Learn to Change, Change to Learn

February 8th, 2009

I was just making one last pass before heading to bed for the night on Delicious . Then I came across a very thought provoking YouTube video, titled “Learn to Change, Change to Learn“.

The people in the video talk about the fundamental problems with our current standard way of education and how a lot of it blocks technology from enhancing the potentials of having technology enhance education. It also hits on a key point about how a lot of our education is a “right answer, vending machine approach”. We are taught to study study study the material and facts into our brains so we can memorize things to output on tests. In reality, most jobs don’t work this way, so why is this our primary method of learning?

From my roughly 6 months of working at IBM I have experienced this first hand. At anytime, I haven’t had to output things I’ve memorized. If I was ever stuck or confused, I researched methods, asked colleagues, and brought up references in order to solve the problem. I also systematically work on my debugging approach of certain problems which I know are common. All of these skills in my opinion are miles more important than being able to store a vast amount of information into your brain- only to output it all onto a piece of paper later on to determine your class mark.