Youth Education - Teaching Teachers Teaching in Two Thousand

During my time going through the Canadian education system, computers were antiquated machines designed primarily as advance type-writers with limited or no access to the 'net. Even when I could logon to Netscape, my options seemed limited because I was never really shown the immense possibilities of the Internet beyond the WWW. Webpages were all I knew, and for the most part, other than some download sites, chat pages, and early weblogs, most pages on the Web were novel but uninteresting.

It wasn't until much later that I would find out the Internet had been alive and strong well before Webbrowsers, and graphical pages displaying user-generated content. There was a whole digital world out there to be discovered. News groups, bulletin board (BBS), Usenet, IRC, and on and on.

Since the invention of the telephone in the late 1800's (largely credited to AGB) The ways that we have of communicating to one another have since grown exponentially.

With this unparralled growth in communication tech, comes a massive increase in information transmission rates. A piece of data that two hundred years ago may have taken months of travel, and thousands of dollars in expense (perhaps hundreds of thousands when adjusted for inflation) can now be accessed either instantaneously, or quite nearly so. A library in Australia? 3 minutes 27 seconds. Even if you assume the data you are looking for has never been digitized, we now have the means of contacting global experts on huge numbers of subjects, in order to flush that vital piece of information out. And that means has been granted to the majority for the first time in history.

It was my fault, perhaps for not subscribing to any formal education on computing at the time, but also the fault of my environment for not providing the immediate means to do so. Whatever the case may be, things are very different now. Even in the smallest communities children are growing up with access to the answer to any question they can postulate. Often times, many answers. This, I believe is a merit to a society because where before if a solution was presented to the masses, it was a singular voice, usually coming from a person in a position of authority, and no matter the ambiguity, that answer was definitive and effectively final.

We now can see that to any situation, there may be many truths, and not always in agreeance with the other... Amongst all these possible truths, there is the answer first sought out. The truth finally chosen by the seeker will be the one that most harmonizes with that chooser's current paradigm. We choose the nature of our own reality, according to how it relates with what we already perceive to be truth.

So what decides the truth for the next generation of curious, inquisitive young minds? Pagerank®? Wikipedia®? No one source stands above all the rest as the final and definitive source for information, and that is what makes the connected world so complex and truly wondrous.

So I'll leave you with this:
When computers can talk to our kids, listen and respond to their questions, customize their lesson plan to their personal profile, formulate their itenerary, and reward positive behaviors with leisure time, or extra snack credits, and punish them by restricting the same, what need will we have of our teachers other than mere guardians?