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September 19, 2017 at 9:34 pm #1093Holly GilbertParticipant
For me, one of the most startlingly relevant issues was brought up in “The Informative Content of Education.” Wells specifically details his concerns over the ability of educational institutions to impart crucial knowledge to learners, outside of specific needs like teaching to read and write, musical training, physical education, etc. He asks, “As educators we are going to ask what is the subject-matter of a general education? What do we want known? And how do we want it known? What is the essential framework of knowledge that should be established in the normal citizen of our modern community?”
These questions continue to be core concerns for education worldwide, and very specifically, for a liberal arts institution like SUNY Geneseo – right as we speak. How do we evolve to balance the increasing need for students to have professional development and/or technical training with the goal of producing the kind of informed, well-rounded, and participating citizen Wells discusses in this reading? Wells speaks of the dangers of economic illiteracy, nationalism, and the ease with which the population is swayed to one idea or the other without having the tools to properly evaluate the world around them. It’s hard to argue that much headway has been made in this direction since the 1930s, even with what educational shifts we have made.
Wells’ ideas haven’t gone completely unrealized; I feel like universities and high schools have evolved over the past few decades to expand their canons and reduce ethnocentric focuses. Yet the world of today is likely shifting even faster than that of the 1930s, and his concerns about the inability of education to keep up with modern needs still ring very true.
September 14, 2017 at 8:31 pm #1075Holly GilbertParticipant- Like Phoebe and Zack, I never really considered the mathematical basis for the creation of a computer. Much of the time, I don’t even think of the term “computer” as “something that computes,” despite the fact that human workers and simpler machines have always been computers; I just associate the word with the mysterious machine I use every day. The article made the development of today’s technology feel much less magical – clearly, years of thought, logical development, and groundbreaking theories all built this possibility. Turing and Shannon may not have conceived the idea of a modern computer, but they certainly laid the tracks.
- The association of information with uncertainty, as the author of the article warns, seemed counterintuitive at first. The idea that information isn’t increased, according to Shannon, by adding more and more pieces (I almost wanted to write information and had to find a substitute, to further the point), is almost opposite of how I’m accustomed to thinking of it. Yet the idea that we cannot glean as much from redundancies helps shift this – information is what better helps us understand, or Shannon’s case, better helps with cryptography. This does not mean that extra material necessarily becomes information once we remove the everyday meaning.
September 12, 2017 at 11:20 pm #1060Holly GilbertParticipant- The difficulty of defining an entirely new and unfamiliar concept with underdeveloped language was something I was surprised by as I read the essay – I guess that when new terms are developed now, it feels so intuitive. The only way I could wrap my head around this was to remember what it’s like to try to communicate with someone in a foreign language you are barely proficient in. If you’re lacking the words, communication can fail.
- Metadata discusses some of the challenges of defining and categorizing complex data with a controlled vocabulary (such as the Library of Congress uses in its metadata), and this was reflected in Cawdrey’s struggle to build a type of controlled vocabulary for the English language. For metadata, this can be tackled by not only using lists of usable terms to categorize data, but also by using thesauri to develop relationships and links. As the essay discusses, Cawdrey (unlike those working with online information, he was all alone, with few organizational standards) had a rough time developing a system as efficient with a language constantly in flux and plenty of circular, unclear, and underdeveloped definitions.
- The essay suggests that our increased interconnectedness is causing language to evolve constantly, making me wonder what it really takes for a new term or word to latch on and eventually become part of the lexicography. Chance, exposure, catchiness, necessity, etc.?
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