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The Wireless Age
Breck, Judy (2001). The wireless age: Its meaning
for learning and schools. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press.
INTRODUCTION
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Schools don’t just teach academic knowledge---they
also nurture and acculturate. |
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Schools don’t just teach ideas—they teach opinion,
application, and practice. |
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The author thinks “the great age of knowledge has just
begun.” |
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QUOTE: “One of the great surprises that will soon
emerge from the confusing, seemingly impenetrable
Internet of today will govern the shape of future
education across the planet. It is being formed from
a very small percentage of the total pages on the
Internet and is the subject of this book. The
combination of these very special pages will become a
web within the Web, and it is a grand idea indeed.”
P.xiii |
PART I: KNOWING ELEGANTLY
Chapter 1: A Good Idea
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This book may not be logical; paradigm shifts seldom
are, except in hindsight. |
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An idea is a piece of thought, a mental
representation. They are the building blocks of
thinking. |
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The Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant
illustrates the lesson that the whole can be more than
the sum of its parts. Indeed, ideas come into being
by connecting and structuring things, so we can think
of ideas as the connections between things and the
structure of those connections as well as the things
themselves. Add in observation and experience and the
result is that the whole of what a mature person knows
is a “wondrous web”. |
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The human mind is very good at finding patterns. |
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Some ideas are so important that one needs them even
to survive; others are time-tested wisdom; and still
others are the cutting edge thoughts that may become
tomorrow’s time-tested wisdom. |
PART II: CLUMSY COMMUNICATION
Chapter 2: Mirrors
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Animals communicate. Evolution also communicates,
through the survival of the fittest. But humans excel
at creating “mirrors” that reflect the contents of
their minds to other minds. |
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Oral traditions, stories, narration have been used as
mirrors for ideas for thousands of years. Writing is
much more precise but much more recent. |
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Art has been used to mirror ideas since long before
civilization. Art also excels at communicating
profound or complex ideas. |
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In addition to narrative writing, other written tools
have emerged---e.g., the hierarchical “tree” diagram
used to denote phyla, families, playoffs, etc. |
Chapter 3: Media
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Media used to be a lot slower than it is today. Also,
the older the information, the less accurate it tends
to be. |
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The terms “divergence” and “convergence” will be
important terms in this book. Divergence means from
one to many. While convergence means from many to one. |
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Diasporas (the spreading of peoples) is one effective
way to spread ideas. However, it is not particularly
efficient. |
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The diversity of world languages impedes the spread of
ideas. |
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(Discussions of the Ancient Greeks & Egyptians,
Alexander the Great…) |
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The Library at Alexandria exhibited convergence by
aspiring to copy all known books and welcoming
international scholars. The library was lost, but the
ideas remain. |
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The Industrial Revolution produced an explosion in
means of communication, from photographs to telegraphs
to radio to records to broadcast and cable TV. |
PART III: THE GREAT CHANGE
Chapter 4: Digital Soup
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Imagine one bowl that holds all your communications
media: books, notes, music, radio, TV, telephone, fax,
etc. And what’s more, blends them all into the same
substance. That’s a computer and the Internet (or it
will be). And the substance? 1s and 0s---the basis
of everything on a computer (what elegance can come
from gates that are simply either open or shut!). |
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Analog devices are easier to grasp than digital ones.
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Most of the hype about the Internet has surrounded its
impact on three areas:
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Technology |
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Communication |
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Business |
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So far, there has been little focus on a fourth area:
ideas. |
Chapter 5: Hyperwebs
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We’re used to using trees as an organizational tool
for ideas. Outlines and syllogisms are also treelike
in their structure. |
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Hyperwebs are like tree diagrams, but are more
complex. Trees are usually organized only on one
dimension, whereas hyperwebs permit multiple
simultaneously dimensions of organization.
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Hyperwebs are vastly more interconnected. In a tree
diagram, a node is linked to at best a few others.
But every node on the Internet is potentially
connected to every other node! |
Chapter 6: Hypermirrors
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What if computers weren’t called computers (whose root
word means “to count”)? |
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Behind the scenes, it’s all computation. But we
interact with interfaces, and these can be made very
intuitive. In fact, most of the biggest advances in
computing have been advances in interfaces.
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The faster and better computers get, the more they
reach beyond math and word prcessing. |
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Computers have become indispensable for scientists,
printers, accountants---why not educators? |
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Even today, much of the talk about computers in
education centers around how to more efficiently
perform traditional tasks like administration (e.g.,
tracking attendance, grading), preparing reports (word
processing) and tutoring. The talk doesn’t
center around ideas. |
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There are two major ways computers assist learning: |
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Reflecting ideas that are to be learned—i.e., giving
access to knowledge
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Assist our thinking about what is to be learned---i.e.,
allowing us to drill down, explore, and connect.
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“The potential for relating digitized knowledge
meaningfully has barely been noticed.” |
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Something to think about: look at how the Internet has
revolutionized the study of geneaology. |
Hopefully, that’s enough to give you the flavor of this
interesting book. Here are the other chapters:
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Chapter 7: Hyperwired |
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Chapter 8: New Reflections |
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Chapter 9: The Radiant Medium |
PART IV: THE GOLDEN HORIZON
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Chapter 10: The Grand Idea |
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