In a post titled "The Temporary Web", Jeff Jarvis muses on the temporary nature of the internet after Twitter. It's these three or four sentences which strike a chord with me, highlighting a shift in the collective consciousness:

"Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams – and I believe at least part of it will be – then we risk losing information, ideas, and the permanent points – the permalinks – around which we used to coalesce. In this regard, Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media."

The chord that they strike is the one I keep hearing when debates about digital natives and learning styles come up. It's also the tune I hear when people discuss the long-term impact of having resources like wikipedia at our fingertips. When learning is no longer intent on rote memorization, it is free to become pedagogically focused on other things. Dates and figures no longer matter so much as the ability to think about things holistically, or to adapt to new conditions.

This is not an easy shift, nor one that ought to be accepted unconditionally. Since the solution to curricula being outdated is not to eliminate the curriculum altogether, new solutions have to be discovered. As Jarvis puts it, "it’s always important to stand back and see the implications in change and I think we’re going to need to find new ways to hold onto memories and make memes happen." In terms of figuring out what to do with those pesky digital natives, perhaps a good first step would be to look at the way older generations' approaches to learning and reading transform in response to the temporary web.