A little while ago, I plugged Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast. I thought I’d bring it up again because he just released a sort of “interim” episode (all too short!) in which he interviews James Burke, writer and host of a few of my all-time favorite documentary series: Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.
In this interview, Burke touches on the nature of history, how historians of the future might view our time, and a host of other mini-topics, including his Knowledge Web project. From the interview:
All this stuff about learning all the stuff you need to know about chemistry so you can become a chemist (or a physicist or a musicologist or a physiotherapist or an archaeologist) is all a plot to make life easier for teachers. In other words, you divide knowledge up into neat boxes and it makes it easier for teachers to grade— because what happens is you give a set of questions to a student and they have one correct answer and that’s easy to grade. I mean, Charles II did what Charles II did and nothing else. And if you get it right, you pass the exam and get yourself whatever it is you’re going to get yourself. And this [the Knowledge Web project] is an anarchic approach. It says, That’s not how history happens, that’s not how life happens, that’s not how knowledge happens. It is all immensely interconnected…
Sound interesting? Listen to the interview on Dan Carlin’s podcast [MP3 file] [iTunes], or check out the Knowledge Web site. It’s still in development, but there’s a swell video showing what one might expect from such a thing. 😉