footprints in the sand

[miriam_e]

I've seen something that has turned my world upside down, but excited me... even scared me a little too -- perhaps how Robinson Crusoe would have felt, finding those footprints on the beach after he'd been stranded on that island.

All my life I have felt a kind of order in the universe. Life is special. It self-organises and propagates. And intelligence evolves from life. We are how the universe learns about itself. Life is the most important thing. And learning is the second most important thing, because learning is the foundation for intelligence. All other things, money, politics, tradition, are not even dirt beside those. Where they aid life and learning they can be tolerated. When they get in the way of them they are a complete waste of time.

Suddenly I realised something crucial. I have always had something of a fetish for knowledge. I read and learn constantly. And today I saw the footprints. The world is not as I'd thought. If I'd thought about it the right way I'd have seen it earlier. In fact I've nibbled around the edges... but never really tasted it.

Data is no longer paramount.

A great shock to me. After life itself I'd always held it highest. But the evidence has been around us for a long time, and gradually strengthening. I used to get yanked out of my chair by my ear in primary school by my bully of a teacher when I couldn't remember my times table. I still find it difficult to do simple maths, but who cares? I have a calculator. I can calculate cube roots now with ease. I daily manipulate vast matrices of data in creating virtual worlds. I don't need to remember all that data. I just need to understand why. Okay, so that is knowledge too, but it is knowledge of a different kind; it is understanding.

So, today it is becoming important to understand rather than to be able to store data. We have machines to store data. I carry a pendant smaller than my thumb that can hold about ten thousand paperbacks!!! I can log in to Wikipedia and uncover facts any time I need, and look further on the wider net or in my thousands of paper books. Simple data is now secondary.

We have moved to a new level. Knowledge about knowledge is now what is important. Understanding how to use data. Remember this next time some moron politician tries for a kneejerk response by pushing the button marked 'literacy and numeracy rates'. They are missing the point entirely. Being able to remember your times table in the middle of a computer revolution is irrelevant. Access to data and knowing how to use it is what is important.

The first speech recognition system that doesn't need to be trained has hit the shelves of shops. Dyslexia is being de-fanged. An inability to write is not such a problem anymore. When we get systems that turn text into fluent speech (a more difficult task, but coming closer) literacy will no longer hold the power to make or break a child's future.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Data are facts that we keep in our head or in hard drives. Understanding is knowing what several pieces of data put together mean. Learning is knowing how many pieces of data that are related to each other relate to other data that seem similar or dissimilar. We have had the ability to other things besides our brain to keep ideas and information (abacus, writing, counting, markings, etc.) Humans have used ways to keep track of what they know and to add more to it. What we can do now that we have not been able to do before is to take huge numbers of facts and data and cross compare them or compute them quickly and simultaneously. That frees the human brain to be more creative in its thinking about facts but we still need to know enough about the facts to draw conclusions and make inferences. More people have access to more ideas and information than ever because of the computer and the internet. People still need to know - which ideas and information are the correct ones to use for a question or subject; what other related ideas may be used to help see further implications; how to search for related or more correct ideas we may need, how to access the data; how to organize many different ideas together. Critical thinking is now needed by more people than ever before to make so much data pay off. Having access to so many facts quickly thru machines is of little good if you have no idea of how to draw good conclusions that can be supported by research. We still need to learn to learn, to think and organize. I've been working on a project that helps people learn how to learn better (www.slssystem.com), realizing that more of us need to learn more ideas and how to put them together not just for our sake but for the good of the community. You need to know where to go and how to get there.