SPEECH, drawing, writing, mathematics, printing, photography, telegraphy, film, radio, television, internet: each of these represents a seminal stage in the history of information transfer and a quantum leap in power and range. The gaps between stages have shortened from millennia to decades to years as the curve depicting the speed of development rises ever more steeply.
The extent to which the internet will change human society and experience is still unclear, although many of the changes it has already produced are now commonplaces 鈥� even necessities 鈥� of daily life, such as email, Google and Skype. All of one鈥檚 work, entertainment and communications can already be concentrated in one portable device. Although for good reasons many people still congregate in workplaces and educational centres, how long will this last? Travelling to one鈥檚 computer terminal in an office miles away, instead of working on it at home, will become comparatively rare as people are put off by transport difficulties and concerns over environmental impacts.
One of the greatest promises of the internet relates to education. In times of teacher shortages, the benefits are obvious: one teacher online can instruct millions of pupils. There are serious disadvantages, such as the lack of one-on-one teacher-pupil engagement, but mixing online with traditional education can reduce that problem. The internet will also be one major way of delivering 鈥溾��. This is learning that uses virtual reality technology to give students a sense of being realistically inside an environment, so that they can learn more directly by participation. They can 鈥渆xperience鈥� historical events and fly like a bird over continents, through planetary systems or into cells and molecules.
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Before the internet can be confidently used as an educational tool, however, some of its more serious problems must be addressed, chief among them the unreliability of so much of the information it contains.
鈥淭o use the internet as an educational tool, its content must be audited for reliability鈥�
Here is a telling example. Suppose you wish to trace the author and context of a quotation you have encountered, 鈥�.鈥� On my search, the first web page cited by Google attributes it to the poet Austin Dobson. This mistake is soon corrected: it comes from a Walter de la Mare poem, and all of the following references say so.
The last stanza of this poem begins, 鈥淟ook thy last on all things lovely / Every hour. Let no night seal thy sense in deathly slumber / Till to delight thou have paid thy utmost blessing鈥︹�� On another web page cited by Google this quotation is rendered as, 鈥淟ook thy last on all things lovely. Every hour. Let no night. Seal thy sense in deathly slumber. Till to delight. Thou have paid thy utmost blessing鈥︹�� There is a solecism in this last line: 鈥渢hou have paid鈥� should read 鈥渢hou hast paid鈥�. But the mistake was the poet鈥檚, not the transcriber鈥檚, and some of the web pages silently correct it 鈥� thus introducing an error about an error. Transcription mistakes abound on other web pages: 鈥渓et not night鈥� for 鈥渓et no night鈥�, 鈥渟enses鈥� for 鈥渟ense鈥�, and so on. These are minor matters here, but not if we were dealing with a mathematical or chemical formula.
The lesson is that to make best use of the internet as an educational resource, its content has to be audited for reliability, and a system of classification introduced. Given that the internet is already the main resource for students, the need is urgent. I suggest that an international consortium of universities should set up panels to audit the worth of websites, endorsing those that are reliable. They should not censor, nor comment on matters of opinion 鈥� the price we pay for the internet鈥檚 open democracy is the rubbish it contains. But they should authoritatively identify worthwhile sites, and warn of factual error when it occurs. Without such expert monitoring, the internet will increasingly be a problem rather than a boon, and limited in educational value.
