Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

moderators and thrown out there was uproar until they were able to convince the Wikipedia people of the validity of their claim. Can you imagine anything like that happening even ten years ago?
    In fact, such are the ramifications of the Wiki way (the word ‘wiki’, by the way, coming from the Hawaiian language and meaning ‘quick’) that in January 2009 the head of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
announced plans for accepting additions and edits from the general public on their online version of the encyclopaedia.
    But let me take you back to Africa where a growing but still statistically small number of the population is linked into the World Wide Web. But let’s look this time, not at PCs, but at mobile phones. According to a 2009 report from the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, more than half the people on the planet pay to use a mobile phone, with the biggest growth in new subscriptions being in Africa. On this continent, whereas only 4 per cent used mobile phones in 2002, by 2007 the number had risen to 28 per cent. 9 The phones are not solely for chatting on either. One of the most popular applications for mobile phones is the safe transfer of money across very risky countries by ‘uploading’ the cash before you leave and then ‘downloading’ it when you arrive. In fact, the term ‘mobile phone’ is already as much of an anachronistic misnomer as ‘carphone’ or ‘Saturday night TV entertainment’.
    And what are mobile phones doing, as any self-respecting 15-year-old will tell you? Merging with computers into ‘smartphones’ that do practically all that a PC can do as well as take pictures and slip into your pocket when the deputy is spotted coming down the corridor. In fact, your new ‘personal digital device’ such as the iPhone is not always a phone at all. ‘It can be a spirit level, a bowling ball, a budget balancer or a breathalyser. The device in your pocket is not a phone any more. It is anything you want it to be’, according to
New Scientist
in 2009. The article also describes how, ‘In 10–15 years, app-enabled phones will be the number one channel through which we receive information.’ 10 What are the implications of that in your classroom and in your school? For years, teachers have been the primary source of information in the classroom, backed up by textbooks that have beenjealously guarded and kept locked in a cupboard or guarded by Conan the Librarian. But now, within a few years, the primary source will be a piece of technology children put in their pockets.
    So, all the knowledge in the world instantly searchable, updated daily and linking over half the people on the planet in one giant and user-friendly network, accessible from my bedroom, on the bus, in the field, up a mountain or at sea, from a ‘sexy’ device I can slip in my pocket. Google isn’t simply a way of accessing information; it is, in Richard Branson’s words, ‘an invention of change’.
    So, you tell me. Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?
    The answer to that question depends, to be brutally frank, on how good a teacher you are.
    The role of the twenty-first century teacher, I am suggesting, is to help young people know where to find the knowledge, to know what to do with it when they get it, to know ‘good’ knowledge from ‘bad’ knowledge, to know how to use it, to apply it, to synthesize it, to be creative with it, to add to it even, to know which bits to use and when and how to use them and to know how to remember key parts of it. Add to that your powerful role in helping them develop their communication skills, their creativity, their curiosity, their ability to work well as a team, their confidence and self-esteem, their sense of what is wrong and what is right, their ability to deal with adversity, their understanding of their role as a citizen of the world – in other words all the things computers can’t do yet – then you have a powerful role for the twenty-first century teacher.
    If the end of the twentieth century saw the democratisation of knowledge, then the role of the twenty-first century teacher is quite simple – to preside over the democratisation of learning.
    That’s why I need a teacher when I’ve got Google and Wikipedia and O2 and an iPhone and an iPad … .

Chapter 6
Your EQ will take you further than your IQ
    At the turn of the last century a self-taught Parisian psychologist named Alfred Binet and his colleague