Encyclopedia is “A complete copy of the Wikipedia encyclopedia on your iPhone/iPod.  This app is the fastest and simplest way to browse Wikipedia on your device, and crucially, doesn’t require any internet connectivity . . . When you first launch Wikipedia, you will be required to download a copy of the database which will occupy about 2GB of space on your device.”

I noticed this via LifeHacker and tracked through a Google Code page and the home page for the application.

As an educator, think about this for a second.  The entirety of Wikipedia on a mobile device no larger than a cell phone; that’s over 1 billion words in your pocket, literally.  That’s over 25 times as many words as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica.  What does that mean to me?

My daughter lives in a world in which she thinks “Daddy knows everything.”  I’m not talking about the normal, narrow-world-view naivete of a child to whom it seems Mom or Dad knows everything; in reality, she’s never asked a question for which I didn’t or couldn’t provide an answer of some sort; even the less definitive answers to philosophical questions are still answers.  Most recently, it was, “Why do we carve pumpkins at Halloween?”

I have explained to my daughter that I don’t know the answer to every question; I just have a real good idea of how to find the answer to most any question.

As an educator, that perspective and ability is a wonderful thing.
As an educator, that perspective and ability creates a significant problem.

It’s an incredible prospect to be able to find the answer to most any objective question given an internet connection and better than average internet search skills.  But, what implications does that have for education, in it’s current, American incarnation?  It may have been nearly 20 years since I last sat in an American History class, and many of the facts I learned then have long since escaped the clutches of my memory.  However, if you were to put me in front of one of those same history tests along with a mobile device, could I not do fairly well on it?  especially if I had a mobile device?  In fact, why should I not have a mobile device available to me, as some Australian schools are now allowing?  In terms of authentic tasks (see previous post), is remembering specific dates, facts, or information something I’ll ever have to do again?  If I can use my iPod to help me answer almost every question on a test, what’s the value of the test?