The author believes that information technologies are powerfully heuristic in addressing one of education's deepest ambitions. Following Engelbart's paradigm, he sees these technologies as augmenting human intellect, not simply because they permit high-speed calculations but also because they externalize our own cognitive processes in a way that allows us to reflect and build upon them to a previously unimaginable extent. In particular, high-speed networked computing enables communal mental activity on an unprecedented scale and generates new awareness of that activity's possibilities. The peculiar power of these technologies results in large part from their plasticity. The "undo" key emboldens the user to try multiple ways of processing an image, text file, or audio recording without fear of destroying the original. It allows an increased sense of possibility, even of serendipity. Information technologies also permit a certain intellectual polyphony that at worst may be cacophonous but at best is an unusually intense and accessible training in complexity and many-mindedness. (Contains 8 resources.)