Marshall McLuhan∞ saw the educational system at the epicentre of the transformation he was heralding. He thought electronic means of teaching were inherently participatory because they offered inadequate information∞, and the social reach is global in scope.

Neil Postman∞, Technopoly: "For four hundred years, school teachers have been part of the knowledge monopoly created by printing, and they are now witnessing the breakup of that monopoly. It appears as if they can do little to prevent that breakup, but surely there is Something perverse about school teachers' being enthusiastic about what is happening. Such enthusiasm always calls to my mind an image of some turn-of-the-century blacksmith who not only sings the praises of the automobile but also believes that his business will be enhanced by it. We know now that his business was not enhanced by it; it was rendered obsolete by it, as perhaps the clearheaded blacksmiths knew. What could they have done? Weep, if nothing else..."

Michael Wesch, A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)∞ "Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans. They are not the problem. They are just the new forms in which we see it. Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.

They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed. There is literally something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

And that's what has been wrong all along. Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our "subjects," "disciplines," and "courses." McLuhan's statement about the bewildered child confronting "the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules" still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called "the real world" which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is "merely academic."