Wikileaks – Montessori Muddle

Montessori in the internet age

Sarah Ellison’s excellent article in Vanity Fair about the collaboration between the Guardian newspaper and Wikileaks in publication of leaked documents, has got me thinking about how teaching needs to adapt to the internet age.

The most interesting theme in Ellison’s article is the contrast between old and new media: Julian Assange’s web-based Wikileaks and the 200-year-old British newspaper, the Guardian (which, I will confess, has a wonderful football podcast).

The conflicts between the two organizations’ cultures has apparently lead to a lot of friction and miscommunication, but also resulted in a fairly effective collaboration. The Guardian has been one of the more active newspapers in exploiting the internet, but it provides the institutional integrity and journalistic tradition that seems to be able to temper some of the manic enthusiasm of Wikileaks’ zealous idealists.

It is no surprise that Wikileaks and Wikipedia share a core precept; transparent organizations work better (of course Wikipedia has put this into practice in its own organization, while Wikileaks aims to reduce the opacity of other organizations). And it should be no surprise that Wikileaks’ model has many supporters who are digital natives. What is interesting is how much the new media needs the old media, and how a forward thinking organization, like the Guardian, can adapt to, and take advantage of, the new opportunities that come from new organizations like Wikileaks.

Which takes us back to education and the internet. If we can agree with Daniel Pink and myriad others (like Ken Robinson) that traditional schooling is not effective at developing students’ creativity, and that constructivist approaches like Montessori do a much better job, then the parallel with the Guardian-Wikileaks collaboration, is that programs like Montessori are ideally placed to blossom if it can take full advantage of the new, developing, technological innovations (like Saguta Mitra‘s).

Like the Guardian, Montessori needs to embrace the new techniques the internet allows, but it is essential it is done with the same care and consideration that Maria M. applied her observations of what works in teaching. The Montessori method, has almost 100 years of tradition that needs to serve as ballast in an era when many are looking for new approaches to education, and we are trying to strike the right balance between what we know works and what we hope will.

Video games and real war

“It’s going to be a constant question for us as a society and for the military whether or not, as they become more game-like, that creates an effect that makes it easier to kill people in a way that you might not want to make it easier to kill people.” – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

On The Media had one of the most though provoking pieces this weekend that I have ever heard. It was based on the video footage of the tragic killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and the wounding of two small children in a van that came to rescue the injured, by a US helicopter gunship. The program dealt with the tragedy itself, the question of war crimes and the propriety of Wikileaks in publishing the video.

They also addressed the marked similarities between the video footage and scenes in modern video games. What was most interesting was that the interviewee, Clive Thompson, argued not that video games were becoming too much like war and desensitizing players, but that war is becoming too much like video games.

It’s been generally acknowledged that the further away the person is, the less you can see them, the more they’re just a blip on the screen, the easier it is to pull the trigger. – Clive Thompson on On The Media (2010)

Audio of the piece called “Virtual War” is below: