This is a past event
What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds?
Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding.
Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it -- knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts you find, how to organise and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition -- these are all critical parts of being literate as well.
In this talk Russell will review what literacy is today, in the age of Google, and show how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead. We have created powerful new tools for the mind. Thing is, those tools are constantly evolving and changing even as the things they operate on change as well. This puts us in the position of having to learn how to find tools, and understanding the substrate on which they work.
Literacy in these days is not just reading and writing, but also understanding what knowledge tools are available, and how they can be used in interesting new ways.
Daniel Russell is the Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness in Mountain View, California. He earned his PhD in computer science, specialising in artificial intelligence until he realised that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion.
Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favour of HI, and enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day. He worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.apple.com using SimpleText and a stone knife. He also worked at IBM and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers before the iPad.
- Speaker
- Daniel Russell, Google
- Hosted by
- Centre for Academic Development
- Venue
- TBC, Old Aberdeen Campus