As is often the case, the debate that is taking place in Washington about how to fix education misses the coming revolution in how, what, and why children learn. While both sides of the debate are arguing over issues like "standards" and the "politicization" of content, they each seem to agree that education in the 21st century, just like the 19th century, will be based on a top-down, pre-defined curriculum designed by a group of expert educators sitting in some Ivory Tower.
The explosion of content on the Internet is on its way to rendering this kind of debate moot. Once a student is in front of a wired machine, he is only one search away from his own answers. A pre-defined curriculum may teach students about a subject in a particular order and with particular emphases, but what if Wikipedia tells the story differently? What if a Google search takes the student in a completely different direction? Textbooks and other curricular materials use to be the only sources available to most students on any given subject. Now and in the future, it is not clear they will be the best.
We need to reorient our whole attitude about education -- away from fighting about the "Holy Grail" curriculum and toward teaching children how to manage the vast sea of content available to them. We need to teach them how to search. We need to give them the critical thinking skills to evaluate what they find. And, probably most importantly, we need to teach them how to build a social network around learning because the truth is we are quickly getting to the point where the amount of content out there will exceed the ability of any one person to filter on his own. Where once we called helping each other "cheating", it should now become "massively parallel processing" -- the only answer to cope with an impending information overload
We, in the technology and social media community, need to work to make this transition as effective as possible by developing tools that will allow the next generation of learners to cope with this new environment. Students need learning management tools -- an iTunes for education where they can track, store, and configure all the things they are finding. We also need to create social media platforms where students to interact with each other. As the Huffington Post is to News, these new tools will harness the wisdom of the crowds for education. Lastly, we will need some way to create traceability. An individual's learning path will only be valuable to those that follow him to the extent that the bread crumbs still lead somewhere and not to the dreaded "ERROR 404 - this URL was not found."
These are exciting times in education. It was fun to see how technology changed the paradigms for music, video, and friendship. Now we will be able to witness its real power as it transforms the way we learn.