Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist
I am often accused of being too cynical. Events in 2016 have not dissuaded me that my approach was not the right one. But I like this quote, which is new to me:
As George Carlin said: “Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.” Guilty as charged: I was an idealist and remain one, well, sort of. Tim Wu interviewed by John Naughton
Tim Wu’s last book, “The Big Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, was magisterial, and of interest to anybody interested in education, tech and the web. His latest, has not been published in the UK yet, but tracks the relation between attention and advertising (‘The Attention Merchants’). In the interview Naughton reprises one of Herb Simon’s great insights:
The cue for his new book, The Attention Merchants, is an observation the Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made in 1971. “In an information-rich world,” Simon wrote, “the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Anybody who looks at how students want to learn, and the fractured landscape of content and ‘learning behaviour’, needs to think hard about this topic.