The book has been one of the most revolutionary pieces of technology in the history of civilization, and Google has found a way to revolutionize the written word once again. With their Ngram Viewer platform, readers can search a database for words and phrases that appear in at least five million books—a development that has the potential to change the way we do research.

Google’s platform measures how frequently words and phrases appear in books in the years 1800-2008, providing data for more than 200 years of literature in several languages. This has the potential to impact academic study in several fields: for liberal arts students and teachers, the birth, disappearance and resurgence of certain words can give them a picture of a word’s origins and history. For scientists, the appearance of terms can offer ideas on how the etymology of science has transformed as the field advanced.

But Google’s Ngram Viewer is also a significant indicator of the increasing influence technology has on teaching and learning. The Internet is becoming one of the most important tools that teachers and students use to collect, process, and examine information—and that makes the Internet the primary tool to facilitate education. As a result, online teaching and learning are also gaining popularity, from kindergarten to higher learning.
But what do online tools like Ngram Viewer mean for the future of education? And how can online education prepare students for the workforce of the future? How can a shift toward technology help shape the business world and the workers who will fuel it?

The new economy

An article from AOL’s Jobs site gives a list of the ten possible jobs of the future: all of them are related to health care, the food industry, and information technology. In three cases, health care and information technology are blended: genetic counseling, medical records administration, and stem cell research. The list is speculative, but it does reveal that information technology will play a substantial role in the job market. Learning to use technology in school—and encouraging students to embrace technology and the Internet as tools—can help prepare students for their future careers. Tools like the Ngram Viewer can be used in the future to track the use of terms, words and phrases in research, and can help scholars build a roadmap of both culture and technology that can give them clues to solve future problems.

Influencing the job landscape

Another job on AOL’s future jobs list—sustainability officer—suggests that conservation and environmentally conscious business practices will be important to both large and small companies in the near future. A sustainability officer would research and apply policies that are both environmentally-friendly and cost-effective. Online teaching and learning can play a role in this development as well: as the environment becomes a key concern, different parts of the world will use education to address