Thinking outside the box - quite literally

This TED talk, by Andrew Blum, is one man's attempt to find out what the Internet really "is". It's a great example of how lateral thinking and thinking "outside the box" can hugely enrich the experience and knowledge of any student. The core material presented in lectures should be just that - students should be encouraged to read around a subject and gain their own points of view and opinions.

While the Internet is a fantastic tool for research, its also important that students realise that just because an article has been published on the Internet, the contents of that article are not necessarily factually accurate. One only has to look at entries in wikipedia.org to see plenty of articles which have been criticised or edited because their content contains too much surmising and not enough hard fact.

Anyway, back to Andrew Blum. When his Internet connection went down, caused by a rodent chewing through his router cable, he decided to find out where the cables actually went, and how we have ended up with a network that encompasses the entire globe, and is still getting bigger....

Andrew Blum: What is the internet really