Gorman and Keen Need a Bicycle Built for Two (but built only by certified, qualified, licensed bicycle experts of course)

I've blogged about Andrew Keen before (but of course only in an amateurish way), but it is really easy to the impression that he and Michael Gorman are doing the intellectual version of spooning.

He had me equating a fundamentalist Biblical belief and Blogging

Excerpt from the opening paragraph of Gorman's blog post "web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason" (his blog is sponsored by Encyclopedia Britannica FYI):

"(web 2.0) suffers from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics."

Wow. My legs hurt from all that leaping. Seriously, when you can't stake out a rational position in the first paragraph, things aren't looking good. Here is the passage that should grab your attention though:

"Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do. The second kind of learning comes from either personal contact with living people—teachers, gurus, etc.—or through interaction with the human record, that vast assemblage of texts, images, and symbolic representations that have come to us from the past and is being added to in the present. It is this latter way of learning that is under threat in the realm of digital resources."

...call off all the researchers, Gorman has nailed it. Two ways. That's it. Case closed. Return all the grants and cancel the conferences, mothball the publications, send home the associations...you get the point. Or start by checking out this post this post by LibraryThing which occasioned this comment from David Weinberger...or since Gorman and Keen are both fighting to protect the high priesthood of the expert, you could check out this debate between Weinberger and Keen.

Comments

[School teacher]

Actually the third way to learn is getting information from different sources such as books, articles, newspapers and so on.

http://www.dalloway-school.com