Tuesday, September 27, 2011

rethinking education


Video - part of the tower and the cloud, higher education in the era of cloud computing

6 comments:

Big Don said...

There is one helluva big danger here for continuity of knowledge over the millennia.  Consider if the early Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Chinese had all there knowledge stored only in modern digital format, and a subsequent dark age (nukes & EMPs??) had wiped out all the access/reading machinery (computers, monitors, routers, drives, software), how much of that  knowledge could ever be extracted and restored by a subsequent civilizations'  (WTF-is-this?) archaeologists looking at a few surviving HDs, DVDs, and SD cards...??  Probably damn near zero.  It's bad enuff today on the early stuff where scholars are really guessing about interpretations for a lot of it even though the artifacts are "readable"...

If knowledge goes this way, you really need Hard Copy of Everything stored as Backups in survivable vaults at different locations...

CNu said...

This happens anyway Don.

There are no reliable translations of Egyptian or Mayan heiroglyphics nothwithstanding the permanence of the same. Hard copy is less the answer than literacy and continuity of literacy depends on continuity of a culture of competence. Oral tradition is vastly more survivable than anything these humans elect to store and r

Big Don said...

Oral ain't very reliable, every re-telling distorts it.  BD is thinking of these experiments in psychology classes where Student 1 tells a story to Student 2, in private, and 2 tells it to 3, etc. then the last recipient compares his story with the original, (ROTFL).  BD was in one of these way back when.  It was particularly funny since there were a couple of foreign students in the class with limited English skills and scant knowledge of American slang/traditions.  Virtually nothing survived of the original story.

One of the recent Subrealistic Thrusts has been the Paucity of Energy looming down the road.  There has been some focus recently in the media over the vast energy needs of modern server farms, e.g., Google has a large one on the Oregon side of the Columbia River hard-wired to an adjacent hydroelectric facility akin to Grand Coulee Dam, 100's of megawatts.  What happens when sufficient power is no longer available to handle all the exponential growth of information created?  Not to mention what is routinely lost forever in software glitches for lack of backups.  BD seems to recall when Subrealism migrated comments to Disqus, comments on all the earlier posts failed to make the trip...???  A lot of good stuff is gonna be permanently lost when pieces of The Cloud fail, are there really backups somewhere e.g. for each of those YouTube videos...??

nanakwame said...

It sure allowed us to find the Dead Sea Scrolls. It sure shows how memory and intelligence was developed by earlier scholars, where now we have augmented sources of memory.

umbrarchist said...

I decided education was the acquisition of relevant knowledge long ago.  Wading thru thousands of people blather about mostly unimportant crap, much of which is wrong, does not strike me as educational.

They could have made a National Recommended Reading List decades ago.  Is the Internet just a new way to bullsh#?  The problem is the same as it always was, QUALITY OF INFORMATION.

Big Don said...

Hey!  You get all the juicy stuff MSM won't touch because it's Politically Incorrect...

Africom Expelled From Niger Just Like Little French Bishes...,

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