"What people said about books in 1498": a very good thought-probe from the fine Engines of Our Ingenuity. Think about the scale of the Gutenberg explosion-
Five hundred years ago, the new presses had spread like brushfire through Europe. The people had suddenly come into possession of some fifteen million new books. Scholars argue about the number. It could've been as few as eight million or as many as twenty four. But the output of new books had been staggering by any reasonable estimate. And those books reflected some thirty thousand titles.
I was thinking of this as I reviewed my presentation slides from this weekend. I had argued that educational technology was playing a frustrating role in keeping much of academe away from the Web 2.0 explosion. Think of it: perhaps 50 million blogs, more than 4 million Flickr users having made 22 million photos searchable and shareable, a wiki encyclopedia comparable to Brittanica, one million social bookmarkers on one platform, all in a few years.
(thanks, Howard!)
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