I Have Seen The Future

I haven't really seen the future but I did spend the better part of last week with my head in the clouds. New Paltz, NY is in the mountains and The Mohonk Mountain House is probably the highest point in that town. And if the altitude wasn't enough to make this sea-level New Yorker light-headed, the subject matter of the conference was.
On our first night we were put into small groups and given this task:
"You have two years until the bird flu hits. The schools will be closed down. Plan how your school will continue to function with most of your students and staff quarantined in their homes or escaped to safer environments."
Doesn't it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime? – to jettison everything extraneous and bull-sh*tty and distill what we do down to it's essence, which is, I think, teaching kids to figure out what they want to know and then learn how to learn it themselves.
I am convinced that the best we can do for kids is to get them thinking, talking, reading, and writing Oh and I also still believe in times tables. Kids should understand basic math concepts and do simple math in their heads (yes, I think you are better off knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide without having to rely on machines or even paper and pencil)
I have nothing against machines. The machines we have today will change education as much as printed books changed learning in the late fifteenth century.
The computer has changed my life.
The first generation Internet, when it went mainstream, and referred to now as Web 1.0, was a huge collection of documents and web sites. You needed some programming skills to post to it and you needed some Boolean logic skills to extract meaning from it. You remember what it was like – the directory-model search engines, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, were not exactly user friendly but intriguing and cool, nevertheless.
Then Google came along, with it's relevancy-based search engine. Since the late nineties Google searches have been fine-tuned by the sheer volume of users. Its PageRank algorithm causes the most connected-to pages to rise to the top aided by the unseen metatags.
The current phase of Internet development is referred to as Web 2.0. and it was made possible by Google's search advances along with the widespread availabilty of high-speed connectivity and inexpensive fast-processor computers.
Web 2.0 is characterized by its interactiveness. The classic example is the "mash-up," the mixing of data from various sources – like Google Earth, where you can plot restaurants or hotels into a satellite map.
It is also free. Web 2.0 is all about participation and democracy. It is blogs and wikis and flikr and opinions on Amazon and shared bookmarks on de.licio.us and ratings in travel websites and playlists in iTunes and Skype and Wikipedia and on and on.
The Times ran a front page story today on the dawn of Web 3.0 – the next iteration of the Web. It will harness the power of the "social computing" sites like the ones I mentioned above – full of facts and opinions and music and pictures and video and collaborative thought. Web 3.0 will not simply connect the dots from one site to another it will do things out of that scary Spielberg movie with the robot children. It will use the content that we all have created to make it possible for us to be "understood" by our computers. You will be able to type in, "I need to find a critically-aclaimed book, fiction, where the main character develops super powers after a natural disaster." Or, "I want a hip hotel in Budapest for $100 a night - next week." Or, "I need to find the cure for bird flu." It will know what you want and find it for you - fast.
So will this be the standard in two years when I have to keep my students learning when they are stuck home in the pandemic?
Jeez, they might never need to come back to school.