Coping with rapid change
Teach metaknowledge instead of knowledge?. [...]
What would be the effect if, instead of teaching knowledge, we taught metaknowledge for 3 years:
- How to learn 101
- Introductory social networking
- Advanced collaboration
- Social capital for beginnings
- Communities 200
and then handed you a copy of Google on your way out the door?
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
Sounds like a great program. I'd enroll right away.
The key issue here is rate of change. In the past, things changed slowly. The key to competence was to get as proficient as you could at a particular set of concrete tasks, which remained more or less the same throughout your career. In a changing environment, the fittest individuals are those who can best adapt to the changes.
In my view one important factor in being able to adapt to rapid change is being able to recognize what actually changes very little. Below the surface, there's a lot of fundamental stuff that doesn't change very quickly. Take programming, for example. Particular languages come and go, but good old logic and basic programming constructs and design patterns have a much longer half-life, and are more and more worth learning. The poor souls who learn a fashionable language instead of learning programming pay for it pretty soon (I find it amazing that the job descriptions issued by human resources staff still often specify particular languages). Toffoli explores similar ideas a little further in his visionary white paper "A knowledge home".
Isn't "being able to see below the surface" also called wisdom? If so, we're all going to become philosophers if we are to survive this century.
 4:29:38 PM
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