I really loved The Screen Savers and have since taken a liking to Leo Laporte’s This Week In Tech. The show has been really good lately, fueled by some smart commentary and insight in regard to where technology fits in to this financial mess. In the most recent episode of the podcast (169: The Donkey Of The Week), the guys bring up something that I’ve been thinking of lately.
My wife is very good at finding information. Google has made finding things a breeze, but she has a real knack for knowing exactly what to type in the search field. She is incredibly adept at knowing the right question to ask. She is a virtual archaeologist.
In the latest episode of TWiT, the group discusses the best way to build the economy is by re-imagining education. Reading, writing, and arithmetic is important, but none of this “memorize these facts.” All of those facts don’t need to be memorized because they exist “in the cloud.” Instead of learning how to memorize what happened in 1929, we just need to know how to find it.
The skill that my wife has should be a highly desirable one to have, and it is a skill that needs to be emphasized more in schools. Cyberspace is the vast pool of information that exist in the cloud, in the publicly accessible banks of computer networks. In the Web 2.0 age of Google, crowdsourcing, and Wikipedia, information is omnipresent. You need to be able to use these tools to get the right information. I call someone who masters the act of asking questions to machines a Wayfinder. That word has this mystic quality—a shaman of the virtual realm. The Wayfinder is able to communicate with the Ghost in the Machine. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and now finding are the skills that need to be taught in schools.