How Wikis, Blogs and the Web spell the End of Education as We Know It

This paper explores how the democratic fora of the internet and associated technologies represent a shift and parallax change in our understanding of how humans will be open to educative technologies of the self. At present an authoritarian modality of educational transmission is dominant. The thesis of this paper is that the reception of such modes of education is changing at a rapid speed and will, in time, signal the end of education as we know it unless schooling can adapt to fit itself in with the ‘people power’ modalities that are emerging. These modalities are emerging from the bottom up, as individuals explore the interactive possibilities of new technologies, but those same individuals are also developing those technologies into the future because of their associated democratically inclined needs for such technologies to be responsive to their self. This is happening - and is seen in this paper to be an unstoppable inevitability - to a point where the technologies that are commercially developed are becoming responsible for a need for democratic educational modes such as that found at Summerhill School or informal home education.
In line with the conference theme, I will also be exploring how the difference of my own thoughts, compared to the thought of others who work towards improving schools, for example, impacts upon the research outcomes and interests that drive such reflections regarding ‘inevitable change’.