The Situation

A buddy of mine and I are working on a zombie survival game from the ground up. Yeah, it’s an odd hobby and it makes sense for us. We both have a heavy language arts and technology background. But, one of the hardest issues we’ve discussed is the story and specifically… how do you make a survival scenario scary when everyone has a cellphone? Our group of survivors is stuck in ruined post-apocalyptic San Francisco after a plane crash. How do they get help, how do they alert the army they need a transport out? Well, they use their cellphone. What if they need to know how to make a signal fire? The survivors google it using their 3G-enabled smartphones. It’s a marvel that Romero never had to deal with back in the 60s and 70s. What do you do when everyone is connected to the largest information-gathering system (read: internet) on the planet?
The same question is being asked in classrooms around the world. I remember the tail end of my high school career (a lifetime ago of six years now) and listened to an english teacher caution us on proper sourcing and not to use Wikipedia for anything. Even now I hear this sentiment echoed, but the times keep a-changing as studies indicate that Wikipedia has become as scholarly as its for-profit competitor, Britannica (http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html). Beyond this one single website, the digital web is expanding in influence and pervasiveness. Curtis Bonk in The World is Open notes in his introduction the increasing use of mobile devices to connect to the Internet in Asian countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan (pg. 14). This increase is also being felt in the Western world with the rise of Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android operating platform, and the decreasing popularity (though this should not be mistaken as a decrease in use, exactly) of normal cellphones such as Nokia brands.
I think the major problem with the institution of education is that most of this learning is informal and mobile. Imagine for a moment that a learner needs to know about college-level algebra. In the time before the Web, he or she would have two courses for this. The learner could go to a university (or city community college) and learn from a professor or teaching assistant the necessary principles to understand this level of algebra. Thus, in this example, comes the original classification of college-level: a difficulty that necessitated the instruction by a college.
The other way would be to self-teach the material with books (the rise of the For Dummies books is plenty of evidence this indeed happens). However, self-teaching a subject a learner is not proficient in or not familiar with leads to many problems in comprehension. The guarantee and cost of buying workbooks would also be quite high.

Without Distance, Time, or Money

The digital Web allows those without the means or the geographical location to procure a proper learning environment. Instead of self-learning in isolation, places like Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow, millions of blogs, wikis, and youtube videos and a billion net-izens can help a learner understand most any subject. This relates to Bonk’s idea of pipes, pages, and virtual learning communities. In the past 20 years, the physical means and software necessary to connect to learning communities has enabled more and more people to learn from each other (pipes). This in turn has created a massive content load for virtually any subject (pages). And in turn, virtual learning communities have arisen to understand, catalogue, and edit information.
Further, the economic impact of technology on education is becoming immense. Let us go back to my friend. He went through four years at a private college to obtain a BA in English. His passion was not in literature, but in technology, specifically networking, and decided to obtain his CCNA. He has had more success at being a technology consultant, networking engineer, and computer programmer than he ever thought he would have with traditional education background. It’s said a normal American will change careers three times in their lives. Well, in this case, the Internet’s ability to service this change is its greatest strength. No longer is education just for the wealthy or something that should be thought of as a linear path. As with my friend’s education background, I have a Bachelor’s, but I can easily learn programming languages, physics, and psychology (all of which are interests of mine) and at the same time polish on my web searching skills. The Internet becomes a democratizing tool.

The Result of Bonk

Honestly, much of The World is Open is covered in other books I’ve had to read for my Virtual Learning Communities class. However, Bonk breaks it down much the technology and education relationship as Alan Friedman’s The World is Flat explained the burgeoning economic paradigms Web 2.0 and current trends were creating. As before, my analysis of the situation is easy to surmise. I think that current education methods need to change and are being resisted in a political climate that demands standardized testing and, as a result, ignores constructive learning perspectives. As a culture, the West needs to embrace the idea that from this point on in history people will not receive just information from grades K-12 from the classroom, but from the endless spectrum on the Digital Web.