Constructivism is to memorization, as RSS is to TIFF

I’ve been wandering around Jon Udell’s blog recently (after a recommendation from Greg Wilson) and found this story from Jon.  He’s complaining that his local high school doesn’t realize that a scanned page, while “soft” copy that can be sent by email, is completely different than an easily parsed form of the same information.  He uses a quote about school reform to make his point, which is actually about constructivist learning, thus suggesting (implicitly) that school administrators who don’t see the difference between a scanned page and an RSS feed, may not also see a difference between constructivist learning and memorization.

It irks me the school publishes this data without acknowledging that it is data, or providing it in a way that’s appropriate for the kind of data it is. In 2010, one of the “tools to succeed in a diverse and interdependent world” has to be a basic working knowledge of information chemistry. The quotation about learning that appears at the top of that image speaks to the underlying principle:

“Treat it as an active process of constructing ideas, rather than a passive process of absorbing information.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

via The laws of information chemistry – O’Reilly Radar.

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