What is that we need to teach our children?

One occasion when I feel a real urge to blog is when I recognize a pattern, that I have seen before. Over the last few years there is one pattern that is coming back again and again. It has to do with information overload. A popular topic these days, but American psychologist Herb Simon stated already in 1971: A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" and attention is needed to build knowledge from information.

But it also has to do with certain skills that make it possible to deal with that on an individual as well as an organizational level. On an organizational level one really helpful tool will be analytics helping to pre-consolidate and pattern recognition - of course in combination with a certain level of human interpretation and judgement (watch out for the upcoming book from Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and Tom Davenport on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organization might give some answers to that).

On a personal level it starts with our children. As a parent of two digital natives I am amazed as to how they deal with the large amount of information that they are presented with. They have different methods than what we grew up with. Diligence and detail study as we might have done it with a couple of books looks different than scanning several Trillion Web pages from the Google index (that is a 1 with 12 zeros) and then picking the top 3-5 for their judgement, information need or to make a decision.

What they need to develop is methods to judge what makes sense and what is off the mark, what information they can trust, and what they can't trust. What sources to trust and which ones to question. How to quickly recover once they found out they used an untrusted or just plain incorrect source.

Those are the methods that will make our children more successful than their peers. Access to information will not make much of a difference when it is as easy for a 12 year-old kid in a small Borneo village to have the same access to it than a Harvard student.

It is making sense of the information, putting it into a frame of reference of prior learnings. Some of this will be based on experience, some of it will be based on learning through collaboration (again something that is becoming available much wider through social media spreading as it is).

But how are we doing in teaching our children to develop the right methods and heuristics to deal with this complicated task and they not only have to get good at it, they have to be faster and faster at it, as more information is flooding at them. They need good methods and tools to unlearn as much as they have to have efficient ways to learn. And they have to know the signs of credibility/non-credibility by heart.

One that said it very nicely recently was Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey in an interview with David Poque, that David highlighted on his blog:

"I think almost no emphasis is being put on giving kids the skills that they need to sort credible from noncredible information. Schools have to wake up and have to give those skills to our kids. It’s the critical thinking skill of the 21st century that they’re going to need, sorting credible from not credible information. And I think we’re asleep at the switch."

I fully agree, many still think of education as a way to "fill people up with information", but when information has such a short shelf-life it is the method and the developed heuristics that count for the future.