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September 20, 2017 at 2:51 pm #1101Jack SnyderParticipant
Wells’ chief complaints about the education system revolve around people’s lack of understanding of politics, and their “crazy combative patriotism” which is at odds with our sense of humanity and is not at all beneficial to the world. Wells’ proposed lesson plan for teaching children only the most important knowledge during their limited time at school seems to revolve around promoting a sense of unity and accuracy. Wells wants to get rid of studying the bible and the un-necessary violence of our world history; Wells would rather focus on building an accurate and well-rounded picture of the current world, growing from general world-knowledge to specialized scientific/societal information later on in adolescence. Wells also wants to modernize teachers through further learning in adult life, keeping them up to date and continuing their learning through new experiences or jobs. Finally, Wells concludes by stating that the arts are excluded from his model of education because children should be experiencing them on their own time, and they can only truly enjoy their own lives if they have the informational background he outlines.
I think that a lot of Wells’ complaints are still valid and applicable today. I definitely believe that the strong sense of patriotism we have in America is at odds with efficient progression as a nation. Combative patriotism means fighting to maintain one’s worldview so that one can continue believing that their nation is great, regardless of its actual status. This is an illogical and detrimental perspective, and so it makes more sense to build children up with an objective appreciation of the world such that we can learn from other nations and prevent the establishment of blind and “combative” patriotism.
I also think that teaching objectively and factually is an issue we face today. Misinformation and “fake news” is extremely prevalent, with people staying in their own information bubbles through news outlet loyalty and closed social media communities. Teaching children accurately and keeping adults informed objectively is the dream, but that is harder than ever given the massive amounts of information and misinformation in our bubbles, and the fragmented trust in news coverage and news journalism.
September 17, 2017 at 4:30 pm #1084Jack SnyderParticipant- Bush tackles the issue of getting lost in the massive amounts of new research that is constantly being done and developed at such a rate where it is impossible to keep up with it all. Bush’s proposed “memex” would allow people to have a library at their fingertips, with the ability to browse through documents, and to even find and share one’s trains of thought through various linked articles. Bush essentially imagines a system which browses through metadata to find desired information and keeps track of past actions for ease of use.
- Bush proposed that the interface would be able to build “a trail of many items,” tying relevant articles to each other for future reference, ease of access, and ease of sharing. This would allow researchers to share their own findings and attach it to other relevant research for others to find. This would build an ever-growing web of related research, building a “record of ideas,” and ensuring that important findings do not get lost in the massive amount of increasingly specialized research.
September 15, 2017 at 1:34 pm #1080Jack SnyderParticipant- Before this reading I’d thought of computers in a more physical sense with parts and software that reads, writes, or executes code on a hard-drive using its other parts. I dont know how I would change my definition, but I can definitely say that Alan Turing breaking down computers into such a simple machine in a thought experiment was very interesting. That is in essence what a mathematical proof is, so its an interesting origin to computer logic, and adds to my understanding of how computers work at their core.
- Before this reading I had thought of information as a fact or statement that is certain – like data. Shannon’s definition of information in the reading was interesting because it described information as the potential for learning new things, associating it with uncertainty in messages and entropy. This makes sense to me in the context of Turing’s computer model, aligning with how inputs write onto a blank slate – the blank spots contain the potential for information based on the input of the original message, and so the infinite amount of empty space represents the potential for computations and the potential for information. This perspective of data can be applied to the 128GB of space that can be used on a computer to store an infinite amount of possible code/information in the 1,024,000,000,000 bits. I think that my definition of information is alright for practical and tangible data, but Shannon’s definition of information is more useful for learning new things or considering intangible possibilities for data. Each definition has its own use case.
September 13, 2017 at 11:07 am #1065Jack SnyderParticipant- Fact in the chapter that most surprised me was that the OED, proposed to be a perfect record of the English language, contained so many variations of different words’ spellings. The OED lists “every form in which a word has occurred throughout its history,” which makes sense from a preservationist’s perspective, and yet still feels strangely counter-intuitive for a dictionary. Emphasizing the “most common current spelling” works to keep the dictionary historically accurate while still making the OED useful for finding the current ‘correct’ spelling of the word.
- One connection I found was The Erya from China being like a directory where everything organized by category. The lists of words were not arranged not by the word and an attempt to pin its definition, but by the thing as it existed in the world (the things for which they stood), and this is similar to how a computer’s directory is ordered.
- By the end of the chapter I was wondering what a modern day attempt at The Erya would look like for the English language. Defining every word does seem like an impossible task with the ever expanding definitions of ‘current’ words, but organizing the words/concepts into relevant groups should be possible.
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