Blessing and Curse of the Internet

I had just texted a fellow student "Found a great tutorial on binary arithmetic, why can't our university lectures be simple and effective like this?!"

Being a part-time Computer Science student, we are suffering from a severe case of uninspired 'frontal unterricht' at our German university. Therefore I am often on the look-out for more informative and interactive bits and bytes, such as video tutorials. I had stumbled upon a good lecturer called Carl Herald, who managed to explain why 1 plus 1 = 0 in less than one minute, and then continued to explain the remaining binary algebraic puzzle in a clear and friendly voice on his YouTube Channel. Many people thanked him in the comments. "gr8 vid i love it!" "Thanks! Wasn't taught the "borrow" method in class." "Thank you, well explained!" For me it was renewed evidence of how technology can support learning.

Then the latest comment caught my eye; "All of you guys know that this guy raped his 9 year old son? check it out for urselfs". Below it he had posted a link to these reddit articles. I wanted to know what was going on and scanned some of the other comments, which were mixed. It seemed many people were in disbelief, others agreed that it was the same guy. Only a few clicks produced articles such as these, which confirmed that this friendly sounding programmer, who had over 200.000 views on his You Tube channel, was indeed the sick person who had abused his child and shared the video evidence of this horrific crime with an online pedophile porn network. He faced many charges and went to prison. I only had to check the latest article to find out that he had taken his life, not too long ago.

The Internet made it possible for him to share his videos, both the programming tutorials and the child porn; the blessing and curse of the Internet in one sad sick story.

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Dumbing Us Down

'Dumbing us Down' about institunionalised education was written by John Taylor Gatto in 1993 . Rather dated, even though it was updated ten years later, yet what he wites is still so relevant. It is saddening that school has the ability to destroy children’s natural curiosity, teaches children how to sit still and listen to the teacher. Yes, frontal learning is as alive as ever in most classrooms. Yet, handing all responsibility to ‘the family’ would not work for a lot of kids and parents – Gatto has this ideal picture where children learn best in an informal setting, but kids need people on the sideline keeping a close eye on the learning process, whether these are parents or school teachers. The more I think about these things, the more I see contemporary learning as a process where experienced learners support starting learners… informal learning doesn’t mean that there is no more teaching involved - because teaching happens whenever learning takes place - it may just not always be intentional. Perhaps we should speak of intentional teaching versus random learning. At the moment I have five kids in my kitchen trying to bake a cake by themselves – no three, my ten-year old and his friend just left for the supermarket because they realised we didn’t have enough eggs in the house. They wanted to do the baking, I only told them to do it by themselves (but I do sit at the table, keeping an ‘ear’ on things…) Random learning with an intentional edge. In the end self-propelled learning all comes down to motivation and fun and there is no reason why teachers should have a different perspective...