The home website here of this year’s Masters golf tournament is a modern classic in Web design aimed at conveying ideas. In a five-minute visit to the webpage you can virtually master the pertinent information about the tournament: current facts, history, tradition, physical set-up and more. A main 2006 theme of the Masters website is that the Augusta course has been lengthened because technology has stretched the length of the golfers’ drives.
Education should stretch with the times! Why does the education industry persist in absorbing billions of dollars in loading down kids’ backpacks with textbooks from the Bobby Jones era instead conveying knowledge to students through subject websites like Masters.org? How about copying the Masters website set-up to interface the week when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel, or doing the same for Marco Polo’s travels, or for the discovery of the cure for polio? Those would be aces for learning. Textbooks are bogies in the era when 300 yard plus golf drives are becoming routine.
