a magical
belief in the knowledge generating powers of the collective.
Lanier's piece
is well worth reading (as are the rebuttals) , but the debate around the question
of the actual worth or worthlessness of collective writing or editing isn't what
caused me to decide to write this particular column. Instead, it was the possible
connections to education that it suggested (my own "Think
education"?) that got the wheels rolling. Although I found a
great deal that I agreed with in Lanier's piece, I tend to be more in favor
of collective writing and editing than against it. But even though in the past
I've encouraged the idea of pupils writing Wikipedia entries, I find doing so
very problematic. Should pupils take part in writing
a wiki? Could a collective endeavor such as that result in something that
could be considered an "authoritative" text (and if so, by whom)? Would
they learn from doing so that expertise is important, and that they have to edit
and re-edit their work in order to make it as accurate as possible? Or would they
perhaps (inaccurately, to my mind) learn that writing an entry for an encyclopedia
is a rather simple task that can be done by anyone? As much as I want to believe
that it's the former, experience tells me that the long-term answer is most often
the latter.
And I suppose that, having asked a question at the top of
this page, I should offer some sort of answer by the bottom. Do I believe in magic?
Perhaps the closest I can get to an honest and accurate answer is "Oh, how
I'd love to!". Then again, another answer comes to mind as well. When a magician
causes a rabbit to materialize out of thin air, we're left with our mouths open,
entertained and amazed, and wondering just how he did it. When we say "it's
magic", we can, however, mean one of two very different things. If we really
think that the trick was achieved through something beyond explanation, then perhaps
we believe in magic. If, however, we realize that the beauty of the trick is that
it really has an explanation, but that the magician has, through expert sleight
of hand and hours of practice, pulled it off so beautifully that we can't figure
out what that trick is, then perhaps rather than believing in magic, we're truly
appreciating it. Education doesn't have to be finding answers that mute our sense
of wonder. It does, however, have to instill in us the desire to seek out and
enjoy the explanation.
Go to: A magic strand?