This quotation is from Amazon.com’s description of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, in which he coined the word cyberspace: “Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway–jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills.”
Cyberspace and the information superhighway became the mental images of the late 20th century for how we humans experienced information “out there” on the new Internet. In October 2006 WIRED, George Gilder used another image: “The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use.”
This week Nicholas Carr, author of the excellent Big Switch book published this spring, has written a post in which he says: “The metaphor of ‘the cloud’ is a seductive one, but it’s also dangerous.” The dangers he writes about, both in the post and in the closing chapters of his book, are real – but they are not caused by the word “cloud.” I suggest there is a danger in losing the very helpful word “cloud” in the growing Net vocabulary.
Gibson got thinking off into a repositioned analog frame of reference with the words “surf” and “highway.” Particularly for education – the preoccupation of the Golden Swamp – emergent patterns for learning are key. Cloud is a great word here: emergence from a cloud is a useful image; emergence from surfing or a highway is very hard to imagine. Findability of quality learning resources is another area crucial to online learning – and not something that happens by surfing or following a road. Findability results from standing out in the cloud.
Cloud education has great potential to fulfill the promise of the Net to lift learning from its 20th century woes. Cloud education is connecting into the cloud to learn and to interact with other learners, and with teachers and knowledge experts. The cloud is already there, but education is barely into the cloud at all. Cloud education policy is to use the cloud for learning – and this policy is what we need to promote and adopt.
We need the word “cloud” to say these things.
