Knowledge Omnivore: Taking learning more seriously than school
The other day, Brendan told me most of his school assignments were too easy. Tonight, we watched a Smarter Every Day YouTube video about all the mechanics of bird flight and he seemed to follow and get it.
I find some of my school work too difficult, not because I don’t get it, but because the authors are pompous, self-referential gasbags who couldn’t figure out good communications or storytelling if they wrote a thesis about it. (I’m looking at you, Pablo Bockowski)
I know I’m not too dense or calicified in my thinking to get it, because when I skim, it starts to sink in, but when I read carefully, I get lost in the BS.
It’s almost like traditional academia is so stuck in it’s stupid conventions and gatekeeping (read: jargon), they don’t see that real education doesn’t depend on their artificial scarcity model (I’m looking at you, journalism).
Life imitates art – or Vi Hart – one of my favorite irreverent YouTubers who loves math, but not necessarily math class.
Or as my former Gazette colleague Jeremy Breningstall said about Coursera’s free online university classes: “It worked so well for newspapers.”
What I’m really doing, threading my way through the sleepy pajama-wearing flip-floppers, helmet-less scooter aces and tightpants of College Park is trying to kickstart my brain and get back into the job of mind-expanding – but not necessarily the same way I did during my bachelors go-round.
I’m spending one morning a week sitting in a small classroom with other media professionals and college-prolonging hopefuls debating the deep trends of the internet age, digitization of the news and the cult of “convergence” – and paying through the nose for the privilege.
Along the way, I picked up my Alternate Basic Rider motorcycle safety certificate from the MVA, because learning isn’t always done best in the classroom.
Next, I aim to get my boater’s license.
Karl Hille lived and breathed local news beat reporting in Greenbelt and the Baltimore/Washington region for more than 12 years until the 2007 recession. While learning and improving the online side of the Baltimore Examiner operations, his platform dropped out from under his feet, then his rebound job at a regional business news magazine downsized him three months later. Now, working for the “dark side” – public communications work by day for the awesome government agency – he is going back to school to find the critical intersection of news, investigation, and the Internet – and re-learning how to be a student while he’s the only guy on campus sporting a fedora.