This nice, hard-working young man, who can gather and process information off the 'Net so well, has nevertheless been failed by all of us in the educational system. His problem had nothing to do with technology or information and couldn't be fixed by them. His problem was lack of insight, the inability to discover meaning by finding relations between experiences and ideas. In a truly educational environment experiences and ideas interact to create knowledge and the insights that feed the seed of wisdom. Still, our infatuation with technology has blinded us to this discrimination and resulted in data and information being lifted to exalted status.
Information is a life form.
Even in education we no longer speak in those terms, and end up with students who have no idea how to find meaning in the information they process. The Internet provides us with nothing so much as an excess of information. At various times I have watched my son Benjamin climb our trees, sit under their shade, pluck their leaves, break off branches, listen to cardinals singing in them, peel their bark, watch them sway in the wind. Without conscious attention to learning, he has come to know our trees and, by extension, the idea of trees. This is a depth of understanding that comes only from experience that employs all the senses within the context of a physically rich environment.