The Information Explosion

IBM Corporation predicted in 2006 that within four years, the world’s information base would be doubling in size every eleven hours (p. 2). If true, the amount of information in the world today has quadrupled since this time yesterday.

The exponential growth of information in the modern age has caused me to look at learning in a different way. At one time, I thought of learning as acquiring information, internalizing facts, filling my brain with data. Now I think of learning as acquiring information meta skills that allow me to find and use information when I need it. At the top of the list of meta skills is categorizing information. Is the information I need by nature stable or subject to change? This tells me where to look for it. For example, if I am interested in learning Plato’s philosophy – information that hasn’t changed in nearly 24 centuries – I can get a hard copy of The Republic and it doesn’t matter whether it was published last week or last century. However, if I want to learn the latest attitudes and software in the world of social media, I need an online source that is up-to-the-minute in its currency.

But not all online sources are created equal, and this brings me to another meta skill needed: Categorizing sources. Wikis, web sites, and discussion boards present information that is subjective at best, biased, ill informed, and inaccurate at worst. On the other end of the spectrum, peer-reviewed professional journals and news sources are more trustworthy online sources because it is in their interest to be so. Being a discriminating information shopper when online is just as important as knowing to go online in the first place.

So what is the teacher’s role in all this? The teacher must first master these meta skills and then become adept at teaching them to students. In doing so, he or she helps “chart a way through this chaos, to provide order and create the conditions to encourage a deep approach to learning.” (Garrison & Anderson, 2003, p. 17).

Dealing with progress

Older learners tend to be overwhelmed, at least in the beginning, by information and technology. This is less of a problem for young people – digital natives – because they never lived in a simpler time. Technology that is disruptive, confusing, and unnecessary to one generation is often embraced as a birthright by the next. It’s a fact of life.

This is the context for “A Vision of Students Today” (Wesch, 2007), where yet another generation of students adopts the timeless whine, “adults don’t understand us!” This video is more remarkable for the way students openly admit the vacuity of their daily routines than for being an indictment of modern education. Would the traditional college freshman lecture class benefit from a makeover? Of course! But the deliberate learning required in college will always take more effort, willpower, and money than socializing with one’s friends, regardless of the technology used.

Dr. Wesch’s “The web is us/ing us” (n.d.) is more clever and useful in that it rapidly creates a sense of the way web technology and the connectedness of people and information has developed. Progress can always use a good sales pitch. That is also a fact of life.


References
Garrison, D. & Anderson, T. (2003). E-Learning in the 21st century: a framework for
research and practice. New York: Routledge.

IBM Corporation. (2006). The toxic terabyte: how data-dumping threatens business
efficiency. Retrieved from http://www.martingover.com/1752/knowledge-doubling-curve-and-your-singularity/

Wesch, M. (2007). A vision of students today. Retrieved from
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Wesch, M. (n.d.). The web is us/ing us. Retrieved from
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g