With the creation of the internet, the amount of information available to people is overwhelming. The sheer volume of stuff out there is staggering. There have been lots of estimates of how much information is accessible via the internet but as it grows, the numbers continue to increase–exponentially! People have even calculated how much the internet weighs! So, this must be a problem for educators. What should they teach now that there is so much new information out there?
But is this really a new problem? If you’ve ever been to a large library, you’ve noticed that clearly there is more information in all of the books than the average person can consume in a lifetime. The problem of information explosion in not new. What is *relatively* new is the technology allowing us to access. It seems like the information explosion is a new problem but it’s not.
Educational leaders and those who talk about school are panicked about this “information explosion.” I’ve been to more than a few in-services and lectures where speakers astound us with their calculations of how much information is “out there.” Then they tell us that it’s changing everything. What they forget is that too much information has always been “out there.” Since the invention of the printing press, there has been too much information for one person to absorb. So the task of a good educator is the same as it’s always been: to help students make sense of the world. The tools that help us do that have evolved and changed but that’s always going to happen. Nothing stays the same so we adapt. Our core job is and must continue to be to help students understand the world and give them the tools to continue understanding it. The students won’t suddenly begin to teach themselves with the Internet. We can’t just turn students loose on the Internet so they can “find” the information themselves. Knowledge without the guidance of a skilled teacher is chaos.
