Just had my own google moment, Harold.

Somehow your comments reminded me of something I read last night. Leafing now through the book, I couldn't find the right page, so I typed in "Frye dog Proust" and voila, thanks to Google reader here is the quotation (from The Educated Imagination, a delightful series of lectures from Northrop Frye in 1963.

Discussing the possible outcomes of studying literature, and glancing upon Marcel Proust (about whom I confess to knowing absolutely nothing), Frye says "our ordinary experience, where everything dissolves into the past and where we never know what's coming next, can't give us any sense of reality, although we call it real life. In ordinary experience we're all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning in plain sight that we don't even know is there." (reprinted in 1993 by Anansi Press, p. 49).

Dog in the library. You've got to love that! It makes me think of all us internetters, tapping away, words flying in through the eyes and out through the fingers, but what is happening in between?

There's no shortage of answers out there. (As we all know) the trick is knowing which questions to ask and where to look for the answers (see Harold's recent post on helping kids learn search skills).

Internet is only a tool for education if we use it to ask the right questions. Surely the changing role of learning professinals lies somewhere in there. Purveyors of reality, if you like, in the sense that we discern the questions and redirect to answers.

It's a bit of a chestnut to describe teachers and other learning professionals as "resource persons" but it is certainly part of the package, along (imo)with being the Motivator, the Model, and the External Source of Structure and Discipline.

One more quote, a little less poetic but to the point: "Content has many ways of getting to the world, we've learned that. But the problem is, you still have only two eyeballs to take it in." Warren Buffett, quoted in New York Times, 13 July 2007, page C6).