I’ve come across the presentation “Das Internet als Gesellschaftsbetriebssystem” (English: The Internet as Society Operating System), held by Gunter Dueck at the re:publica 2011 in Berlin. If you know German, you should watch the video, it’s a great piece in both content and presentation style!
While Dueck talks about different topics to show that the Internet is the lifeline of society, there’s one point that was of particular interest to me: how the Internet changes work, and what this means for education.
The Internet provides access to a lot of data. Information can be retrieved by anyone and anywhere. This means: Knowing something is what everybody can; knowledge is no longer giving us much advantage. Dueck asks: Who (e.g. a person behind a counter) can give you information that you couldn’t get by spending two hours researching on the Internet? The implication is that society is not divided between those who know and those who don’t but rather between professionals and unprofessionals. Professionals are those who have the (social) skills, for example a good teacher is the one who knows how to teach and guide their students, not the one with the most accurate factual knowledge. And talking about teachers: The education system should teach us how to be professionals, teach us the skills we require, not the knowledge.
While I do agree with Dueck that the ubiquity of information will render some jobs obsolete, I think that we need to define professionalism. It’s not just social skills or being able to lead. It’s true that general information is readily available, but we still need to be able to analyze, filter and interpret the information. From my experience, this, and mostly understanding the big picture and connecting the dots of your work is the most essential skill.
Thinking about coders, it means that e.g. by-hearting programming syntax and API specifications is not as important as being able to understand a problem and find a solution! And this indeed requires some background knowledge you can’t acquire with two hours and Google.
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