Whither education? A 3-part policy: take two

Over the summer I thought a lot about what the education sector should/must do to get really into the internet wave and upgrade into the 21st century. Last night in the third USA Presidential campaign debate, both candidates lamented the often sorry state of education. Neither candidate mentioned anything about the internet where the student generation is moving at warp speed. They, and other leaders across the board need the suggestions of the internet sector. Here are mine:

Schools K-20 should do these three things fully and now:

Mobiles for students, green the books, no more searching gobbledygook.

If you are a GoldenSwamp.com reader, you will recognize that this formula is an update of one I proposed last June: No more pencils, no textbooks, no more searching gobbledygook. The proposal is the same, with a slightly new take on the wording. The newly refined three points now give the structure to the Golden Swamp 21st Century Learning Handbook that I am writing. These are the key ideas:

Mobiles for students: Personal mobile computers — varying from laptops to smartphones to future morphs — will deliver the internet and thereby directly deliver the knowledge to be learned to each student. Education as the 21st century civil rights issue, as John McCain said in the debate last night. Mobiles address education discrimination in a powerful new way: The same online knowledge from the internet will display on the mobile screen of a child of color in a ghetto as does on the screen of a preppy kid under a lovely tree on a private school lawn. A mobile is not aware of its owner’s social, cultural, or racial identity.

Green the books: Educational institutions will buy and use no more textbooks and other educational resources that are printed on paper.

No more searching gobbledygook: Knowledge experts, educators, students, and the fully learning community will optimize educational resources for search engines, syndicate them to users, place them in social networks, and otherwise make certain that virtual knowledge is emergent into the open internet. (A major portion of the handbook I am preparing will describe how to do this important optimization work.)