More Monkey stuff
Lawrence Lessig has a nice commentary on the “The Cult of the Amateur” (mentioned at EDEN by Michael Moore). I especially appreciate the wiki page documenting some of the fallacies. One of the difficulties in this kind of “debate” is to figure out whether Keen is being funny and overstating his claims a bit for rhetorical effect or whether he is really disingenuous and shouldn’t be taken seriously at all.
I haven’t read his book and wonder whether I should – time is precious. Would very much welcome your thoughts and comments…
Erik Duval's Weblog 
But you *are* sure our comments are worth the while! Quite an assumption 🙂
Indeed – I am an optimist 😉
Erik,
I was just browsing your interesting blog and wanted to comment on one point you made – concerning school and teenagers. I feel there is much truth in what you say about the irrelevance of the provided school learning to children at this age and 25 years ago, when I was a very young teacher, I would have completely agreed with the view you express here that this is the cause of the problem. However, I now am of the view that there are other perspectives that need to be taken account of – lifelong change processes, the way we respond to change emotionally at different ages, extensional and intensional aspects, changing culture and so on. For example, it may be the case that challenging othordoxy (whilst not fully understanding its role) is a necessary stage of life to become a mature adult – or it may not be. Of course academics, I hope, continue to do that beyond teenage. My point is that there are many models that might apply.
Best wishes
andy heath