MIT Technology Review

What is missing in the focus on getting laptops in the hands of children is the social component of learning—a component all too often taken for granted or even disparaged. As a culture, the United States has long loved the heroic idea of children teaching themselves. Movies and stories constantly retell this narrative of scrappy young people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. These myths are especially common regarding technical knowledge.

As lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing threaten to stretch out into the weeks, months, and even years ahead, there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online. Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet, where even recent history has a tendency to get buried or vanish.