Dot Com What? - Ten Years Behind

When I want to learn about a new technology, I ask my little sister... not my teacher.

General Education classes are a repeat of high school classes.

Every job I apply for requires at least a bachelor's degree.

It takes me six years to graduate because classes are either too full or canceled.

When "real-world" experts come into my classes to speak, they admit they don't know what the future of my field will be.

When I want to know about current trends, I turn to Web sites run by professionals my age who understand what's going on... not my teachers.

And you wonder why I'm facebooking through my classes?

School today is especially irrelevant. I've heard it said that universities are typically ten years behind the times. (Let's make an exception for the Silicon Valley schools, which clearly have been internet innovators, not laggards.)

That puts schools even with innovations in 1997. Back then, the dot com bubble had just begun to rise. The Nintendo 64 was released, and for the first time a computer beat a World Champion chess player. And the first version of the Java programming language was a year old.

Wait, really? Java is 10 years old? Computers haven't always been more capable calculators than humans? Computer graphics look way better now than in the days of the Nintendo 64... We have really come a long way in a short period of time!

The pace of technological innovation is astounding. We've all heard the mantra "six months to obsoletion." Who wouldn't be scared by that? There's a lot to learn for anyone. I remember when I could skate by on an English assignment simply by making a Web page that impressed the teacher, who had no idea how to do such things. That was back in the day, you know... before xml replaced html.

Innovations are made to make things better, faster, easier, and prettier. It's exciting and daunting to learn about.

And the experts have to struggle to stay on top of it. They always have to learn new things to simply function. Teachers don't have to learn new things to function... they can teach the same old same old... but if they want to remain experts, they have to learn new things.

In all my journalism classes, I have never once been taught the basics of how to get a good photograph, nor how to capture and edit audio, nor how to build a dynamic Web site or to write for a dynamic Web site. If I do any of that, it's because my friends help me. It's because they know how to do it and because they understand why it's important.

I might find teachers who agree that I should be capable of all those things, but I won't find many teachers who are actually rebuilding their course work to reflect that.

People my age are interested in the new lifestyle the internet affords us, because we're living that lifestyle. And hungry to learn about it. Frankly the best way to do that for me is to talk (or facebook) to my friends, and my little sister's friends - people who adapt quickly to new technology, who aren't afraid of it, and who can teach me what they've learned by trial and error.

It's preferable to learn in a school setting, where concepts can be explained formally, and (ideally) textbooks can feed the fundamentals of new concepts for the hungry brain to devour. Academia has perfected learning over the last two thousand years. But lately those learning institutions have failed to be relevant in an environment where learning and adapting is everything.