Don Tapscott has a career based in thinking about how the technology of the modern net is going to have broad effects on society. Most of his work has been discussing how the business landscape is changed by these tools - massive collaboration, greater transparency, and such will (he argues) have substantial effects. He’s also thinking about what this means for education, and what exactly that education should consist of.

In the Telegraph (UK, not Nashua) today:

But for today’s youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries, according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott.

Tapscott, author of the best-selling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”, suggests a better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online.

The Canadian business executive said: “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

“Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates.

“It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google.”

This is an interesting assertion, but a bit more extreme than I’m comfortable with. I agree that it’s probably not necessary (and maybe never was) to memorize every piece of information I could ever need. But one of the things I keep becoming more aware of is how hard it is to synthesize large ideas without some of these bits already stored. Knowing about the Battle of Hastings without knowing when it was is not terribly useful.

I think what Tapscott is really getting at (I hope, anyway) is that it is more important to see the broad trends than to memorize every last date. But it’s also harder to fit new pieces of information into your model if you don’t have at least the important details to anchor new ideas to. In this case, knowing that the Battle of Hastings was around AD 1000 is probably sufficient accuracy… until you learn about something else that happened in 1066 and would get more out of it if you could make the temporal connection.

I know that over the last five-odd years my understanding of twentieth-century history has gotten miles better, and I think that part of this is that I finally have enough of a framework to actually synthesize new pieces of information. Not just “This happened in year X,” but “This happened just after this other thing, and that’s probably part of what fed into this other thing that happened shortly afterward.” Being able to abstract patterns from individual data points is a big chunk of understanding history, and it requires knowing these details that Tapscott is disparaging.

(Tapscott goes on to claim that the brains of members of “the net generation” are different than those of people a few generations older. I am, ah, dubious. Not getting into that today.)

I feel like this is in some ways equivalent to the “Why should I learn my times tables? I can use a calculator!” argument, that seems to bite people in the ass when they want to learn calculus, and struggle with the quick arithmetic involved in transforming and simplifying equations. And sure, there are calculators that can do integrals, but I should hope that the future engineers of the world have a grasp of what exactly is happening in their equations. And the way to get that is, I think, to actually walk through the steps. And to be able to walk through the steps you need to know your times tables.

There was a discussion of these ideas at Making Light a while ago. (Google found that link for me.) Several commenters pointed out that one piece of learning that’s very much facilitated by Google and Wikipedia is the jump from suspecting that there’s a connection between two events/people/inventions/etc to following up on that idea and getting relevant details. A couple decades ago, you’d’ve had to find a book, or several books, and actually read through lots of text to find the data you wanted. It would’ve been an entire research project, and more work for many people than idle curiosity warrants.

I suspect that one of the most interesting discussions in education in the next decade will be trying to figure out how much framework is required in order to be able to make use of new information, or to know what you need to look up. Google and Wikipedia do very little good unless you know that a piece of information exists. The change in how available basic facts are will, I expect, change our standards for what everyone memorizes in school, but by a lot less than Tapscott seems to think.