The Web knows How - what is the impact on the Future of Education?

Good read in the Ecommerce Times, today, on The Web knows How.

"Just about any practical task -- from changing a motorcycle's oil filter to the proper care and feeding of a pet monkey -- can be found on the Web on sites like WikiHow and Howcast. The sites vary widely in their approaches. Some limit their offerings to in-house video clips, while others employ a wiki model and make themselves completely open to revisions from anyone..."

I am, myself, constantly amazed at how much educational, instructional and research material can be found on the web, already. My favorite source for browsing top-notch knowledge that is well-presented is Slideshare - check out my own contributions here.

The Net's tidal flood of knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg, with most major institutions of learning (such as MIT) now putting their courseware and classes online as you read this. In addition, education is going multimedia at dazzling speed, too: no longer is it all about reading. Videos, podcasts and games are moving into the 'Education2.0' turf everywhere. Just wait until 4.5 Billion people are indeed connected with high-speed mobile devices, and wait until we can actually use them to read stuff just like we read books - UI and UX is the key here.

In the future, instead of striving to just get access to information and relevant instructional materials, and to 'digest' it quickly it seems that we will need to learn entirely different things, such as:

1. Search and bookmark (i.e. to quickly find and evaluate what is actually relevant, and ignore / postpone the rest) - I think this will, among other things, mean using new 'zooming' interfaces such as the iPhone / iPod touch offers, and such as Microsoft's new surface computing interface allows. Directories and link-based information structures are just too slow and cumbersome if you have vast amounts of information.  On this note, I also think that Social Search will be very big, in the future, since it allows me to search within my own, relevant community rather than the entire world, thereby applying filters that help me get a better signal-to-noise ratio (see my post and video on Web1.0 to Web2.0 etc, here). Maybe this is where Friendfeed will take us?
2. (Re)-Connect i.e. make connections between new information and what I already know, on the fly, and without past assumptions getting in the way of new realizations. The biggest challenge here will be to UNLEARN what I think that I already know and what I assumed still has value. As Alvin Toffler has said: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn"
3. Filter skillfully. You may recall how, if you are anywhere close to my age (late forties that is ;), we used to poke around university libraries for hours just to find a single page of information that was actually useful to our current topic?  We did not have good filters available that would allow us to zoom into each topic; we had to look at everything around it, too, and while that also had some benefits it usually took a very long time. Today, using all kinds of search filters as well as human / social and machine-based recommendations, we can zero in in what we need, and get right down to it.
4. Experience the knowledge: pure data does not mean much until it translated into conversations and into actions. This is becoming more crucial than ever before (and I will write more on this, very soon).

My bottom line: the 'old' skills included fast reading and quickly ingesting mountains of data, the essential 'new' skill is being able to search / find, filter and connect. Having said that, I guess being able to absorb a lot of information is still a good thing I guess - but surely the truly human task is to put it all into that magic blender that makes that secret sauce. Creativity. Ideas.