The New Media won't fit in the classroom.

A recent article in The Walrus Magazine – Missing Marshall McLuhan describes how the McLuhan Festival in Toronto. Like Harold Jarche, I found one paragraph particularly juicy reading:

“The new media won’t fit into the classroom,” he told the audience. “It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask.”

Harold added his comment:

All of the action is outside the classroom – blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting – you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.

This seems quite true, and I think the difference in the use of technology for communication within and outside the classrooms is staggering. I had students in a Computer Science class play around with a wiki yesterday, with pretty positive results. I wanted to see if I could get them editing text on a wiki without giving any explicit instructions or explanation – this is a wiki, its a web page that can be edited by anyone – and they seemed to understand what it was all about. If the schools don’t absorb the technology, the schools may end up being absorbed by it!