Stephen Downes

OK, let's get right to the end of this one, as this is where we find the proposition being argued against. It is this: "Conventional wisdom is that students need knowledge of how to search rather than mastery of basic facts." And we back up a couple paragraphs to get this: "Larry Sanger (2010) in "Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age" presents a compelling argument against rejecting knowing content and factual knowledge." But nobody is arguing against content; that would be like arguing against nouns. The argument is against the supposition that there is some specific content that must be learned. So we go back to the beginning of this post and ask, "what is assessment for learning?" What is assessment (still working in reverse, back up the argument) "in the culture of Google and Wikipedia," "in the culture of language, symbols and texts," "in a culture of participation," "in a culture of consumerism – where students are consumers and commodities?"