Week 1 Reflection

When reading Michael Wesch’s 2009 article, From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments, for ADLT 641, I recognized numerous relevant parallels to Eduard Lindeman’s 1926 work, The Meaning of Adult Education, which I was introduced to in ADLT 702.

Lindeman notes:
Many educators who have come to realize that most of their subject-matter disappears from the minds of students shortly after graduation fall back upon the consolation that at least students have been disciplined – they will know how to find knowledge even if they do not possess it.
Wesch notes:
As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.
As evidenced by these two assertions, well-honed skills of a life-long learning remain relevant and necessary. In this case, Wesch builds upon Lindeman’s observations.

Lindeman notes:
Preoccupation with the content of education has so far overbalanced pedagogical thought that schoolmen now find their center of interest in curriculum-making: the process of transforming the school into a department-store bargain counter.
Wesch notes:
Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you ‘take’ and, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it.”
As evidenced by these two comments, content delivered by subject remains pervasive in education. In this case, Wesch echoes Lindeman’s sentiments.

Lindeman notes:
Authoritative teaching, examinations which preclude original thinking, rigid pedagogical formulae – all of these have no place in adult education. “Friends educating each other” says Yeaxlee…
Wesch notes:
For at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating.
As evidenced by these two notations, the hierarchical top-down transmission of content from expert to novice is not successful in adult education and a more successful strategy involving peer-to-peer discussion can be implemented with new technologies. In this case, Wesch offers an answer to Lindeman’s assertion.

Considering these works were composed/published more than 80 years apart, how far have we come?