Future network users will suffer from infoglut; the volume of resources available on the Internet will be completely overwhelming. There will be lots of gold, but more fool’s gold, tailings, and junk. If you search for evolution, you may get Darwin’s Origin of Species, fourth grade essays, creationist dogma, and erudite scientific papers. Mediocre and dreadful resources will be on the networks in far greater quantity than excellent ones, as always.
Predictor: Tinker, Bob
Prediction, in context:In 1995, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology commissioned a series of white papers on various issues related to networking technologies. The department convened the authors for a workshop in November 1995 to discuss the implications. The following statement is taken from one of the white papers, “The Whole World in Their Hands,” by Bob Tinker, the president of Concord Consortium, he has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and a reputation as a pioneer in constructivist uses of educational technology. Tinker writes: ”Future network users will suffer from infoglut; the volume of resources available on the Internet will be completely overwhelming. There will be lots of gold, but more fool’s gold, tailings, and junk. If you search for evolution, you may get Darwin’s Origin of Species, fourth grade essays, creationist dogma, and erudite scientific papers. Mediocre and dreadful resources will be on the networks in far greater quantity than excellent ones, as always. There will be lots of drill and practice, courses that preach radical relativism (your theory is as good as mine), and untested student activities by the terabyte, generated by teachers of all degrees of competence. Every government agency, every lobby, every professional society, every public interest group, will generate network-based units that cover math and science topics that support their world view. NASA already sells space platforms thinly disguised as instructional material; the nuclear industry will convert its units on the virtue of its source of energy, as will the coal, natural gas, and corn/ethanol lobbies. The religious right will champion creationism and produce biology material innocent of Darwin and sex; racists will have units on the genetics of Lamarck and Schotkey. Old and out-of-date textbooks will be copied wholesale onto the net and sold.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Information Overload
Name of publication: The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning
Title, headline, chapter name: The Whole World in Their Hands
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney