Ministerial Address and Everything is Miscellaneous

Ministerial Address

Learning and Teaching Scotland is pleased to announce that the Minister will deliver an address outlining the Executive’s ambitions for Scottish education over the next year.

To watch  Ministerial address: See link below

Followed by:

Everything is Miscellaneous

We have organised our ideas using the same principles by which we organise our laundry. We've had to because the means by which knowledge is communicated and transferred have been physical. This has silently constrained how we order knowledge.
Now, however, as information and the information about information are all becoming digital, we are creating new principles of organisation free of the traditional constraints. For example, in the physical world, a book has to go on one spot on a shelf, so we have to choose its primary category. Digitally, the more categories we can file it under, the more useful it will be to readers. Traditionally the institution that owns the knowledge resources also owns the organisation of those resources; digitally, users are coming to expect to be able to organise information the way they want.

In effect, we are moving from a world in which experts decide what is reliable and relevant information and then arrange that into neat hierarchical trees, into one in which the best strategy is to create a huge pile of miscellaneous leaves sorted and organized by users on demand. This is the inverse of the old system in which experts and educators added value by filtering information. Instead, the pile of information gains value the more inclusive it is. Users of the system become active participants. Knowledge becomes plural and thus better represents the diversity ever more insistent in the newly connected world.

This raises many issues for educators and for society overall. It challenges the traditional sources of authority. It means that knowledge is becoming social, affecting the validity of testing individuals. It dices up topics and connects them in hyperlinked webs. It suggests that expertise is not a matter of containing lots of information and may not pertain to individuals so much as to groups. It undermines the shared basis of knowledge crucial to democracies.

We can't yet know how we are going to work through such issues as a society. But the ‘miscellaneous’ storage of knowledge seems already to be well underway.

Peter Peacock, Minister for Education and Young People

David Weinberger, Writer, Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society

David Weinberger, Ph.D. is a co-author of the bestselling book, The Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.  His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Wired, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and many others. He is a commentator on National Public Radio, and a columnist for KMWorld and Il Sole 24 ore.

He is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for Internet and Society. He's working on a book called "Everything Is Miscellaneous" (Times Books, winter '07). He has a doctorate in philosophy from University of Toronto.