A question was raised in an interview on one of my favourite radio stations, Triple J, more specifically the John Safran and Father Bob show. They usually talk about religious topics, not that I have a single religious thought in my mind, (as in, you could call me an atheist, but that wouldn’t even phase me, so don’t waste your time) but sometimes they talk about current topics out in society. This time however they were discussing with a guest about how the content on the internet is really only out there if you have the correct tools to access it, and even then, it takes quite a great deal of labour to track information down. They argued if this effect, of concentrating on new tools and web related products, was heightening users degree of creativity and even intelligence.

But where does it leave us? Does the Internet really provide us with a great educational tool, or merely an ad-hoc problem and solution fixer? Also do I need to spend years in web related technology courses in order to know how to track down a proper educational path? Now to be fair, the individual they interviewed was heavily biased to the side that the Internet is written by authors that know nothing, the content is highly unedited and un-edit-able, there is no sense of professional or credible content. Claiming Wikipedia (the awesome tool we all use to fudge information for our papers due in 2 hours time) was nothing more than an invalid pool of information.

This struck a deep and dirty chord for me, how dare he bash such an amazing tool like Wikipedia. But it got me thinking. The information on the web is highly unstructured. I mean, you rely on web spiders to trawl the Internet looking for content that they want or what they see as valid, which works really damn well! But I admit, if I am learning a new topic, it can be quite hard to research through a wide array of blog posts and even then, I don’t know if what I am reading is in fact correct or what I am after, do I? I mean I am learning!

So after a few minutes of brainpower, I came up with the dilemma of deciding whether the internet empowers us as a learning tool, which could someday replace the annoying teacher, blackboard and the apple on the desk, or if it was merely a tool that was making us all specialists. We seek out information on the Internet, it’s not like we go looking for something we’re not interested in, unless we are told to, for example a university or school assignment. We do however love to spend hours upon hours looking up information we like to learn about. We even look through Wikipedia to learn about topics that we consider important to us that you would not find out in the general public quite easily, including at school.

But is this a good thing? Well I see what the radio presenter was trying to do here. He would like to see the Internet be the be all and end all, and because that it isn’t at the moment, in terms of a one-stop digital education shop, he is bashing its usage. However I think that encouraging specialist knowledge is in fact not a bad thing at all. Is it really necessary to learn the Italian or Russian languages at school, when you might be interested in how to calculate the melting point of a particular metal, or the frequency of frog mutations in the Amazonian jungle? I would in fact argue that it is important to encourage specialist knowledge, it enhances the ability for individuals to be deployed as expert bots within a problem, and this would only heighten the cost-effectiveness of HR and efficiency of the departments/organisation.

I don’t want to sound too first year business degree here, however I learnt very little expert knowledge from my 12 years of schooling, and it wasn’t until I got home from school I could learn about what I really wanted, web design, development and computing technology. I think it is important to discover these inner drives within our children, and drop them like one of those skill tester toys into an environment that will allow their interests and learning to thrive! Yes, school bashing time.