Technical support to help the Wikipedian cyberpolice more efficiently block your edits before you even submit them to Wikipedia. Or, as the agreement puts it - to 'promote the shared values and educational objectives' of Kennisnet and the Wikimedia Foundation.
The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the best-known project of the Wikimedia Foundation, will receive technical support from Kennisnet, thus helping the Foundation to achieve its goal of improving the capacity and responsiveness of Wikipedia. The agreement was reached to promote the shared values and educational objectives of Kennisnet and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Kennisnet is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation a reliable partner with regard to open content and freely licensed 'knowledge'. The cooperation extends across several projects, including the 'Ultimate Wiktionary', a project for the integration of lexicological content, and a project celebrating the jubilee of Queen Beatrix.
Ah, we almost forgot - Che Wales is into monarchy, monarchy for the masses, a veritable lady Di. And why? Because -
People in the Dutch education system indicated that there is a huge demand for the type of information offered by Wikipedia.
Sounds like they went to the polls in the Netherlands... But no, wait! As you will see in a moment, this is an official move on the part of the teaching cadres in the Netherlands - and it is those cadres that are so tantalizingly denoted as "people in the Dutch education system":
Kennisnet Foundation about itself:
Kennisnet is the internet organisation for primary, secondary and professional education in the Netherlands. The foundation was established by the education organisations in 2001. These organisations are represented on the Supervisory Board.
Purpose
Kennisnet was set up by and for education, and therefore has an emphatically public objective. In order to meet this objective, Kennisnet creates virtual space for learning and educational processes. The added value of Kennisnet lies in its ability to offer simple and effective solutions to complex problems in education.
'Simple' and 'effective' solutions (like 1-click Wikipedia) to the catastrophic worldwide crisis in education and knowledge. What marketeers! What marketeering! Can they at least bring about, more modestly, 'effective solutions' to educating us, the public, about such hoaxes as Global Warming, AIDS, Black Holes, Big Bangs and Crunches, Higgs Bosons and so on? Judge for yourself:
Kennisnet does this by:
• organising and facilitating a range of education, geared to various target groups. (primary/secondary/professional);
• cooperating on building an education market for electronic learning resources;
• guaranteeing unrestricted access to educational content and services for all users.
So, the 'solution' to the knowledge crisis lies in "building a market for electronic resources" and in "unrestricted access" (read: advertising-infested access to unrestricted crap brought to you courtesy of the 'wisdom of crowds'). And if that's not enough of an indicator of what's in store for European education, culture and science, read this:
Kennisnet supervises the proper operation of the it's educational infrastructure, on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Until the end of 2003, this has been subcontracted by the ministry to a consortium of cable companies.
The New Europe farms out the operation of its educational, cultural and scientific infrastructure to cable companies. It is all one big happy Web 2.0 family, which is why the Internet and Wikipedia are largely as 'interesting' as TV. With all the tools for excellence right at the tips of the fingers, the sorry truth is that these 'cutting-edge' 'efforts' have succeeded only in producing and retrieving crap. And the whole shebang is syndicated, syndicalized, unionized, brought on as a shining achievement of unionism:
Establishment
The Kennisnet Foundation was established by the educational organisations. This is expressed in the composition of the Supervisory Board, on which representatives of each sector of education have a seat. The Supervisory Board has seven members. Four members are appointed at the proposal of the Association of Cooperating Employers' Organisations in Education (VSWO), the Association for Management in Secondary Education (VVO), the BVE Council and the AOC Council (one member each). Three members are appointed by the Supervisory Board, one from the business community, one from the internet world and the chairperson.
The old ultra-Left used to debate why unions 'are never revolutionary', but it seems the debate should have been about how they are always so reactionary - one more invisible bureaucracy madly rewriting history, science, culture, manically inventing useless 'educational' methods for brainwashing, drowning any possible spark of intelligence in an endless replication of vacuous categories, standards and slogans. The targets of this dementia? Kids, of course - what better targets could there be for sublimated pedophiles? They now have the State and the media in their hands and education at their mercy:
For whom?
Kennisnet targets primary, secondary and professional and adult education.
In our portal, we refer to:
- Primary Education;
- Secondary Education;
- Professional and Adult Education.
Within these categories, we distinguish between various target groups, each with their own range of content geared to the needs of the user.
Primary education
- Children
- Teaching staff
- Parents
- ICT [Information & Communication Technology] coordina tors
- Managers
- Pupil care
Secondary education
- Pupil
- Teacher
- Parents
- ICT coordinators
- Managers
- Pupil care
- Student counsellor
Professional and adult education
- Teacher
- Student
- ICT coordinators
- Managers.
Kennisnet, naturally, is one of the European Partners of the European Schoolnet.
The European Schoolnet about itself:
The European Schoolnet is a unique an international partnership of 26 Ministries of Education developing learning for schools, teachers and pupils across Europe and beyond. It provides insight into the use of ICT in Europe for policy-makers and education professionals. This goal is achieved through communication and information exchange at all levels of school education using innovative technologies, and by acting as a gateway to national and regional school networks.
Translation: the goal is achieved by inducing young people to swallow crap like Wikipedia and Wiktionary as the new tools of knowledge, limiting their horizons of 'knowledge' and 'information' to the daily hysterias of a futures market. That's the goal, and quite demented it is. These are the people who determine whether or not you are lying by whether your brain "lights up" on an fMRI scan; the people who invent ever new "attention deficit disorders" and "oppositional defiant disorders" to deliver your children to zombification by pharmaceutical companies. The same sort of people who, in the Vichy Republic, would determine who was or was not a Jew by the 'scientific methods' of prognathic measurement. Now they do it all over again in virtual space, in the name of democratic 'education', 'culture for the masses', and get away with it. They do it impunely - almost no one cares to notice, such is the overall degree of castration. And, as we know from history, it always helps to pepper this sort of thing with a little Jugend-pomp, a few astronauts, and a bit of flag-waving:
An exemplary news item from the European Schoolnet:
Earth & Space Week: “A flag for planet Earth” – competition rewards nine children
Nine children have been awarded for their designs for a flag for planet Earth as part of the Earth & Space Week opening ceremony on 11 February 2005, in Brussels. The flag design aimed to capture theHer “motto” of Earth & Space Week: Celebrating our planet, while reaching for the stars. The contest was open to children aged 5 to 19 from the European Union, Norway and Switzerland. The winning children received fabric flags printed with their own designs from Prince Philippe of Belgium, European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen, and the European Space Agency Director Jean-Jacques Dordain in front of an audience of astronauts, dignitaries and other senior officials.
The European Schoolnet heralds and vehiculates the great European policy of the new social-democrats now in control of the federal State: let private interests run with public policy and education, and let's define education as the right to be just as ignorant and stupid and cocksure of yourself as the guy next to you. Writes the European Schoolnet about Kennisnet:
The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science has commissioned Kennisnet project and is offering connections to institutions of vocational training and adult education, teacher training institutes, primary schools and secondary schools.
The ICT Directorate within the Ministry is responsible forKennisnet. It co-ordinates the process of connecting schools to the network. The kennisnet.nl office within the Ministry produces the content for the Netherlands' most important education domain.
Ominous - an ICT Directorate in charge of public education. And the objective is 'independent learning', learning that is independent of any learning - since Wikipedia is serving as the standard of 'information', and neither the producer or the consumer require any understanding of the subject matter. But it's all just a way to be, on a hitherto unprecedented institutional scale, Zen about knowledge - since knowledge is all a matter of opinion, and one can never be certain of it anyway. All that we can be certain of is that it is ever more firmly in the grip of a cyberbureaucratic shredding machine:
Is information and communication technology (ICT) the cause or the result of changes in the world around us? Opinions differ on this question. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Many things are in any event changing in today's society: the way people interact, communicate, earn money and spend it.
All these changes are having an impact on education. People are talking about 'the new learning', but what does that mean precisely?The purpose of education is to prepare people as well as possible for an advanced course of study, a job and a place in society.
ICT makes it possible to tailor education to the individual pupil. We can track each pupil's progress and determine whether he or she is keeping up or falling behind and which parts of the programme he or she has or has not yet completed.
The way we teach and coach pupils is changing, but so is the subject matter. Increasingly, pupils are required to steer their own learning processes and to learn independently. The teaching-learning process is geared to demand rather than supply. Pupils themselves search for answers to questions, even if these questions are ones given them by their teacher, who guides the learning process in this manner.
The way the pupil finds the answer is as important as the answer itself. In this way, pupils not only learn what the capital of Bulgaria is, but also how they can find out. Children learn to learn, and that is the best preparation for lifelong learning. Kennisnet is an important tool for 'the new learning', because it gives everyone involved in education the opportunity to use ICT.
Remarkable. Children are given an opportunity to find out, in Kennisnet and on Wikipedia, where the capital of Bulgaria is, while, at the same time, they will be able to follow whatever junk reporting, calculated disinformation, spoof additions, subliminal advertising Wikipedia may be featuring on that day. Or, ideally, they'll consume as 'encyclopedic truth' a 'final version' of an entry determined by the Wikipedian 'wisdom of crowds' to be 'good enough' to be locked up and kept 'stable'. Capital. "Opportunity for everyone" meaning the opportunity to consume junk - and it makes little difference whether the junk is served up by advertisers, civil servants in pursuit of job security, or volunteer acolytes of a 'freedom' cult.
As Rosemary Righter noted in her December 9, 2005 article in Times Online (see Appendix 5):
The logo of Wikipedia, the online “free encyclopedia” visited daily by millions of students who innocently imagine that what they are getting is reliable factual information, is a globe composed of jigsaw pieces decorated with letters from many alphabets. Just above the omega, at the point where, on human heads, they used to perform frontal lobotomies, bits of the jigsaw are missing.
To put it another way, the next best thing to a lobotomy is 'learning' from Wikipedia.