Will the Real Tomorrow Please Stand Up?

Oh dear, I thought, a tech article from 2000! That's technically the last millennium and whats this Xerox he keeps going on about? Surprisingly the article doesn't sound too dated, that's because the writer is discussing ideas that are still coming into being. We are living in an increasingly wired age where the "cross pollination" of ideas seems to have become unstoppable. Even though I cringe when CNN describes Twitter as an agent of regime change there is at last some fire for all the smoke.

The question that concerns us should not be the spread or penetration of the digital age but the meaning of it and in particular its impact on education. As I noted we're more than a decade past the publishing of this article so lets revisit and review a few themes -


"Now, with incredible amounts
of information available through the Web,
we find a “new” kind of learning assuming
pre-eminence—learning that’s discovery based. "

Well, how about it? This reminds me of sites like Digg or Stumbleupon, but are we expanding our exposure to new ideas and opinions online or are we burrowing into our niches? As online information consumers people tend to search for things that reinforce their existing beliefs and interests, imagine someone deciding to research how they might be wrong about immigration or climate change for example. In the old days you had to open a newspaper to read about the events of the day. On your way from the front page to the sports section you'd "stumbleupon" an article about a local issue you weren't aware of and maybe it would change something, now you just go straight to your drip feed and bypass the rest.


Now let’s overlay on top of this physicalsocial region the Web, and look back to the example of students participating in local, face-to-face groups but tying also into virtual ones. A key understanding is that on the Web there seldom is such a thing as just a producer or just a consumer; on the Web, each of us is part consumer and part producer. We read and we write, we absorb and we critique, we listen  and we tell stories, we help and we seek help. This is life on the Web.


I think it's true that the Web has been the great leveler of authority, by providing a platform to big too control and so easy to access technology has empowered all of us. With nothing more than a smartphone and a Youtube account anyone can influence the news or even bring down a powerful figure. Wikis when they work are simply amazing, I've hacked cameras and game consoles relying on community built guides that are constantly evolving and building on each others break throughs. Of course there's always the nagging issue of finding an audience, it was once said of poetry that there were far more poets than readers of poems... With blogs I suspect it's even worse and with that, I thank you for making it to the bottom of this post.