Labun Jordan: Old School

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(Host) New technologies are replacing some basic skills, like how to use
a fax machine or keep a record player from skipping. As technology
writer and commentator Helen Labun Jordan watches her ability to do
things like write cursive fall out of fashion, she’s also noticing how
these changes force us to re-examine what underlying value old skills
might have.

(Labun Jordan) The really smart kid at school used to
be the one who had memorized the presidents in order and could give you
the capital of any country off the top of his head. So, what happened
to that kid the first time one of his classmates got a smart phone and
could just Google the answers?

We might feel that looking up
answers we once memorized is cheating, just like you still can’t use
spell check in a spelling bee. But it’s hard to tell the line between
that feeling and simply failing to realize that a particular skill has
become obsolete.

When I was in school, the big debate was over
whether math classes should embrace the sophisticated new TI-83
calculator. The TI-83 was the height of mobile computing – it graphed
trigonometric functions with the push of a button, and once you saw
graphing could be that easy, you never wanted to do it by hand again.

After the TI-83’s the card catalogue came into question.

And today, even the basic lecture hall is faltering as online lectures become more popular.

There’s
a reason for these changes. Lectures online can be started at any time,
broken into bite sized chunks, and replayed as needed. Calculators
saved hours of dull point plotting. But changes like these can also be
disconcerting. After all, some staples of education have been around
since ancient Greece, so who are we to dismiss them?

While
innovation impresses us with what it makes unnecessary, it also
challenges us to identify what’s valuable in the existing way of doing
things.

Free, online lectures force us to re-examine the
benefits of going to a university. Friday morning in a lecture hall may
not be on the list. But the casual exchange of ideas among friends, a
chance to work directly with instructors, and access to facilities that
offer everything from genome sequencers to ancient art, are definitely
benefits.

As for calculators, when I got to calculus class, our
teacher banned all of them, even the old fashioned kind. He didn’t want
tidy answers, he wanted to see how we solved the problem, with an
emphasis on logical thinking and understanding the concepts behind the
numbers.

And though physical card catalogues are disappearing, frameworks for organizing information are not.

There
are dozens of other learning activities that are old fashioned, but not
outmoded. Writing students copy stories out by hand, like
pre-Guttenberg scribes, so they can pay detailed attention to how the
authors structured each passage. In 2012, the musician Beck caused a stir by
releasing his latest album as sheet music. This a publishing strategy from
Mozart’s time that might be a good strategy for our time too, since
giving someone else the means to create music is still an inspiring way
to share it.

I’ll agree that technological change is notable for
what it replaces, but it’s also notable for compelling us to think more
carefully about what’s valuable in our established ways of doing
things.

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