Is web 2.0 dumbing us down?

As some of you might know, I'm an avid listened of podcasts (mainly to make my daily hour long commute seem a little less wasteful). Two of the recent casts I listened to grabbed my specific attention.

The first is a presentation titled Republic 2.0 by Cass Sunstein. In this presentation mr. Sunstein explains the risks of web 2.0 to democracy. While the increased access to the expression and consumption of information and opinion seems like a wonderful thing, there are downsides to how we engage with blogs, wiki's and social networks. Due to the vast amount of information out there, but also because of the nature of these new social artifacts, we tend to expose ourselves only to information and opinions from those that we are close to (ideologically or otherwise). Research has shown that in homogeneous groups like these, polarization takes place: views and opinions become more singular and extreme.

This is a concern in itself, and something to keep in mind when considering aspects of our education system, such schools based on subgroups of our society over dimensions such as religion, class or even geography. The concern got a new dimension for me however after listening to one of the seminars of the Long Now Foundation In his talk, Ignore Confident Forecasters, Philip Tetlock shares some insights from his research on peoples ability to make appropriate predictions about complex future events (in this case in world politics). He found 2 types of thinking, leading to 2 distinct patterns of predictions. one group was classified as 'hedgehogs'. These were people that had a single specialism or conviction, and tried to explain everything in the world from this single perspective. The second group, the 'foxes' were more broad in their thinking, and the constructs they applied to solving problems. Foxes significantly outperformed the hedgehogs.

So this begs the question: If we allow ourselves to be exposed only to those views and people that we have sympathy with, something the web increasingly allows us to do, are we really depriving ourselves of the tools for a balanced and effective mental development?

Targets, procedures and learning

The idea that responsibility and creativity are slowly dying by neglect has bothered be for a while now. I've never really been able to put my finger on what the problem was, but now I have had some help by two very distinguished thinkers:

The first person to lift up some of the veil was Peter M. Senge. I recently read his book "The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization", which I thoroughly enjoyed. In it he discusses much about how people, but also organizations, learn. More importantly, he addresses why they often don't. A lot of that links back to the systems we use to enforce and measure. Systems that, by their constant need for satisfaction, lead us to shorty term symptom driven thinking and compliance, in stead of long term holistic and creative problem solving. I am looking forward to reading Dr. Senge's treaty on education "Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education", in which I hope to gain some insights in how to make changes to our education system in order to create an enviroment in which students are once again challenged to be creative, in stead of pummeled into being compliant.

Last Thursday I coincidentally had the opportunity to attend a lecture by one of our visiting professors: John Seddon. His crushing analysis of the effects of the target and regulation driven framework that is destroying much of our public services fitted seamlessly into the seeds sown by My earlier reading. I would recommend visiting the vanguard website to have a look at some resources or events that are planned.

I see lots of parallels between these management paradigms, and concepts that keep us busy in education. The discussions about formal and informal learning, the pros and cons of instructional design, and the problem of over-assessment all seem to be based in similar (mis-) conceptions over what makes us learn and thrive. There are parts in our education system, and more so even in the collection of professional bodies governing some of the qualifications and licenses, that seem to be tailored towards breeding armies of self-confirming professionals, in stead of critical and independent thinkers. And while this seems comfortable at first, I do believe we are slowly digging ourselves some enormous holes.

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Update: I gather that the podcast of John Seddon's talk is now available.