Thinking Backward: A Knowledge Network for the Next Century

Abstract

The standards of educational information exchange are still firmly rooted in a Newtonian paradigm that emphasizes strict rules of information exchange. With the explosion of information since World War II, and especially its accessibility through the mechanism of the internet, this paradigm has become a barrier to effective exchanges of information at all levels. Vannevar Bush recognized this problem as early as 1945 and provided a roadmap to addressing it in his famous As We May Think. Douglas Engelbart and Theodore Holmes Nelson applied Bush’s vision to technology but we have never fully realized its potential in part due to our Newtonian information paradigm. This article argues that what Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson proposed is essentially an Einsteinian (relativistic) notion of information flows with tools specifically designed to facilitate the augmentation of human knowledge. It further posits what such a system of knowledge exchange might look like and how we might begin to build it.