Territorial Bloggings

Go read this article. Really. Click the link & go read it.

I’ve read Cringely for a long time, before and after he left Infoworld, where he assumed the mantle of their industry gossip column, and took it to great heights. His book Accidental Empires is a wonderful read about the growth & emergence of the pre-dotcom Silicon Valley culture & power brokers (Gates, Jobs, McNealy, etc…).

Anyway, he’s written a gem of an interesting column this week. I work in higher-ed, and I have two elementary-ed aged kids. My parents were public school teachers. I’ve grown up immersed in the ethos that learning, both in the vocational and liberal arts senses, was a good thing. I’ve also spent my entire working life in computer technology (and most of that in higher-ed). This is why I find Cringely’s column this week to be so interesting.

I don’t know if he’s exactly right in all of the particulars, but I do think he’s right in the big-picture sense. We’re on the cusp of a huge change in what education means & how it is delivered. It may even change how I go about making a living. It depends on just how fast some of these changes take effect.

As an example, back in my first attempt at grad school (UNC-CH’s School of Information & Library Science) in 1989-90, database construction & searching was very different than searching has become. Full-text was not a viable option & was rarely available. Entire graduate-level courses were dedicated to understanding database design, query design, & how to best go about doing research for folks, because online, searchable database access ran anywhere from $10-$300+ per hour. You had to know how all the different databases were constructed & indexed, so that you could write queries that got all the necessary, relevant, & useful results without spending too much time, and thus, money. IOW, “normal folks” didn’t have access to the data repositories.

I remember thinking & wondering how much better full-text indexing & searching would be, and wondering why it didn’t seem to be more of a priority. Well, I guess it was, because now we’ve got Google & all of these huge data repositories that are full-text, cheap (if not free), and easily accessible by even the “normal folks”. Getting data is no longer the problem/bottleneck - knowing which of that data is actually information is the challenge. Not to mention how to use it.

So, if you’ve gotten down to this point, and you didn’t go and read the article/column yet, here’s a second chance - hopefully you’re intrigued enough to go read it now…

Let me know what you think.

-ghp