Thursday, January 19, 2006

'Poll' on Communication and Effective Learning

Dave (Pollard) concludes thus on the topic of The Economics of Communication and Effective Learning  (certain words/phrases/points coloured in blue by this blogger – me – to highlight points I agree with fervently)

1.       People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.

2.       People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.

3.      People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery -- everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet -- a malnourished mind.

4.       People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It's a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.

5.      People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it's faster and the answer is more context-specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches.

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