these days you can spend your entire days watching discovery channel/surfing the web and aquire all sort of knowledge.
20 years ago,you had to have had “hands on” experience to be credible in a discussion
therefore…is knowledge less worthy?
Only in the same sense that money is worth less than twenty years ago thanks to inflation. Sure, a dollar bill doesn’t buy you as much candy, but there are still rich people and poor people.
I don’t think knowledge is any less worthy but our means of acquiring it are different. It’s very easy for someone to gain a basic insight into a topic by watching a few TV shows and surfing the internet. I know some people on these boards scorn Wikipedia but I think it’s one of the best things about the internet. Sure, you have to take it with a pinch of salt and get another source, but it has got me interested in so many topics that I otherwise would have known nothing about. I wish it had been around when I was at university - how useful that would have been! I think the fantastic thing about the acquisition of knowledge is the ongoing democratisation of it. A hundred years ago the possibility of higher education was limited to an elite in rich Western countries. Now the internet is increasing the opportunity for people to learn more and more about a vast range of subjects. I don’t think many people fifty years ago would have foreseen legions of computer programmers from India, the most sophisticated technology coming not just from Europe and the US but also from the Far East and the people in my university class from Singapore, Mexico, Iran and Morocco as well as the UK. Naturally I’m not trying to pretend it’s a utopian world with opportunity for all, but the growing possibility of learning for many parts of the world can only be a good thing.
Of course people will say there is some value in having to work hard to achieve knowledge, but what does this actually mean? To gain a good understanding into a given subject is still hard, whatever the source of the learning is. To me it’s irrelevant whether you go to a centralised university or learn from the internet and TV, to become an expert in linguistics, physics, economics or French requires a great deal of dedication and not a small amount of talent.
So, is knowledge now more accessible to more people? Yes. Does that devalue the acquisition of that knowledge? Not at all.
There is more information nowadays, you can watch a programme on a different country each week. But you could argue that that information is not so deep. You will gain more understanding on Tanzania living there for a week than you could in an hour watching TV. As they said on Star Trek “To be a thing is to know a thing”.
People travel and watch more TV/Internet than 100 years ago, so people are a lot more educated than then.
That rudimentary infopop you see on the Discovery Channel and its ilk used to be taught in schools.
I think that u need to define knowledge a little more. I think practical knowledge is far more valuable than theoretical knowledge. Whilst your argument that people are much more knowledgeable than 20 years ago is correct, I believe this is generally theoretical knoweldge.
IMHO this is the reason that whilst the whole world may know much more than it did, it doesn’t seem to have gotten any wiser. It is the application of knowledge that is the foundation for wisdom.
Knowledge has and always will be useless. It’s what you do with what you got that counts (to me.)
[quote=“dablindfrog”]these days you can spend your entire days watching discovery channel/surfing the web and aquire all sort of knowledge.
20 years ago,you had to have had “hands on” experience to be credible in a discussion
therefore…is knowledge less worthy?[/quote]
From Anderson & Krathwohl, four types of knowledge:
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Factual knowledge (basic elements: knowledge of terminology; specific details and information)
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Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements in a larger structure: knowledge of classifications and categories; principles and generalizations; theories, models, and structures)
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Procedural knowledge (how to do something: knowledge of subject-specific skills; techniques and methods; criteria for determining use of appropriate procedures)
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Metacognitive knowledge (thinking about one’s own thinking: strategic knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge about cognition)
And what you know (knowledge) is distinct from how you think (cognitive processes). Depending on whose rubric you value, the latter may involve six levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
Factual knowledge has indeed grown by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, and Internet access has doubtless helped many people acquire new procedural skills. But whether such knowledge has had any effect on conceptual knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, or cognition / critical thinking in general is far from clear. So I would say that “knowledge” is worth far more now than ever – how otherwise to deal with all the factual data we’re inundated with?
It HAS lead to an increase in over-opinionated dickheads though.
I know a few wikipedia wunderkinds.
[quote=“TomHill”]It HAS lead to an increase in over-opinionated dickheads though.
I know a few wikipedia wunderkinds.[/quote]
Hence the problem of the scales being heavily tipped in favor of factual knowledge. Wikipedia, after all, doesn’t conceptualize knowledge (concepts sit on an equal footing with facts), nor is it concerned with skill development or metacognition –you can fill your head with wiki facts but it’s still only ever going to be one form of knowledge. Actually, as Taffy mentioned above and we discussed on the wikipedia thread, there’s the question of whether Wikipedia even represents accurate factual knowledge in the first place…
[quote=“TomHill”]It HAS lead to an increase in over-opinionated dickheads though.
I know a few wikipedia wunderkinds.[/quote]
that’s what prompted me to make this thread to begin with.
last night i was in a bar,for the first time in years,and on the screens was “discovery channel”
with many glued to the telly…
i remember,long time ago,bars were filled with knowledgeable wannabes,not pint holding students 
As far as getting a job is concerned - yes. A generation ago all you needed was a college degree, in any subject, to land a comfortable middle-class sinecure. It didn’t matter even if it was a B.A. in Philosophy, you could still get a decent job because people assumed that anyone who had enough brains to graduate from college surely had enough brains to run a rinky-dinky middle management position, at least. These days, college degrees are barely worth the paper they’re printed on. In fact, back in the old days a generation or two ago, most journalists had barely graduated from highschool, and learned their trade on the streets. Nowadays to be a “qualified” teacher you have to throw a year of your life away on a meaningless “Education” degree, whereas back in the day anyone who knew Biology was given a shot at being the highschool science teacher, only a humble B.A. was required. Degree-ification is one of the annoying banes of modern society.
As people become more and more educated, your value as a knowledgable person decreases. Before the internet, there weren’t many Westerners who came to Taiwan. Your value as an English-speaking white person was immense 10 to 20 years ago. Now that more people are knowledgable about the easy money to be made in Asia, your value has decreased because now you’re just one of the horde. And I am not just talking about English teachers - businesspeople trying to invest have also gotten stampeded over.
[quote=“mod lang”]As far as getting a job is concerned - yes. A generation ago all you needed was a college degree, in any subject, to land a comfortable middle-class sinecure. It didn’t matter even if it was a B.A. in Philosophy, you could still get a decent job because people assumed that anyone who had enough brains to graduate from college surely had enough brains to run a rinky-dinky middle management position, at least. These days, college degrees are barely worth the paper they’re printed on. In fact, back in the old days a generation or two ago, most journalists had barely graduated from highschool, and learned their trade on the streets. Nowadays to be a “qualified” teacher you have to throw a year of your life away on a meaningless “Education” degree, whereas back in the day anyone who knew Biology was given a shot at being the highschool science teacher, only a humble B.A. was required. Degree-ification is one of the annoying banes of modern society.
[/quote]
IMO that’s a good thing,the prospect of your own kids getting education by someone who knows barely more than the parents is scary,
incompetence is rife here in taiwan,if you’re english native or ABC you lend a “teaching” job very easily,which is a shame because the few real professionals here get tarred with the same brush
if the situation was the same 2 generations ago in our respective homeland,it’s only right that it got sorted out.
i can’t see anyone other than language/education workers getting a rougher time
nowadays or 50 years ago,a SERIOUS business person who could not speak chinese would have paid for a translator,different times same actions,so yes,if it’s harder for anyone,it’s gotta be the education workers
This looks interesting…
[quote=“smell the glove”]
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Factual knowledge (basic elements: knowledge of terminology; specific details and information)
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Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements in a larger structure: knowledge of classifications and categories; principles and generalizations; theories, models, and structures)
-
Procedural knowledge (how to do something: knowledge of subject-specific skills; techniques and methods; criteria for determining use of appropriate procedures)
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Metacognitive knowledge (thinking about one’s own thinking: strategic knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge about cognition)[/quote]
I can’t argue with this, and in each case of these knoweldge groups, as you go down you become closer to can I say “true knowledge?”
However as you move further down it becomes less objective and more subjective. This makes it much harder to pass that knowledge on to someone else and I’ll use an analogy with each number below corresponding to the above
- I know people kitesurf
- I know the kite interacts with the wind enabling it to pull you through the water, whilst the board creates an effective interface between yourself and the water
- My body knows automatically what to do during each slight nuance of the wind or how I should twist in the water to turn around.
- I can imagine/create based on all of the above a way to improve my skill not just in my mind but as it happens. (actually a better example of number 4 is people who have the ability to create music on the fly such as jazz players)
The point of all of this is that 1 and 2 can quite easily be taught / explained to other people, whilst the last 2 need to be experienced. You can’t learn it over the internet or see it on TV.
[quote=“smell the glove”]
And what you know (knowledge) is distinct from how you think (cognitive processes). Depending on whose rubric you value, the latter may involve six levels: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
Factual knowledge has indeed grown by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, and Internet access has doubtless helped many people acquire new procedural skills. But whether such knowledge has had any effect on conceptual knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, or cognition / critical thinking in general is far from clear. So I would say that “knowledge” is worth far more now than ever – how otherwise to deal with all the factual data we’re inundated with?[/quote]
Nice… I pretty much explained the same thing in a different way. IMHO Taiwanese seem better at the first two than most people that I know back home. But as for applying, analyzing, evaluation and creating…I think we’re miles ahead.
[quote=“TomHill”]It HAS lead to an increase in over-opinionated dickheads though.
I know a few wikipedia wunderkinds.[/quote]
But I much prefer over-opionated people to people who are so openminded that they just don’t have an opinion on anything. I like the challenge of meeting someone with an intelligent and different opinion to myself because often someone goes away either learning something new or having a greater understanding of another way of looking at things. Perhaps you come away wiser believing something else.
No, it’s all professions that require more education than a generation ago. It’s part of the process of moving from an industrialized to information age economy. Even the guy who changes the oil in cars for a living, he has to go to VoTech just to get his foot in the door. Driving a truck - you have to go to trucking school these days, get yourself certified. A generation ago such requirements were not necessary for such blue collar jobs, but these days the only jobs that do not require degrees are behind the counter at Stop’n’Rob or waiting tables.
As for the businessmen, before the internet and globalization, there were very few Westerners doing much business in most of Asia. So the few that did come over had it supereasy - your stereotypical English colonial sipping pink gin on the verandah, who couldn’t hack it back home but lives a life of leisure in the Orient. Now that there are hordes of white people doing business in Asia, the competition is much stiffer. Also, MBAs are a recent innovation. A generation or so ago, almost no one had an MBA. Now corporations won’t look a resume unless you have one.
That is not entirely true. If a teacher has a degree in English or Geology, then that teacher knows more about that specific subject that they were hired to teach, than the parents (unless those parents have degrees in the same subject and use them daily in their lives, ex. the parents are actual geologists excavating stones.) An Education degree is superflous to a teaching career. Like most jobs, teaching is best learned hands-on from experience, and wasting a year learning theory isn’t going to help you with that. All an Education course teaches you is to be fluent in educational theory; in other words, it teaches you basically nothing that is useful. It’s just a piece of paper. But mere pieces of paper are worth a lot these days, no matter how practical or useful they are in real life.
There are those who say it’s a form of progression from “lower-order” to “higher-order.” More to the point, though, knowledge and cognition interrelate in a very interesting way: you can remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and even create factual knowledge; ditto with conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. On the practical level, you can chart this in columns and rows, and many educators do precisely that: their objectives and measures are targeted at a specific type of knowledge at a specific level of cognition - the assessments fit the methods which fit the contents which fit the goals (and to do otherwise is to be mucking about). You could have endless fun (maybe) just breaking the teaching of English down this way, just as you could the independent learning of virtually anything – and just how far TV and the Internet can take you any which way.
Agreed. Furthermore, factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge usually have standard “correct” answers, but metacognitive knowledge does not. Metacognition can be taught (for example, by encouraging people to become more conscious of their beliefs), but conclusions will invariably and necessarily be subjective.
I’m not so sure about that. The first sentence, that is. As was alluded to in the OP, it’s what you do with knowledge that counts, and the focus of education here tends to be on factual knowledge and on lower-order cognition. The six levels I mentioned have subdivisions. At the lowest level, “remember” means recognizing and/or retrieving knowledge from long-term memory. Going one level up, “understand” means interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and/or explaining. Sure, lots of memorization occurs in Taiwan, but it’s possible to (A) memorize for the short-term only and (B) memorize something without understanding it. So there is some deficiency in the first two, to say nothing of applying, analyzing, evaluation and creating (each of which has its own subdivisions). Might the same be said of the Wikipedia generation?
Metacognition couldn’t be described any better. Such a difference from those who make up their minds long before arriving at the discussion table.