I talked a while ago about approximeeting:

A group of young people rendezvous by successive approximations, starting with a general idea that they’ll get together, then trading messages among the group to tighten details until they’re all in the same physical space.

I love the word, and the demonstration of how kids will use new tools like cell phones to do what we couldn’t have done. But I saw the flip side of that last weekend. I went to a rock concert at New West Fest. The B-52s played to an outdoor crowd of several thousand. (And yes, everything I know about the B-52s I read on Wikipedia.)

It was a street concert – no seats – and we were jammed. Cell phones were lighting up everywhere in the darkness, and most of the conversations were about the same: “That’s where I am, but I can’t see you….”

In the squash of this crowd the cell phones were useless, the technology failed, the approximeeting strategy couldn’t work.

Now, Rick and Paola and Carol and I could feel amused and ever so slightly superior, because we had agreed that there would be a heck of a crowd, and we’d be smart to meet exactly at the NW corner of Library Park and stick together when we waded into the concert crowd.

My point? Having new skills doesn’t necessarily obviate the need for traditional skills. Anticipating situations. Planning accordingly. Recognizing when the usual method may not work. Recognizing that a plan isn’t working. Problem solving alternatives. Having a back-up plan. Not wearing sandals to a rock concert. (Yeah, OK, I forgot that one….)

“Brazil” and the Information Explosion was one of my earliest posts here. I talked about the skills our kids will need to find, evaluate and coordinate the masses of information available to them through the Internet.

Picture a graph of these three points:

* When I drafted the section of Grow With the Flow where I consider the skills kids will need to work well with masses of information, I imagined a kid doing a report on Brazil. Google showed just over 1,000,000 leads. That was five or six years ago.

* When I posted my RiverTown News article, on May 1, 2005, there were just over 100,000,000.

* As of this morning, a kid doing that report via the Internet would need to find a way to work with 623,000,000 possible information sources about Brazil.

I like the skill sets that mass of information will ask of kids: Among many other skills, they’ll need to develop task-appropriate research strategies, conduct focused searches, and evaluate the worth of their sources. Much more demanding, much more fun than the scissors-and-paste skills I needed to do a report on Brazil when I was in grade school.

Curiously, that 600-fold increase in information about Brazil in the last few years doesn’t actually make it a bit harder for our earnest young researchers. If they know how to talk to their search engine, it will give them what they want.

That may be about to change. You’ve followed the talk of a Universal Library? Google and others are working to scan all the world’s information. ALL the world’s information. At a single source. No one knows if the goal will be reached. But imagine that some good part of it does happen: the Library of Alexandria raised to the power of the present. What will change for our student?

Of course the quantity of information will take a huge jump. Every map that shows Brazil, every mention of Brazil in someone’s blog, every out of print book about Brazil, all the work of Brazilian artists – if it has a tie to Brazil, it’s all available, kind of like snowflakes are available in an avalanche.

But I don’t think it’s the quantity that changes everything. It’s the nature of the information. Integration of information this disparate, tucked away in myriad sources, will be the work of very sophisticated software – our native intelligences will be augmented by artificial intelligences.

This implies a meta shift. Our kids won’t be directly researching, focusing, and evaluating information. They’ll be telling machines how to do that. Their task will be to bring the highest human cognitive abilities to information that has been assembled according to their very precise instructions – to understand it, synthesize it, and do something useful with it.

I’d guess fourth graders will be able to get along pretty well without advanced AI management skills. But make no mistake: Teaching goals for them should have that highest level of information management in mind from the start. I’m all in favor of scissors, and I hope they stay in the curriculum. But once the Universal Library arrives, they won’t cut it.

Discuss the Universal Library and what it would mean for how we educate kids.

The Universal Library is in the news this week because of an article by Kevin Kelly, of Wired Magazine, which appeared in the May 14 New York Times Magazine. As of this post, the full text is available: Scan This Book!

And here’s a summary of the article from SearchEngineWatch.

We ask our kids to memorize a good many facts. We ask much less than previous eras, and we talk a lot about other facets of learning: creativity, problem solving, independent learning. But there are few weeks in my office when I don’t hear about troubles with arithmetic facts, weekly spelling tests, and multiple-choice exams with “right” answers.

I’m talking only about the kind of facts that require no more than straightforward recall. There is a right answer, and a computer can say if the answer is correct or not. How much is 9 times 7? What is the capitol of New Mexico? How do you spell “antidisestablishmentarianism"? These are facts we say we “know by heart,” by which we mean both that they are firmly in long-term memory, and that they can be easily accessed on demand.

I can see only one convincing reason to learn a specific fact: It is needed as a stage in a higher-level process, and if it isn’t available automatically, it overloads working memory and prevents higher-level processing. It’s difficult to comprehend what you’re reading until decoding is automatic; your energy is all going to sounding out the words. It may be that you can’t understand what’s going on in long division until your subtraction facts come easily.

Not many facts meet that criterion. Yet somehow I doubt we’re ready for schools that don’t attempt to teach lots of facts.

So here’s a suggestion…

OK, My thought was that when we feel a body of facts must be learned by rote (the multiplication table, for example) we look for creative routes to teach it. There’s reason to think the learning would be more effective, and we might get two-for-one benefits: both the acquisition of the essential facts and some good habits.

But the longer I muddle it over, the less sure I am that’s a useful direction. And I feel out of touch with how much rote memory is still involved in the curriculum – maybe the facts are being taught mostly through discovery processes nowadays?

Does anyone out there have help to offer? How much “by heart” learning are we asking kids to do? What should be the role of rote memory today? How do we decide what facts are worth teaching? How can we best teach them?