I'm not in Edublogging mode right now. Normal service, as already stated, will only resume next Monday. But today, while concocting this posting on my Culture Blog, I was struck once again by the educational value not of television as such, nor of the internet as such, but by the two together.

The telly told me about a new skyscraper I'd not heard of, and google got me to all the info about it. Without the telly I wouldn't have known what I was looking for. Without the internet I wouldn't have gone looking, and found it.

It is a common pattern in the history of new communications that when a new method arrives, it gives new value to older ones, despite widespread theorising to the effect that the new method is nothing but a threat to the old one. The printing press thrashed out new stuff to talk about. TV sells books. Now, the internet makes of a snatch of telly reportage.