Thanks to my success with Twittercize, I was asked to guest lecture for a graduate Internet Marketing Communication class at the University of Denver. For one week, the online students obliged my rambling, opinionated self. This series of blog posts excerpts some of my answers. Special thanks to a real marketing whiz, Lora Louise Broady, for asking me to participate. You know I loves the spotlight.
Expounding on several things at once, I’ll say this:
The nature of society is changing. As our collective adolescence shifts toward adulthood, roles of dominance (either through power, information, money, etc.) will slowly disappear. Mature individuals and societies don’t dominate, they collaborate. That’s why open source programming and Wikipedia have taken off, that’s why we see the White House working hard to set up channels of communication with the general public, and that’s why teachers are no longer (necessarily) the experts.
In the past, teachers were guardians of information. Now it’s given freely. Some teachers, still stuck in their antiquated mindsets, struggle to admit that a student would have more information than they do. It’s unfortunate, because teachers are still needed to facilitate, but not to disseminate.
Having a fast internet connection does not necessarily make you an expert or any wiser–we still desperately need teachers to show students how to use the wealth of information at their grasp.
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