In 1985, when Bruce Springsteen wrote “We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school,” he was talking about the lure of whatever might be waiting outside every classroom around the world. That  youthful feeling of the world passing you by — the things you were missing as you sat in a classroom day after day — is an age-old challenge for educators. It’s one that’s about to be subjected to an even greater assault as the digital generation moves deeper into education.

The Internet was the first volley on the way a generation learned. Students no longer had to trudge to the library to research a topic. The encyclopedias of our parents’ generation were tossed into recycling bins, and a combination of Google (s goog) and Wikipedia was all students needed to complete even the most ambitious assignments. Even with all their merit — the…