You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole
Published in November of 2016.
Those of us who work at the intersection of education and technology are at risk of falling into the trap of thinking that we are breaking new ground.
Steven Poole’s new book, Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas, is worth investing a few hours with - if for no other reason than to increase our caution about claiming unearned innovation.
One example where the edtech crowd would have been well-served by taking the main lesson of Rethink to heart is in the world of MOOCs. The people who put together the MOOC platform companies were often too slow to place their new idea - free online education at scale - within a long tradition of distance learning.
Perhaps the MOOC backlash would have not come so strongly, and the difficulty that we have in communicating the value of MOOCs as places to do educational R&D and learn about learning, if the original MOOC evangelists had been a tad more circumspect in their claims of disruptive originality.
Rethink is full of examples of inventions and modes of thought that we tend to think of as brand new - but in reality are not new at all. The book starts with the example of electric cars. The idea that the future belongs to electric cars would have been as plausible 117 years ago as it is today.
In 1900 there were more than 30,000 electric cars registered in the U.S., and small electric taxis (known as hummingbirds for the sound that they made), were to be found all over London. It was not until the discovery of large oil reserves and Ford’s invention of the assembly line (actually an idea that he rethought from the disassembly of meat in the slaughterhouse), that the future dominance of the electric car got delayed.
The parts of Rethink that I enjoyed most were the parts about old technologies (electric cars, electronic cigarettes, leeches), and zombie ideas (flat earth, the efficient-market hypothesis). Zombie ideas are ideas that should have stayed dead - but refuse to die.
We have lots of examples of zombie ideas in higher education. My favorite zombie idea is the notion that we can replace educators with technology - a fools errand that seems to gain new currency with each generation.
The parts of Rethink that did not do it for me were when Poole discusses philosophy - apparently the ancient Greek Stoics predicted much of cognitive behavioral therapy - as I found these chapters overlong. If learning about panpsychism is your thing than you will enjoy all of Rethink more than I did.
This critique might reflect more on my own interests than the quality of the book, and should not stop you from adding Rethink to your list of books to check out in 2017.
What are you reading?
