I thought it might be good to recall what we were talking about at the top of the topic —
QUOTE(Herschelkrustofsky @ Tue 8th March 2011, 1:35am)
Obama has been hanging out with Bill and Melinda Gates (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/cthulhu.gif) , and other
persons who really care about education. Their consensus seems to be that all those people who said that a high student-to-teacher ratio was harmful were wrong, and that we can really think about getting rid of a lot of those teachers and replacing them with on-line instruction. With increasing emphasis on drill-and-grill and other regressive educational techniques, does this not put Wikipedia in more significant role as an educational [ahem] resource?
The question is not about the potential of IT to educate, inform, and even inspire, or at least to catalyze, facilitate, and support the same. That ship sailed a long time ago, and those of us who were all aboard when it left the dock know that its potential has been actualized with all the wimper not a bang of previous generations of educational technology, from AV to TV.
The question is whether some Harvard dropout — and his crew of better lawyers than programmers — just because he made a bazillion bucks with his viral spreadsheet program, really knows more about education than all those saps who actually wasted their time going to school to learn what they're teaching about, and who just keep on doing the job, day in day out, year after year, taking all the crap that our Corporate Owned Government and Corporate Owned Media can dump on their heads while they're too busy grading papers to talk back.
That is the question.
Jon Awbrey