The FT had an interesting article on Alvin Toffler's "big notion of the moment". It's in the August 19/20 edition, by Nathan Gardels, and bears the title "He has seen the future". Of course, we all know that Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi saw the future quite clearly some 36 years ago when they published Future Shock, followed a few years later by The Third Wave. The thing that struck me about the FT piece was Toffler's comment that "new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the "prosumer". And that, of course, is what the Global Text project is all about. The consumers of texts are the ones who are creating and maintaining them. Toffler goes on to say that "Even in the US, institutions out of synch with each other are caught in a "clash of speeds" between the old system and the new. Standardized education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10mph". Global Text will help get education up to speed by enabling prosumers to keep text content current. (One can only wonder if traditional businesses serving the education community will adapt.) By way of illustration, Rick Watson noted that "Wikipedia’s opening two sentences for Pluto when accessed on August 25, 2006 reads: Pluto is a dwarf planet in the solar system. It was classified as a planet until it was determined on August 24, 2006 that it is not a true planet". Now that's going 100mph!
Don
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