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Information is obviously the essential element for learning
and a tool for practical knowledge
which could progress into intelligence!

A World of information is available for easier learning, from the past, now, and into the future! The future of our world depends on accurate information and how to properly utilize it.

Appropriate decisions require reliable information with intelligent analysis! Thinking that intelligence is the amount of information or knowledge that we have is not necessarily true! There are many people who are knowledgeable, but lack intelligence to properly utilize their knowledge.

Some experts believe we are living in history's most extensive informational revolution. We now know how to store all of humanity's combined knowledge and wisdom and make it instantly available to almost anyone, anywhere, on earth. As a result, we need to develop a learning revolution to keep pace with the revolution in instant communication. Every family, school, or business can, and must, take advantage of this new age of networked intelligence.

We are living through a revolution that is changing the way we live, communicate, think, and prosper (or fail to prosper). This revolution will determine how, and if, we and our children work, earn a living, and enjoy life to the fullest.

For the first time in history, so many things are now possible and feasible

It is estimated that most of us do not know how to benefit fully from the hurricane of technical change, even in developed countries. Unless we find the right answers, an elite twenty percent could end up with sixty percent of each nation's income, the poorest fifth with only about two percent. That is a formula for guaranteed poverty, school failure, crime, drugs, despair, violence, and social eruptions.

We need a parallel revolution in lifelong learning to match the information revolution, and for all of us to share the fruits of an age of potential plenty. Fortunately, that revolution; a revolution that can help each of us learn anything much faster and better, is also gathering speed. We obviously need to learn how to take control of our own future.

We must link the modern marvels of brain research with the power of instantly available information and knowledge

For the first time, we now know how to store almost all of the world's most important information and make it available instantly, in almost any form, to almost anyone on earth—and to link everyone together in a global networked learning web. This power enables even developing countries to bypass the industrial revolution and to leap straight into the age of information and innovation.

• The most obvious face of the communications revolution is the world total of an estimated more than 500 million computers and the worldwide internet that links them together.
• Someone has said that pulsating below the surface are the invisible catalysts for change: the 6 billion noncomputer silicon chips embedded in cars, stereos, rice cookers and thousands of other items.
• In fact, the computer in a cellular phone has more power than all the computers used during World War II combined.

More important is the network revolution. Canadian researcher, and author, Don Tapscott wrote in The Digital Economy: "We are at the dawn of an Age of Networked Intelligence -- an age that is giving birth to a new economy, a new politics, and a new society."

The seismic scope of this change forces us to completely rethink everything we've ever understood about learning, education, schooling, business, economics, and government.

In fact, schools can successfully introduce information technology only if they rethink the role of teaching and learning. if every student can retrieve knowledge when required, then the teacher's main role is no longer that of a information-provider but of a facilitator for learning how to find and utilize the vast reserves of information.

We are also learning to make use of the most brilliant human resource of all: the almost limitless power of the billions of cells and trillions of connections that make up the average human brain.

The age of instant communication

Since the world has developed an amazing ability to store information and make it available instantly in different forms to almost anyone; that ability is revolutionizing business, education, home life, employment, management and virtually everything else we take for granted. Our homes will re-emerge as vital centers of learning, work and entertainment. The impact of these technical changes alone will transform our schools, our businesses, our shopping centers, our offices, our cities—in many ways our entire concept of work.

Our ability to communicate is one of our key human traits. Most scientists say the world has existed for millions of years and that humans in somewhere near their present form have been here for maybe two million years, and as "modern humans" for 35,000 to 50,000 years. Yet our ancestors—whatever arguments exist over their origins—did not invent any form of writing until 6,000 years ago.

It took another 2,000 years before they created the first alphabet—the unique concept that eventually enabled all knowledge to be recorded by rearranging only 26 symbols; however, not until the 11th century AD did the Chinese start printing books, and it was not until 1451 that German inventor Johannes Gutenburg printed the first European book: transforming our ability to store and communicate knowledge by making the printed word available to millions of people. Before Gutenberg, there were only about 30,000 books on the entire continent of Europe. By 1500, there were more than 9 million.

Not until the last hundred-odd years did we start to speed up the process: the first typewriter in 1872, the first telephone message in 1876, the first typesetting machine in 1884, silent movies in 1894, the first radio signals in 1895, talking movies in 1922, infant television in 1926 and the computer microprocessor and pocket calculator in 1971. Since then the communications revolution has exploded.

The world is becoming one gigantic information exchange

In a typical year the world produces over 800,000 different book-titles. If you read one a day, it would take you well over 2,000 years to complete them all; but what if you could automatically select only the information you want, when you want it, and have it fed to you through one of those 10 million messages that we will soon be able to transmit at the same time on one fiber optic "cable" at almost no cost? Then what if you could reproduce that information at home in any form; on a computer, videotape, compact disc or on your home printer? The technology is operating and more and more you won't even need the fiber optics.

Today Microsoft head Bill Gates is the world's richest businessman. Gates' teenage dream was "a computer on every desk and in every home". Now he plans, too, for an age when people everywhere will be able to take the best courses, in any subject, taught by the world's best teachers—in their homes.

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, says the new "information appliance" might even come inside a cereal box. "My kids could rummage around for the free gift," he says, "take out a tube, unroll it to something flat, flexible and magnetic, stick it to the refrigerator and start navigating the Web."

The great information-appliance race is on. The goal is to create electronic gadgets that are as simple to operate as the TV, but which can instantly make a connection to the digital world.

Wired magazine's executive editor Kevin Kelly calls the new economy a "tectonic upheaval", and he writes: "The irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. All the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers—that is, connections rather than computations."

Kelly says the network economy is "fed by the resonance of two stellar bangs: the collapsing microcosm of chips and the exploding telecosm of connections. These sudden shifts are tearing the old laws of wealth apart and preparing territory for the emerging economy.

While the total world population of personal computers is estimated to be about 500 million, the number of noncomputer chips now pulsating in the world is thought to be a billion, and may very welll be 10 billion by 2005, and a trillion not long after.

One of Asia's outstanding business leaders, the Taiwan-based Acer Group's Chief Executive Stan Shih, for instance, prophesied that low-cost, interactive, electronic multimedia systems will allow management in developing countries to bypass the industrial revolution—jumping directly into the Information Age.

Internet commerce and learning

Not only can people communicate instantly around the globe, but they can trade instantly and learn instantly. Open up www.amazon.com on the World Wide Web and you'll join at least 540,000 customers who each day gain instant access to 2.5 million books. Amazon does not own a an actual store it has assembled the world's biggest personal database of readers' book preferences.

Peter Drucker, John Naisbitt, Kenichi Ohmae, Robert Reich, and many other forecasters all agree the next trend: the move from an industrial to a service society. Naisbitt again: "When I got out of college in the fifties, 65 percent of the workforce in America was blue-collar. Now it's down to about 13 percent, and its falling. That doesn't mean we're producing less. In fact, around 24 percent of America's gross national product is in manufacturing, about the same as it has been every year for 40 years. The difference is that 40 years ago 65 percent of the workforce was manufacturing these products, and today only 13 percent. Now obviously that 24 percent represents many more products as our economy has grown tremendously. The big change is: we're now manufacturing with information, rather than people—with computers, automation and robots instead of workers. The industrial workforce will continue to shrink, just as the agricultural base has shrunk. A couple of hundred years ago 90 percent of the people in North America were farmers.

If all a developed country's manufacturing can be done with ten percent of its workers, and all its farm products produced by another two percent, what will the other 88 percent of us do?

Some are calling our future "the new service economy", but the very terms "manufacturing" and "service" are becoming obsolete. More and more, manufacturing will be combined with service: customized for individuals—in the same way that computer hardware now represents a very small part of the total service supplied by a computer company. By far the biggest part is in specialist consulting: customized software systems and training.

Everyone now has to become a self-acting manager of one's own future; however, much education still resembles the declining industrial method of production; a standard assembly-line curriculum divided into subjects, taught in units, arranged by grade, and controlled by standardized tests. This no longer reflects the world we live in, and traditional educational systems can no longer cope with the new realities.

The biggest growing network by far is the internet, with its thousands of individual networks, and the opportunity for anyone to sell his or her niche products to customers around the planet.

In many of companies, the educational need is for thinking and conceptual skills, risk-taking, experimenting, and an openness to change and opportunity. How much of that is taught at schools?

A continuing theme is that we cannot achieve the educational breakthroughs we need unless we make an increasing investment in new methods of education and learning.

No one would think of lighting a fire today by rubbing two sticks together. Yet much of what passes for education is based on equally outdated concepts.

It's Our Choice!
Each of us was born with two ends:
One to sit on and the other to think with.
Success or failure in life depends on which we use the most—
heads we win, tails we lose!

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