RecentHeadline… NEW YORK (CNNMoney) –After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will cease production of its iconicmulti-volume book sets … Instead, the company will focus solely on itsdigital encyclopedia and education tools.
Growing up, I remember when my family got our encyclopediaset. We unpacked the many boxes and placed the volumes on the shelf of honor. Myparents paid it off, little by little, month by month. Our encyclopedia set wasmore than a bunch of books; it was the embracement of knowledge, a sign thatlearning was important in our home. Somehow, I don’t think families feel the same way about Wikipedia.
Like it or not, the end of the printed EncyclopediaBritannica epitomizes the slow but clear decline of ink-on-paper technology, anindustry begun almost 600 years ago with the Gutenberg press. Going forward,more and more knowledge will be online and in the cloud. You can’t touch it, you can’t hold it, and you can’t really own it. In my office, I have an entire wall ofbooks, some I’ve actually used, but most Ihaven’t touched in years. Why? TheInternet, of course. It’s all there; faster to access,cheaper to maintain, easier to update, deeper in depth, broader in scope, andsimpler to share. This is a good thing, right?
Maybe. Schools are dumping textbooks and moving to eBooks. Soon,no more 30-pound packs on the backs of 12-year olds, and no more dated contentin an age of online resources and instant updating. Libraries are digitizingtheir collections, brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing, Kindles and other eReadersare flying off the shelves, and eBooks are outselling their paper brethren. Theexponential growth in knowledge and the shortening half-life of its usabilitydemands that we have faster access to better content. No way can traditionalprint media keep up. People are still reading and writing, but they’re doing it in new ways.
The speed of technological change is accelerating. Printedbooks have been around for hundreds of years, but CDs and DVDs will take just asingle generation to fade away. In spite of the increasing techno-churn, I seegreat potential for technology to enable true interactive learning and provideaccess to immense information resources. And social learning, which hasactually been around forever, has come to the fore because of advances indigital media. Our rush to find new and better ways to create, store, manage,and, especially, share knowledge may be necessary to meet the challenges of theinformation age; but we must be careful or we will lose something along theway.
My fear is that our total embrace of all things digitalmight cause us to make poor decisions in other areas, like sacrificing quality,professionalism, and standards for what Cammy Bean refers to as “clicky-clicky-bling-bling.” We know that not everythingworks best in electronic form, especially when poorly done. You can’t really accomplish true knowledge creation and transfer in140 characters, or even 140 words. Despite the “crowdpower” of informal learning andsocial media, there is still a unique, important, and powerful role for greatteachers and mentors. In education and training, we have learned thatorganizations that blindly rushed to put allcourseware online have failed miserably.
In the era of books, publishing was hard, with limited opportunities.Today, everyone is both a content consumer anda content creator. It’s much easier, and the costscan be miniscule; anyone can publish almost anything online. What does thismean for us? I think it means our key role moves from production to decision-makingand advice on content and learning quality;a realization that great technology, even as a great enabler, does notautomatically mean great learning, understanding, or enlightenment. I may be awhiz at Microsoft Word, but that doesn’t guarantee I can write thenext Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. We must focus less on bells and whistles,and more on content, learning, and results.
So it’s not as much about building acourse as it is about what should be in that course and how it should work, andwhat we should deliver in other ways. Not as much about creating onlineknowledge resources as it is about what those resources should include and how weshould structure them. Not as much about building social networks as it isabout what those social networks can and should accomplish. And so on.
My head tells me to cull my bookshelves big time, but myheart wants to hold on. The end of books is more emotional than anything else. Itdoesn’t mean the end of writing orthe end of reading. It means that creating the right “stuff” and getting it into the handsof those who need it, when they need it, is more important than any medium ortechnology of the moment. The end of the iconic printed encyclopedia may be sador nostalgic to some, but it is more importantly a challenge to us to keep oureyes on what really matters – content, not packaging;learning, not technology.
