Knowledge or Information

A presentation by Professor Richard Noss

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Technology has fundamentally altered the way science is communicated and even done.

And this is such a contrast to the impact technology has had on education

The remarkable capacities of technology to force us to think about teaching, how, what, the changes which come from the technologies being digital!

Context, Content and Knowledge

• See JISC "the information behaviour of the researcher of the future"
• "theme - we need a fully developed mental map, understandi retrieval and appreciation of the info space and what is an effective search?"
• Content and information are different, they mean little without contextualising.

The danger with digital technologies are the extremes:

1. the information is enough (any old information) more info is better, especially if it is democratic "information based explanations"

2. any random combination is useful and can be made worse by the advent of digital technology

There is an Information Illusion:

• Information Technology is "technology that enables you to gather information" but in fact it meant Communication but now we have I+C+T
• Web 2.0 might be great but it might be rubbish we dont know where this might take us; LGC doesnt mean it is actually interesting in itself.
• The interesting question for education not how we learn or teach better but to fundamentally reconstruct what we can learn
• "Switch from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals" changed the tasks we dealt with.
• It is Digital Technologies that will change the way we can represent things and that will change what we do.
• Ten years ago we wrote a book on mathematical meaning and "when he was young he wrote a logo program to draw a fractal tree and that changed the way he understood nature"

Conclusion

"access to mechanism is the key, not the agglomeration of technology"

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