First, I suspect that his skill in “touching” is inversely proportional to the number of people he has to “touch;” at it remains to be seen how “reproducible” (to invoke Giddens language) that skill is.

Secondly, as my father has always delighted in saying, “One is not a statistic!”

To develop that point, I really cannot figure out, for the life of me, just how good Judy Breck’s Golden Swamp is at “touching.” Since I think this would be a great way to pursue this discussion, I invite everyone to visit the site at:

http://goldenswamp.com/

I do not need to be sold on how cool it is, but that may be the problem. To invoke another metaphor, my consider is the Golden Swamp may be one of the best circuses on the Web at a time when we have all those students (and probably plenty of teachers, too) hungry for bread. (All those jokes comparing the Bush Administration to the Roman Empire are finally beginning to register with me!)

Don’t get me wrong. It is not my intention to disparage cool. However, just as there has never been a Royal Road to Geometry, there will never be a “Superhighway to Being in the World.” I am not just concerned that Generation M may be untouched by teachers who can guide without disrupting those “unvarnished selves;” I am concerned that the extent to which they perceive the world through their media experience may be leaving them untouched by the world itself!

ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES includes a story about the master teacher of Zen, Gasan (an unvarnished self if ever there was one). The story goes that he was visited by a university student who brought along a copy of the New Testament and read him passages from the Sermon on the Mount. After hearing the text, Gasan said, “Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.” If we cannot communicate with Generation M through today’s classrooms, can we at least figure out how to “touch” them as the student “touched” Gasan?

In a conversation that grows more interesting with each iteration, JP Rangaswami last night revisited his original thoughts on the ‘livebrarian’. I responded to his initial post yesterday, and would now like to drill down a little more into…

For me the true role of education is learning how to learn and when that foundation is laid then great potential is unleashed as I have witnessed in my university days here and in the US. I agree with JP that unvarnished selves should be encouraged but on both sides of the ocean an increasing proportion of people are not so much unvarnished as untouched.

If you are functionally illiterate and or innumerate, the ability to search is hugely compromised and in many cases the will to search is destroyed. I hope I’m not being overly defeatist on this (and I am sure that the combination of “literate” individuals and social software is immense even if the literate are a minority), but when I move away from this keyboard and the incredible insights and opinions to which it gives me access, I am very aware of a huge and I think growing digital divide.

The constraining and often corrupting anchors and frames I speak of tend to be in us. Not all of us, but many of us. I am part of that many.

I see a whole new opportunity in Generation M, who for some reason have managed to avoid some of the biases and corruptions. And my pushback against expertise is in order to give them, and the generation after them, the ability to bring their unvarnished selves to bear on all of us.

Does that make any more sense?

The point about children is an interesting one. My searching skills were clearly formulated within my education (pre-search engines) and, I believe, they enhance my search engine-based searches. I presume (because I know I would do it if I were young) that children today go straight to Google and I wonder if they are given any guidance on how to use it.