Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

The ease of getting information has made us lazy, I think. Maybe we don't retain it as well; it has become disposable. I mean, years ago if we wanted to find out how to fix a leaky faucet or if we wanted to know who Narcissus was, we'd have to go to the library, look through the card catalogue, maybe ask the librarian where to look, find the book, and read up on it. You'd think that if we wanted to know something that badly -- and went through all that trouble to learn it -- that we'd probably retain it. Or we wouldn't bother finding out at all because it wasn't worth the effort. Let me give an example: I ran across a word in a Steve Martini novel that I was reading. Cool word, I thought. I looked it up. I do that often at http://www.dictionary.com/ . The word meant a person having a homegrown, nontraditional kind of education. I didn't write the word down anywhere; now I can't remember the word and it's driving me crazy. Maybe if I had to go grab ...

Yesterday I went to an educational workship hosted by the DSBN. The speaker was Will Richardson from New Jersey. He said that the current education system is failing our children because we're not learnin' 'em about wiki's and twitter and netiquette and stuff. He said they're using it all, but they're using it badly and we're clueless. He made a strong case that our future (our present, really) will look very different than our not too distant past. He kept using the word "transparency" w.r.t. privacy. Ie. our concept of privacy will be radically different than what it once was. My head is still spinning as to why I should use twitter and delicious.com and wiki's and ustream.tv and on and on...