Good post over at Creative Generalist reviewing David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous. The main thrust appears to be about how the internet and computers have radically changed the way we seek, use and organise information and how most of existing monolithic structures (read: education) are bound by the fact that most paper-based information had to be, well, bound. A lot of it resonates with what I was saying in my talk at Urban Learning Space.

These are some choice quotes from the book (that are posted in the Creative Generalist review):

But discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want. Our bookstores look like they prefer seekers over browsers because the usual layout works well for people trying to find what they came in for, whereas there are almost as many ways to organize for browsers as there are browsers. (p.9)

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas, and knowledge and put them neatly away. (p.22)

As I’ve said before, educational structures (curricula, exams, learning and teaching audits) tend to be based around what is easy to measure - it’s what you know not what you do with it - but what you do with what you find is much more important than knowing it in the first place. Even Einstein said “Why should I remember anything when I can just look it up?”.

But that’s not to say knowledge and the generation of knowledge isn’t important. Here’s another good quote from the book:

In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning, even though we can’t yet know what we’ll do with this new domain. Certainly some will mine it for knowledge that will change our lives through science and business. But knowledge will be only one product. Knowledge’s new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning. Knowledge is thus not being dethroned. We are way too good at knowing, and our continued progress - and survival - depends on it. But knowledge is now not our only project or single highest calling. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning. (p.222)