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I’m proposing a new approach to education, or rather I’m pointing to the new  approach that is already here. Let people trace their own path. Completely.  Halfway through a sentence on microscopic worms, a student should be able to tap  on the scientific name c.  elegans and jump to a web page dedicated to it. From there they should  be able to follow links to videos, forums, whatever. Link, link, link – the  student follows their whims and interests. They return to home base, the  sentence on worms, when they feel like it, and they jump out again. The Life  on Earth textbook, or any other textbook, can never fulfill this kind of  branching of the educational path, because it can only be accomplished on the  infinitely complex web that is the internet.

At the risk of sounding trivial: this is how we learn about movies, gossip  among our friends online, and humorous events around the world. This is how we  intake information on the internet. Right now that data is all pretty useless –  it’s not exactly educational. But if we put all the right materials online, if  we found a way to link between them, then we might learn about cell membranes as  well as we learn about celebrity nip slips

The internet allows us to place content in one place, and to link it together  in infinite combinations. If we rely on publishers, they will draw walls between  content, how else can they make sure you pay for the materials in their  textbooks? Instead, we need to focus on creating quality educational  materials and putting them out there for everyone to use. We don’t need  textbooks, we don’t really need chapters. Each student can build their own  curriculum, or if that’s simply too scary, we can create an (several?) official  table of contents and encourage students to follow it. That’s fine as long as we  allow them to explore and create links on their own as well.

We teach in closed environments, from stale textbooks, and too often we seem  more focused on what we can block with our networks than what we can light up  our classrooms with. Our curriculum is paced and pixelated, and based on  pedagogies that may well be increasingly irrelevant to today’s learners.