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=**__Chapter 12 - Distance Education is About Change__**= =**Technological, pedagogic, economic, demographic changes are converging and continue to accelerate. Where is this taking distance education? In this section we consider a few possibilities and are invited to speculate ourselves.**=

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**__The Changing Supply of Information __**

 * ==The “information explosion” is an ongoing and exponential process==
 * ==In 2000, UC Berkeley School of Information Management estimated that between 1 - 2 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) of new information is being produced each year. (that’s 250 MBs for every single person on earth)==
 * ==25% of that new information is textual, 30% is photographic==
 * ==Half of all this new information is produced in the US==
 * ==Many of these figures are incredibly out of date - see below to find updated figures==
 * == For example the book notes that 610 billion emails were sent in the year 2000. In 2009, 247 billion emails were sent **EACH DAY** for a total of 90 trillion over the course of the year ==
 * ==Full 2000 data can be found at==

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 * ==Full 2003 data can be found at==

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 * ==Full 2009 data can be found at==

__**Supply of Information Trends**__

 * =//Paucity of print// – all the paper-and-ink printed material produced each year makes up less than .003 of all the __//world's stored information//__ – the rest is digital, much of which is now “born digital” =
 * ==//D////emocratization of data// – no longer do business and government control digital information – today 55% of all hard drives are in __//personal computers//__ – individuals can and do create gigabytes of data each year==