"The Information Age" has provided a veritable cornucopia of information that is readily accessible by anyone with an Internet or cellular connection. As of this writing, it's been thirteen years since the first smartphone was demonstrated by Steve Jobs at the 2007 Macworld Expo. Today, 2.7 billion people around the world use them on a daily basis to communicate with their friends and loved ones and keep up with current events. Roughly 35% of the planet is now interconnected in a way that has never been possible before. In 1991, there was only one website. Today there are over two billion of them. Most of them are totally irrelevant, misleading, time-consuming, but often entertaining. With one internet site for every four people, we are drowning in drivel.
On May 10, 1996, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey connected two Macs through the Internet and conducted a coast-to-coast video chat. They marveled at the plethora of possibilities that this new technology would bring and how it would forever change the world for the betterment of everyone. Kesey noted, "All of this equipment is allowing us to get out from under the thumb of the major broadcasting companies and build our own audience."
Leary agreed, "Empowering the ten-year-old kid. The ten-year-old kid has got the equipment of a network now." Leary predicted that one day, "Everybody would have the capacity to be in everybody's ear." Twenty days later, he passed away, believing in a modern utopia that would be forged from technology.
Timothy Leary's wish for ubiquitous communications has finally come to pass. Unfortunately, the utopia that he envisioned has not; the interconnectivity of one-third of the planet has spawned something else entirely: a modern Tower of Babel.
However, I can't help but wonder if this is really leading us to a better means of education or not ...
In the world of electronic communication, there is a term called "signal-to-noise ratio" that is a measure of how much signal is getting through versus the (obscuring) background interference. In the parlance of teaching, this would be the equivalent to how much information is being imparted amongst the extraneous information that is being presented. For example, if a student can get 15 minutes worth of information by reading 30 minutes in a book, they have an effective signal-to-noise ratio of 1/2. Similarly, if they can get the same 15 minutes of information from a one-hour video, then they have an effective signal-to-noise ratio of 1/4. Granted that all students (myself included) learn in different modes at different rates, some modes of knowledge transference are still inherently faster than others. In a given day, a student can learn twice as much if their signal-to-noise ratio is 1/2 instead of 1/4. The trend to combine knowledge with entertainment in order to make it more fun and enjoyable is laudable, but it progressively decreases the signal-to-noise ratio.
We effectively hold students captive from K-12 ... that's 20,000+ hours of their lives. What signal-to-noise ratio do we want them to have during those hours? As we make things more entertaining and fun, are we diluting the essential knowledge that needs to be imparted over time? How many hours of actual learning are necessary to produce a literate product for the market-place by age 18?
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