One man's junk is another man's info.
Perhaps at a very basic level the internet and education can't go together, for
the very simple reason that almost by definition the educational system judges
the information that it chooses to present to students, determining (whether rightly
or wrongly) what is correct, what is fitting, what is comprehensible, and more,
to each specific group of students. The internet doesn't do this. To a large extent,
the special magic of the internet stems precisely from the fact that it doesn't
judge, but makes everything available.
In a
review of books devoted to baseball, the internet site Publishing Trends reported,
in 2000, about special niche markets that were developing as a result of the internet:
As Robinson points out, the beauty of such sites
lies in the maximum exploitation of a narrow niche. “To most people, this is
a lot of meaningless information,” he says. “For baseball junkies, it’s gold.”
I have no doubt that vast numbers of people, if exposed to the items that I view
on the internet (not to mention what I write) would be convinced that they're
significantly more meaningless than a photo of Janet Jackson's breast.
Go to: Who wants to solve that problems?, or
Go to: All that technology for ... that?