The Wikiness

I’m so glad that, in this LA Times article, he suggests what I’ve been asking for the last few years: enlisting our high school kids in knowledge-worker bootcamp–getting them working in teams in the wiki mines. A couple of years of that, and they come out stronger, w/ 21st C. skills, electronic collaboration, pln’s, etc.

Along with the ability to “see for miles” that ubiquitous wifi affords students comes a weight of information that Brin describes negatively in its effect on his younger sibling at school:

Brin said he hoped that the increasingly powerful access to information would free people up to become more capable individuals. But he did see a downside.

“When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence,” he said. But now that students can see beyond their own school or hometown, they see that “there are always going to be a million people better than you at times, or someone will always be far better than you. I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.”