Schooling has held cyberspace off at arms length for years, cringing at the dangers educators saw out there and touting a need they saw for education experts to guide and limit what students do out in the scary virtual world. The education establishment put walls around its stuff in the digital “out there” and walled it out of or filtered it into schools.
Meanwhile, we have come a very long way folks from the time when cyberspace was a separate world where geeks isolated themselves from the “real world.” In his new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky explains, on page 37:
The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world, was an accident of history. Back when the online population was tiny, most of the people you knew in your daily life weren’t part of that population. Now that computers and increasingly computerlike phones have been broadly adopted, the whole notion of cyberspace is fading. Our social media tools aren’t an alternative to real life, they are part of it. . . .
As they put it in Star Trek, someone needs to order schooling to head into the internet in a big ways: “Helm, Warp One — Engage.”
