George Siemens of Connectivism blog wrote:
We have designed education to promote certainty (i.e. a state of knowing)…we now need to design education to be adaptable (i.e. a process of knowing).
David Muir of EdCompBlog picks up on that an adds:
Education should not only be about what you know – how many “facts” you can recall and write on a test paper. If that’s how we view education, we could end up turning schooling into a version of The Weakest Link.
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I remember, many years ago, a professor at Jordanhill saying, “Knowledge is like fish – it goes off!” A couple of my colleagues got quite upset by this, but I think he had a point – especially in the fast moving world of technology.
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It’s like the definition of intelligence I came back from SETT with last year: “Intelligence is knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.”
David Warlick of 2 Cents Worth picks up on both (I really like the movie analogy!) and adds:
Believing that we can find the success in teaching by measuring what students have memorized in their classes is the height of arrogance, in my opinion. Yet, preparing our children for a future that we can not even describe requires of educators more than we have ever expected before.
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It is not a time for teacher-technicians, trained lab clerks who observe a deficiency, and prescribe a scientifically researched strategy. It’s a time for teacher-philosophers, who love their world, love what they teach, love their students, and who love what their students will be.
Read all three posts for yourself.
A Blog Around The Clock 
This has the feeling of the nature-nurture debate to me. Do we need to teach a ‘process’? Sure. But what does that process operate on? Knowledge. The process is useless without something to work on. The EdCompBlog you link to describes how the author no longer needs to use Epson dot-matrix text effects, and that HTML tags are going out of style. Yet someone one the street who doesn’t know what a dot-matrix printer is, or what HTML is, has no way of evaluating whether they need this stuff or not, and if they decided that they did, they would have no way of “knowing what to do” because they don’t know anything about the subject!
I prefer this quote:
I doubt any of the three would disagree with that quote – they have been writing about education for years and cannot put everything in every blogpost. Memorization of facts as part of the process is not rote memorization – but rote memorization is still used by far too many teachers. A new approach would eliminate rote memorization and replace it with learning, including learning a lot of facts, but through a process that os meaningful – thus NOT rote.
I hope so – but that’s not the tone of these blogposts, and the overall theme of the set of links you provided was definitely slanted in one direction. I regret that I didn’t have time to read their whole blog. 🙂
Can you provide any details or direction on what the “process” is supposed to be, or how someone is supposed to go about educating for it? So far, in the links you’ve provided and a brief Google search, I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of detail.
Focus on ‘2 cents worth’ as well as David’s other websites linkd on the sidebar for the start.
Thanks!
At the risk of rattling the cage further… 🙂 You may like to try a follow up post of mine where I try to think through these issues a bit further. I don’t think I meant to suggest that memorisation was bad however I think the nature of what we memorise may be changing thanks in part to technology. For example, I realised to my horror recently that I didn’t know my parents new phone number. I have it programmed into the memory of every phone I use and it’s written in my address book (paper version at home) and my PDA. But since I don’t ever dial it, I don’t actually know it. Is that a bad thing?
Clearly I still feel it is or I wouldn’t have said with “horror” above, and yet… Is this inevitable? Are there things I used to have to memorise that I don’t have to any more? Is it now more important to know where to find the information and to know what to do with it than to have it memorised? To take a science example, is it more important to have memorised the nine planets in the solar system in order from the sun, or to have an idea about why there is a debate about the definition of “planet”? (Note the use of “more important”. I don’t want to suggest it is an either/or situation.)
As for details on how you “go about educating for it“, my original post came about in part because of a lecture and tutorial on constructivism and constructivist approaches to education.
I hope this helps, but I suspect I’ve just opened a whole new can of worms. 🙂