When I was about 15 years old I was the proud frontman and guitarist in a small-town rock band. In addition to these duties, I also took it upon myself to wear the hat of webmaster. This was in 1997 - before the days of Myspace and Facebook. Instead, I turned to free web hosting sites like the now useless Geocities and Angelfire. WYSIWYG editors were still fairly uncommon at the time so I printed off some tutorials and started hard coding my site. This is how I learned HTML.
More than a decade later, and I’m still up to my old tricks. I recently started another band, and knowing the importance of a web presence, decided to create a website for the project. After looking through some links saved to my Delicious account, I realized something very important. All my coding skills from 1997 mean almost nothing in 2010.
Knowledge is obsolete.
Instead of HTML body tags, it’s CSS now. Instead of fancy Flash menus, it’s all about jQuery. And what the hell is AJAX?!
Fortunately for me, I know where to go for help, and how to practice and master new skills on my own. At some point in my formal education, I learned how to learn.
This is what teachers need to impress on students. Knowledge becomes worthless surprisingly fast, but the ability to acquire new knowledge is essential.
Don’t teach knowledge. Teach learning.
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