Towards thinking about expertise

Part of the team was out of town last week and getting intellectually overstimulated, so the normal rate of posting slowed a bit.  I'll try to make up the loss from here on in.

Over the past few months I've come across a few blog posts and articles that all somehow relate to the issue of subject matter experts or to expertise in general.  In one form or another, they have either to do with declaring an end to the need for expertise or with refuting that claim.  Most recently this was prompted by Robert Murray's short piece in e-International Relations titled, "In Defence of Expertise," but I think most of the writing about the end or not-end of theory (related to big data) also provokes this line of thinking.

At the moment I am not sure what to make of the issue of the value/validity of expertise in today's world.  Having just come out of some workshops dealing with complexity and systems thinking, I am tempted to simply repeat an oft-repeated phrase from the event: everything within bounds.  Yet clearly that doesn't actually address the issue, it simply sidelines it.

The issue also comes up within the education and learning futures space.  Here a number of people across the country are both excited by and insistent on the erasure of the line between student and instructor, people that often assert that the "model" of education in which a teacher (expert) pushes knowledge to a student (novice) is dead or terminally ill.  While debates on the lecture itself as a valid form of teaching/learning continue, the overall issue in the future of education space seems to be with the validity of teachers are experts.

Interestingly, the ideas of a Google/Wikipedia/adaptive learning-driven information environment as well as the almost New-Agey passion with the "wisdom of crowds" and the emergence of "big data" all seem to support the development of a counter-expertise worldview in the US today.

And at some point we can probably rope in the anti-intellectualism in America that others have identified...

Again, I don't know where to go with these thoughts at the moment, but I feel like there's something here to explore and work on.