The Information Society

1. Educational softwares that are flexible enough to accommodate individual learning preferences and learners' needs can be very efficient. The aim is to adapt the learning environment to each specific users using various techniques. While I am familiar with this concept and with some of these techniques, I never made the link between this adaptive learning and the customization of knowledge.

Dyson, Gilder, Keyworth and Toffler (1994) argue that a major change in today's society is the "demassification of actionable knowledge" (p.298).

I never saw it from this perspective but indeed, what we once called "mass knowledge" is now more and more being customized in order to suit people's needs. People can personalize their home page, add widgets, use wikis, etc...


2. Another interesting topic raised by these four authors is "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests".

Again, this can easily be related to education. Teachers communities could be a great source of help and support for teachers, and teaching strategies from all around the world could easily be shared. Learning environment could also include students communities, in which students could share their ideas, problems and solutions.

An important characteristic to highlight is that these communities would be diverse but private (i.e. accessible to members only) and hence the information would be valuable (unlike the wealth of irrelevant information found on the Web).


3. The last point is more directly related to the concept of Information Society. In her article, Susan Crawford cites an interesting comment from Cooper:

The evidence suggests that the concept of an information economy is new but many of the products and services in it are the same. It is not clear that there has been a shift from a services to an information economy, rather than a relabeling of existing products and services.

So is there no real change? No shift but simply a relabeling? In the Handbook of the New Media, Webster argue that there is in fact no real evidence of change ("quantitative indices of the spread of information and information technologies cannot be interpreted as evidence of really deep-seated social change").

Are people feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information and the rapid growth of new technologies? Is that why they talk about social changes or technology determinism? People tend to forget that technology itself is subject to social shaping and furthermore, new technologies are being introduced only when society accepts them. For instance, educational technologies aleady exist and are being developped; some countries have already implemented them into their classrooms, while other countries are still very reluctant to accept them.