YouTube's Do-it-Yourself Videos Show the Best Teachers Are Online

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a deep-seated unease that we as a species have not adequately adjusted to the fundamental changes that took place when ubiquitous on-demand 信息 networks descended around us. I joke that the exact moment it hit me was in summer 2007 when my pal Dave bought his first-generation iPhone and we could no longer argue about facts. 在那之前, a group of several adults could spend a good hour arguing over which of two baseball players had a better statistic in some particular season. After that moment, Dave could—and would— simply look up the correct answer. Entire phyla of conversation topics met extinction that day.

What does it mean to be an educated person in a world where almost any fact can be effortlessly requested and retrieved? Smartphones in the classroom are primarily seen as a source of distraction, 或者更糟, 一种背叛学术诚信的手段. 然而, I believe an even more pervasive and pernicious development is a cultural obsession prioritizing correctness over discovery. Arguing over baseball facts may well have been ultimately pointless, but it had value as a low-stakes exercise in 理解ing your own convictions well enough to communicate them persuasively to someone with different recollections.

The dominant framework guiding educational theory today is the 2001 revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, a hierarchical structure from supposedly low-cognition processes to high-cognition processes: remember, 理解, 应用, 分析, 评估, 创建. 从一个角度来看, ubiquitous networks sapped the foundation supporting the entire learning hierarchy; from another, they freed students’ cognitive cycles for the higher domains of learning processes. The tension between these two contradictory yet reasonable perspectives is one source of this unease.

Another component is the pushback against policies that set up students with a false choice between the successful completion of a 4-year college degree or a life of failure. 在他2009年的书中， Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work——马修·B. Crawford laments the abandonment of industrial arts from middle and high school curricula at the turn of the 21st century. He provides a strong argument that skilled manual labor professions offer a more promising future than white-collar jobs in an era of ubiquitous global 信息 networks.

An unlikely hero emerging to rescue widespread public technical education (not to discount the career training provided at community colleges, 在工作中, 在工会内部)是流媒体, 再加上全球零售供应链. 如果你家里的主要电器坏了, you can perform a search of the model number with a few words describing the symptoms and find several videos of regular people teaching you how to perform the repair—or at least how they got the thing working again. Given modest comfort with tools and the guts to see something get worse before it gets better, you can then order the replacement parts you need online at wholesale prices and have them at your house a day or two later, often a tolerable amount of time to go without an appliance.

免费获得高质量, volunteer-sourced, 即时培训百家乐软件是革命性的. 一些最好的视频老师不在大学工作, but are instead running channels on YouTube and providing expert instruction on how to repair cars, 房子, 和家电. Therein lies a serious problem for the public good: YouTube is a video platform corporation owned by history’s most successful advertising firm—not a library or public archive. Content producers out of step with the corporate mood risk de-monetization or de-platforming.

尽管发生了剧变, 我的结论和亚里士多德的结论一样,300 years ago: “The mark of an educated mind is the ability to consider any idea without adopting it.“你知道，他是这么说的. 在网上查一下.

[本文发表于2019年7月/ 8月号。 流媒体杂志 “沉浸式信息时代的教育”."]