Tuesday 24 February 2009

Taking Digital Wisdom apart.

Having participated in the Innovate webcast and listended to Marc Prensky, I am making more sense of the Digital Wisdom concept. One slide in the presentation summarised it nicely for me: Digital Wisdom is about accepting (digital/technical) enhancements and using these appropriately.
I also found it helpful to take apart the meaning of "Wisdom". 
Wikipedia defines it as: 
"Wisdom is knowledgeunderstandingexperience, discretion, and intuitive understanding, along with a capacity to apply these qualities well towards finding solutions to problems. It is the judicious and purposeful application of knowledge that is valued in society. To some extent the terms wisdom and intelligence have similar and overlapping meanings."
I believe that wisdom is acquired over time. There may be exceptions to this but it is a learning process where lessons learnt are converted to expert responses. And as with many experts, they may have a "tacit" understanding - ie they cannot necessarily explain how they have "done it". 
The digital part seems obvious, but it does consist of a huge range of possible technologies and tools. Prensky makes an illuminating distinction between digital tools as nouns or as verbs
Tools as nouns: Powerpoint, e-mail, Wikipedia, Flash, IM, Google (changes rapidly)
Tools as verbs: Presenting, communicating, learning (stays the same)
Thus H. Sapiens Digital's required tools (the verbs), Prensky says,  would be "the best way to network, to communicate, to present, to calculate, to learn, to think."
But, since digital tools do not automatically lead to digital wisdom, we need to partner together brains with enhancements so as to work together effectively.

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