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Surprising Science —

A Digital Education

“How do we use the technologies of computation, statistics and networking to shed light—without killing the magic?” Jaron Lanier asks if digital classrooms are good for education.
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“The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares. Right now, many of these decisions are being made by the geeks of Silicon Valley, who run a lot of things that other people pretend to run.”

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