On "The Networked Student"

I love this hypothetical student. I love his spiky, Bart Simpson-esque hair, and his googly volleyball eyes, searching so hungrily for new information. I love his zeal for new ideas, his take-no-prisoners approach to learning, his ingenuity, creativity, fearlessness, technical ninja-ery, and boundless motivation. I'm so in love with this student that I can barely stand to acknowledge that I've never met a student like this in my entire life.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. Given the tools, training, resources, and most critically, personally relevant materials, many students voraciously seek knowledge. Training, as the video plainly states, is crucial, as any erstwhile internet scholar must know the difference between good, factual, scholarly information and Things That People Type On The Internet Because They Can.

This style of learning -- the personal learning network -- nicely compliments social networking, which is old news to this generation and will be ubiquitous, in some form, in the future; maybe an academically-sound architecture that functions according to the same principles (and is therefore relevant to students) could inspire the kind of freight-train effort the "Networked Student" puts forth. FactBook, anyone?

But I also have a gripe. (Don't tell me you didn't see it coming.) In this construct, the teacher is described as a learning architect, whose role is to teach the student how best to seek information outside of the classroom. Are we to suppose that the student should seek all authority outside of the classroom, and that the teacher should serve as some hybrid librarian/operator/IT consultant, free of any particular mastery of the subject matter? Or does the teacher need to do both, in the same classroom, while conforming to curriculum guidelines that realistically cannot require expensive technology (because let's recall that not all students have computers, and not all schools have enough of them, and that's a sad and inescapable fact) AND attempting to engage students who are not crazy self-motivated?