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Summary of last weeks Brain Play session

First of all we would like to thank everyone who attended last week’s Brain Play session ‘On Knowledge Exchange and Educative Praxis’, and especially a big Thank you to Mary Ensor, Chris Skilton and Lucy A Sames for sharing their experiences and opinions!

Below you can find some of the questions and conclusions that the audience and speakers reached over the duration of the talk while trying to contextualise knowledge in regard to their own experiences and practices.

Knowledge is tied to perception. Knowledge has cross-cultural implications, which is especially important to consider when it comes to knowledge transfer. Bringing something that you know and practice in one place, may not be effective at all in another. This means that knowledge can be divorced from practice and be taken out of eco-systems (eg. advertising; mother with a deaf child not taking the offered sign language course), which then questions the usefulness of knowledge if inapplicable, especially with the internet around.

Another example is when engineers went to a remote village in Uganda and installed a well to prevent the female residents from traveling 2 hours to fetch water. The intention was to make their life easier by having a well in the middle of the village rather than having the women travel for it. A year later the engineers came back to discover the well was not used as the women found their walk to the river too culturally important.

Educational memory vs. emotional memory. Can factual memory only stick with us because we have a emotional bond to it, or do we need to build a emotional relationship with hard ideas for us to remember?

New ways to approach education. Whilst beforehand it was important to possess a skill and one has room to explore, we are now contextualising education almost to a degree where curiosity is being shunned, meaning we get more and more specialized with people studying/working in isolation, being brilliant in one field of work, but less successful as an overall engineers to solve overall problems.

This can be linked to our schooling, in which the drawback of the university setting is so divorced from the reality of life, that the people in the university context are not bringing the practical grounding that the knowledge is based in. Does this mean that the current ‘typical’ education system is based on memory learning rather than understanding – or can playful memory learning turn into knowledge, a prime example Ed Cooke’s ‘Memrise’. Or should we be teaching inquisitive- and creativeness as part of the curriculum, whichever subject (sciences, languages, etc). Especially as creativity and creative ability is educated out of many people during their schooling. (eg. Ken Robinson’s TED talk)

Is using the internet a new and better way of learning? Even though pieces of information are now so easily and quickly accessible our brains have become lazy, maybe even because of it. School systems are changing faster and faster, however we seem to have forgotten to teach the basic skills of problem solving and the tools one needs to do so – teach children to develop the brain, make them cope with problems and find solutions themselves. Should internet forums be seen as a new, non-hierarchical alternative to peer-to-peer learning systems, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a student and a teacher at the same time? Use Open Source as an example, everyone can comment on a topic, however does everybody have a worthwhile opinion about everything, or should we start following a voting system similar to Amazon/Ebay sellers, where we start voting for great ‘teachers’, and moderate it?

One only learns if one is ready to learn. The prime example of this is Summerhill School. A S Neill (founder) is best known as an advocate of personal freedom for children, and students only need to attend classes only once they want to and feel ready for it.

Without trial and error we don’t get anywhere. Everything has started with not knowing. Whether is the Wright Brothers building airplanes, Edison to lightbulbs, Da Vinci and many more examples. All these people were not afraid to make mistakes, and didn’t mind their world becoming a little messy.

Time. It always takes a while to get good at stuff. “It took us 150 years to work out that a peer-reviewed journal was a good idea. It took someone 5 years to work out that pornographic novels were a good idea after the printing press was invented.”