Brown and Duguid Potential Implications for the Education System

Brown and Duguid discussed the potential implications for the educational system. They discussed the traditional university versus a potential "degree-granting body" (DGB). They talked about how "a student's university career in such a system would no longer be through a particular place, time, or preselected body of academics, but through a network principally of their own making, yet shaped by a DGB and its faculty" (p. 239). This potential DGB would be an overseeing administrative body ensuring the students a solid education--everything else would be left up to the faculty and the students. This would give the faculty and students freedom to teach/learn in varied settings that worked best with their situations. The facility would be more of a regional magnet, and they would not be locked into one set facility, or possibly, no facility at all. This basically means that the university may not look different but organizationally it will be very different.

Even though organizationally it will be different, including distance learning technology, Brown and Duguid implied that fundamentally, it would be best for it to follow the same structure that it did in the past. Education is more than just knowledge delivery. It is the collective memory of the entire class. With this community support, students learn from one another, not just the teacher. This reinforces our prior readings. Although they discuss workers, the same holds true for students. "Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible" (p. 126). The best way to transfer knowledge is to spend time together working, and together talking about work. This way you are not simply acquiring information, but assimilating it. If you can make sense of it and practice it you will "own" it!

As I read, there was one idea that Brown and Duguid wrote about that really stood out. It was the difference of "learning about" versus "learning to be" (on p. 128). They discussed how "learning about" basically is just obtaining the information, and how easy this has become with the advent of the web. More so, "learning to be" requires more than information. It becomes learning by doing (ie. apprenticeship or internship). They also included some really good examples of what they meant. One example that really demonstrated this concept was in the case of the customer service representatives in the call center that picked up knowledge from the service technicians calling in their service calls. They would discuss the case with the rep. who then had knowledge about the service problem. If they were to receive a similar call from a client in the future, they could then, if the problem was simple enough, possibly walk the client through the process to troubleshoot it themselves, saving time and money for the client. They also found that once technology advanced and the technicians no longer had to call in for their service calls, the reps were out of touch and could no longer help the clients in a similar fashion.

These readings made me think of the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” If you just give a person the "information" without the other aspects that help him to assimilate it, you are basically just giving him the fish--you are just sharing the information not the knowledge. However, when you incorporate all of the other aspects of learning Brown and Duguid spoke of, you are actually teaching him. This will feed him, intellectually, for a lifetime.