“Brazil” and the Information Explosion was one of my earliest posts here. I talked about the skills our kids will need to find, evaluate and coordinate the masses of information available to them through the Internet.

Picture a graph of these three points:

* When I drafted the section of Grow With the Flow where I consider the skills kids will need to work well with masses of information, I imagined a kid doing a report on Brazil. Google showed just over 1,000,000 leads. That was five or six years ago.

* When I posted my RiverTown News article, on May 1, 2005, there were just over 100,000,000.

* As of this morning, a kid doing that report via the Internet would need to find a way to work with 623,000,000 possible information sources about Brazil.

I like the skill sets that mass of information will ask of kids: Among many other skills, they’ll need to develop task-appropriate research strategies, conduct focused searches, and evaluate the worth of their sources. Much more demanding, much more fun than the scissors-and-paste skills I needed to do a report on Brazil when I was in grade school.

Curiously, that 600-fold increase in information about Brazil in the last few years doesn’t actually make it a bit harder for our earnest young researchers. If they know how to talk to their search engine, it will give them what they want.

That may be about to change. You’ve followed the talk of a Universal Library? Google and others are working to scan all the world’s information. ALL the world’s information. At a single source. No one knows if the goal will be reached. But imagine that some good part of it does happen: the Library of Alexandria raised to the power of the present. What will change for our student?

Of course the quantity of information will take a huge jump. Every map that shows Brazil, every mention of Brazil in someone’s blog, every out of print book about Brazil, all the work of Brazilian artists – if it has a tie to Brazil, it’s all available, kind of like snowflakes are available in an avalanche.

But I don’t think it’s the quantity that changes everything. It’s the nature of the information. Integration of information this disparate, tucked away in myriad sources, will be the work of very sophisticated software – our native intelligences will be augmented by artificial intelligences.

This implies a meta shift. Our kids won’t be directly researching, focusing, and evaluating information. They’ll be telling machines how to do that. Their task will be to bring the highest human cognitive abilities to information that has been assembled according to their very precise instructions – to understand it, synthesize it, and do something useful with it.

I’d guess fourth graders will be able to get along pretty well without advanced AI management skills. But make no mistake: Teaching goals for them should have that highest level of information management in mind from the start. I’m all in favor of scissors, and I hope they stay in the curriculum. But once the Universal Library arrives, they won’t cut it.

Discuss the Universal Library and what it would mean for how we educate kids.

The Universal Library is in the news this week because of an article by Kevin Kelly, of Wired Magazine, which appeared in the May 14 New York Times Magazine. As of this post, the full text is available: Scan This Book!

And here’s a summary of the article from SearchEngineWatch.