Dipping into the flat ocean of information

Alan Porter has written an insightful article on how he watched his teenage daughter research a school assignment, and questions whether the book model/paradigm we’ve been using — even online — for generations, will continue to apply to the latest generations. I found these paragraphs of his summed his ‘Aha!’ moment well:

For kids raised as part of the “digital generation,” where the first place they go to find out information is the internet and social networks, is the book an irrelevant model?

Yes, the information they access still needs some sort of markup and tagging so the search engines can find it. It still needs metadata to enable user tagging. But instead of strictly enforced hierarchies, what is being built and accessed is more of a flat ocean of information that users search rather than navigate and then dip into to find the components they need to build their own solutions.

Alan’s full article — which is well worth reading in its entirety — is here: http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/2009/200908/third.htm.

[Links last checked September 2009]