Unless you’re an Atlantic subscriber and read the January issue, you probably haven’t heard about David Weinberger’s new book Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that Facts Aren’t Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room because it hasn’t yet attracted a lot of reviews. But forget that: go to your bookstore or Internet bookseller. Buy it, download it, whatever: this is an important book which deftly outlines the real challenges faced by anyone in the business of supplying expertise, now that science has – in Weinberger’s beautiful turn of phrase – gone from being a form of publishing to a network.

This book isn’t just another extended essay of the good/ill caused by the Internet, though that issue does receive some excellent, even-handed treatment. It’s also a much more profound meditation on how the economics of data collection, storage and transmission have profoundly altered not just how we look at expertise and knowledge, but even what we think of as “facts.” Massive increases in computer power have allowed us to look more easily at system-level problems which were undreamt of even a decade ago (systems biology, for instance, barely existed in 2002), but at the same time have made it clear that systems like living organisms or social structures are so unbelievably complex that they may never be understood.

Though Weinberger is writing about expertise rather than universities per se, there’s plenty in here for HE nerds to ponder. Most directly, Chapter 7 is a fantastic tour d’horizon of what the economics of data and the network-ification of science are doing to scholarly publishing. But indirectly, nearly all the issues he raises have implications for how we think about education. Take humanities and social sciences for instance. The growing realization about the degree to which knowledge is contextual rather than absolute scores one for the humanities (especially the po-mo folks). But at the same time, if broader access to information and networks is eroding the value of credentials as a signal of expertise, what’s the purpose of keeping doctoral students in six- or seven-year programs to demonstrate greater expertise in ever-smaller circles (especially in largely interpretation-based disciplines like English and philosophy)?

But the most fundamental challenge is simply this: if networks are better than experts at solving problems, it presumably means that a modern undergraduate education should be at least as much about learning how to tap an expert network as it is about developing expertise. I’m not completely up on the latest in the teaching and learning field, but I’m guessing there aren’t nearly enough people thinking about that one.

Buy it. You won’t be disappointed.