February 03, 2008

Surely, anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing

OwlsI'm in the Times Educational Supplement, in an article titled Artificial intelligence, dealing with cognition enhancement in schools. Perhaps not anything new for any of you who have read my other talks and papers, but at least I got the last word.

I think it is important to start thinking about what we actually want to do with education. Educators certainly have a lot of views on this, as do the public, but it might be worthwhile to start an ongoing debate about this between all the stakeholder groups (including the pupils) in the light of both the changes in information availability (not just more, but entirely different kinds and with different kinds of epistemology - wikiknowledge is different from other kinds in important ways) and cognition enhancement. Is education about knowledge acquisition? Or socialisation? Or bootstrapping kids into people with reasonable chances to live a good life? A competitive selection process or a cooperative effort? Depending on what people come up with, very different systems and applications of cognition enhancement are needed.

Posted by Anders3 at February 3, 2008 02:45 PM
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