This photo from a series Macs through the ages at Silicon.com is the first laptop produced by Apple in its PowerBook 100 series. This colorful seven pounder does not look all that different from today’s laptop, yet this picture was taken in 1991, nearly 20 years ago! The biggest tech difference between then and now is today’s portable computers are usually use unplugged; they are wireless.
It is common practice to refer in education circles to using computers as using technology. But that nomenclature refers accurately only to the now hardly novel machines and their infrastructure.
In 1991 the internet was small, the World Wide Web was one year old, and browsers were still on the drawing boards. In the 1990s, content poured into the internet, including bountiful academic knowledge resources. In 1998 Google came online to replace overloaded indexes and simple keyword search engines with a usage weighted search engine.
Those of us who have spent a lot of time in the past couple of decades working with a machine like the one in our picture will not have noticed a lot going on with the machine itself. For a while it seemed important for the machine to be able hold a lot of content, but when the internet came along content and the action moved online. The cognitive resources of education moved into what I like to call the golden swamp – the internet.
Harnessing the internet for education is not about technology. Instead, organizing the internet cognitively is the challenge. Educators need to focus on optimizing the best knowledge resources so that they are findable. Subjects need to be tagged and interlinked. The gold in the swamp needs to be found, organized, and used.
