Really Smart Students

I want to share a story about one of my teachers in high school. He was a passionate man that understood how he could teach his students some basic skills that would help them to become critical knowledge workers.

One time he talked about information - let it be an article in a newspaper, a movie, a picture,…. He said this information usually has one fundamental characteristic:
"it represents what one person selected because he thought is was interesting or relevant. A photographer only shows what’s inside his frame. He chooses, not to show other things."

Now, there is nothing wrong with that. Most of the time what’s outside the frame isn’t interesting at all. But as a critical knowledge worker you should be aware of such things.

Since then about ten years have past and there has been an exponential growth in the amount of information. Unfortunately that critical attitude isn’t enough anymore. A knowledge worker today needs skills to detect the signal within the noise. Today RSS is the most suitable tool to do so. Only problem, people don't know it, let alone use it properly.

RSS / XML is revolutionary because data can be exported free of formatting constraints. Because of that you can to take it up a level. This ‘meta-RSS’ - if you will- implicates understanding how you can automatically filter and structure the information into something that’s useful for you and your business.

I hope there are a few teachers that, like mine did, can show their students how to handle all this available information and become Really Smart Students.