Stealing Knowledge

There's an old Kris Kristofferson song that goes
"now I wont say I beat the devil
but I drank his beer for nothing
Then I stole his song" Believe me, you don't want to hear me sing it. But I thought of it as I read this piece linked from McGees Musings The link is to two of my favourite authors on information and its technologies, John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid of "The Social life of Information"

I'm right in the middle of the evaluations for the Stockholm Challenge Education category and although Stolen Knowledge was written in 1992, there are still many, far too many, people trying to apply ICT to education who have not come to terms with this passage from 11 years ago.

We find it quite difficult to address these questions-not because it is impossible to build technology to support learning, but because that is a different problem from building technology for teaching.

I find myself wanting to reach through many websites to the people behind and say, "read this, then go away and think about it, then read it again. Only when you have realised how utterly hopeless it is and broken down weeping at the impossibility of it all, will you be ready to start.

And there are some people who have started, and gone on from there to use ICT in education in wonderful and startling ways, and guess what? Almost none of them look like we expect, and almost all of them have practically no resocures.

I think that those who survive in poverty have a resourcefulness that teaches them how to get beyond the obvious to really luminous and exciting answers to their problems. Which is not to praise poverty, it is degrading and unnecessary and while it makes those who survive astonishingly strong, it kills so very many others.