Maybe because the digital world requires a new mindset for facing the post-information age, he points to the need to prepare students for a limitless information future. Perhaps Negroponte promotes a new openness to the possibilities for learning and interacting in the digital world because he believes that the positive societal changes it makes possible are astounding.
His reasons notwithstanding, it is safe to say that Negroponte's vision implies a need for an education process that is expanded to allow intellectual exploration without limitation. He says that "[b]eing digital . . . creates the potential for new content to originate from a whole new combination of sources" (19). "Digital" students would be encouraged to make connections among ideas studied in a variety of classes and to create multidisciplinary works. Negroponte describes a different intellectual interface than that to which students have adjusted in the past:
In the digital world . . . information space is by no means limited to three dimensions. An expression of an idea or train of thought can include a multidimensional network of pointers to further elaboration or arguments which can be invoked or ignored. The structure of the text should be imagined like a complex molecular model. Chunks of information can be reordered, sentences expanded, and works given definition on the spot. . . These linkages can be embedded by the author at "publishing" time or later by readers over time (70)."Digital" students will be faced with problems resulting from having too many choices, not only in available information, but in dimensions from which to understand it and means by which to process it. Instructors' duties in the digital world will be to help students learn to distinguish valuable from useless information, but also to help them choose appropriate information media for differing rhetorical situations and to learn to judge the credibility of home sites that provide guidance through the digital world.