Over the course of the industrial revolution, motors shrank in size and cost, disappearing inside household appliances and workplace tools to create new kinds of machines. Through a similar process, we are now embedding computers and telecommunications into our everyday context, making possible three innovative types of learning devices. Smart objects, with embedded microprocessors and wireless networking, explain their own functioning and help us create "articulate" educational environments that communicate with their inhabitants. Information infrastructures provide remote access to experts, interlinked archival resources, virtual communities, and "distributed" investigations involving many participants in different locations. Shared synthetic environments, by immersing us in illusion, help us develop a better understanding and appreciation of reality. The new messages emerging from these new media can dramatically improve instructional outcomes, but such an evolution of educational practice depends on careful design of the interface among the devices, learners, and teachers.
The coming generation of computers and telecommunications is different from prior evolutions of information technology because it is dramatically reversing the century-old trend toward a crowded ecology of devices. Different species are fusing together; the radio, television, telephone, copier, fax, scanner, printer, and computer will eventually coexist in a single box. Soon, the ecology of information technologies will have only a few superspecies remaining that synthesize and extend the capabilities of all current devices.
One way of understanding this evolution is to classify these synthesis devices into three types?smart objects, information infrastructures, and shared synthetic environments?based on their relationship to our surroundings. Smart objects are artifacts in our immediate context that can explain themselves and, acting in concert, help us understand our surroundings. Information infrastructures are ways of extending our nervous systems so that we can communicate and learn across barriers of distance and time, exploring and contributing to remote archives and virtual think tanks. Shared synthetic environments are entire virtual contexts into which we immerse ourselves, much as Alice walked through the looking glass to become part of an artificial reality. Thinking about new educational media from this perspective highlights the crucial issue of how our relationship to these various devices shapes and makes possible different types of learning.
To illustrate some potential implications of smart objects, a vignette is presented below that depicts the daily routine of a university faculty member a decade from now. The ideas and situations in this vignette draw heavily from a scenario described by Weiser (1991). Brief descriptions in italics explain neologisms that may be confusing to readers. The purpose of this scenario is not to predict how university teaching will evolve, but to illustrate the types of smart devices that will permeate society in the future and the range of their instructional capabilities.
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She glances in the "foreview" mirror to check the traffic. (Commuters' automobiles are hooked into a large network that uses data sent by cars and highway sensors to monitor and coordinate the flow of traffic. The foreview mirror presents a graphic display of what is happening up to five miles beyond her car along Vesper's planned route to work.) Noticing a traffic slowdown ahead, Vesper taps a button on the steering column to check for alternate routes that might be faster. A moment later, she cancels the request for rerouting as the foreview mirror reveals the green icon of a food shop on a side street near the next freeway exit. The foreview mirror helps her to find a parking space quickly, and she orders a cup of coffee while waiting for the traffic jam to clear.
While drinking her coffee, Vesper calls up some of her students' work on the screen and begins reviewing it. (This machine, about the size of a thick pad of paper, has the approximate processing power of today's supercomputers. It is linked via wireless networking to a large web of computers, including those at Vesper's campus.) The university's diagnostic expert system for debugging prototype designs can handle the routine misconceptions typical of most sophomore engineering students, but occasionally it is stumped by an unusual faulty procedure that some learner has misgeneralized. (A computer program trained to mimic human experts can handle many routine aspects of evaluating student performance, but complex assessments still require human involvement.)
Vesper has an uncanny ability to recognize exotic error patterns in student work, and she diagnoses three sets of student misgeneralizations before resuming her trip to school. Her new "bug collection" will be sent automatically to the national database on design misconceptions, where it will be entered into statistical records. Her notepad also forwards her diagnoses to the university's expert system on design, which incorporates the new bugs into its knowledge base and begins preparing tutorials to correct those particular errors. Later today, this instructional material will be forwarded to the appropriate learners' notepads to provide individualized remediation.
As Vesper walks into the engineering complex on campus, her personalized identity tab registers her presence on the university's net of security sensors. (Within a clip-on badge displaying Vesper's picture and name is embedded a small device that broadcasts information about her movements. This identity screening procedure is part of the university's security system. In this future world, these elaborate precautions unfortunately have become necessary.) A moment later, the machines in her office initiate a log-in cycle in preparation for her arrival. She realizes that she has left her car unlocked, but does not bother to retrace her steps; from her office, she can access the network to lock her car via a remote command.
As Vesper gets to her desk, the "telltale" by her door begins blinking, indicating that the department's espresso machine has finished brewing her cafe au lait. (A telltale is a remote signaling device that can be triggered to blink or emit a sound, advising people in its vicinity of some event happening elsewhere.) Vesper drinks a cup of cafe au lait every morning upon arriving. She heads down the hall to get the coffee; the espresso maker's brew will be much better than the vile stuff she had consumed at the food shop. On returning to her office, she instructs her desktop workstation to remind her not to stop there again. A copy of her evaluation is automatically forwarded to the food shop's manager and to the local consumer ratings magazine.
In the hour before class, as her sophomore students arrive, they wander around the halls visiting friends and faculty, gradually congregating in the engineering lab to work on projects for their exhibition portfolios. Vesper will join them in about half an hour to begin face-to-face instruction. She takes a break from viewing her videomail to fast-reverse through the electronic trails their movements have left on the security system. Valerie is still dallying too long before getting down to work; Vesper will have to speak with her. Richard has not arrived at the engineering complex, but no message has come in to indicate why he is later than usual. Vesper decides to wait another fifteen minutes before taking action about his unexpected tardiness.
Her desktop workstation conducts a brief dialogue with the "intelligent" equipment in the lab, then reports its findings. (Just as with the identity badge and the telltale, classroom devices can have embedded microprocessors and wireless networking. This gives each set of objects limited abilities to sense what is happening and respond, guiding some forms of student learning.) Ronald is redoing activities he has already mastered rather than moving on to the new work she had assigned; Vesper notes that she needs to talk to him about this. Everyone else seems to be on task and involved enough to be occupied for another 15 minutes before she arrives at the classroom.
A small light on the edge of Vesper's glasses begins blinking. A phone call is coming in; must be from someone not on the network. "Activate," says Vesper (the only word her glasses can recognize). A voice begins speaking, emanating from a small telephone receiver the size of a hearing aid located in her left ear. The voice is Richard's girlfriend, informing her that he is sick again. With a sigh, Vesper makes a note to prepare hardcopy homework that will be sent off by snailmail?what a hassle! (Many network users refer to traditional delivery services for paper copies as "snailmail"; they prefer the rapid transmission of electronic mail via telecommunications.) She will be glad when the government finally recognizes that access to basic network services is a fundamental right of all citizens, even if that does mean subsidizing subscriptions for the poor. Her notepad automatically informs the attendance monitor in the registrar's office of the reasons for Richard's absence . . . .
As discussed earlier, the purpose of this vignette is not to suggest that Vesper's world is the most likely future, but instead to illustrate the types of intelligent devices that will permeate society in the future and the kinds of human capabilities that they can enable. Through the ubiquitous presence of smart objects, the everyday context itself can become an "articulate environment," able to communicate with its inhabitants. This situation is analogous to animistic cultures studied by anthropologists, in which people believe that objects have souls and personalities and thereby experience a very rich interaction with their surroundings.
Moreover, Vesper's environment may seem implausible?why would a person choose to live in such a machine-centered environment?but then, how would today's world of cellular phones, facsimiles, electronic mail, and answering machines have seemed two decades ago?
The vignette also deliberately incorporates a high level of surveillance; instruction is individualized by monitoring students' activities and by intrusively intervening if these do not match some predetermined pattern. From my perspective as an educator, such a "Big Brother" world would be unattractive. But I deliberately incorporated some dystopian aspects into this vignette to underscore that the design of powerful technologies must be considered carefully to avoid unfortunate side effects. Advances in information technology have already stripped away much of our privacy; for example, supermarkets track our purchases and sell lists of our preferences and buying patterns to telemarketers. Unless care is taken with how smart objects are implemented, we may all live in "glass houses."
The "information superhighway" metaphor, now widely used to convey the implications of high-performance computing and communications, is an inadequate analogy. It is the equivalent of someone in 1896 declaring that the airplane will be the canal system of the 20th century. Backward-looking metaphors focus on what we can automate?how we can use new channels to send conventional forms of content more efficiently?but miss the true innovation: redefining how we communicate and educate by using new types of messages and experiences to be more effective. Since emerging forms of representation, such as hypermedia and virtual reality, are in their early stages of development, we are just beginning to understand how they shape not only their messages, but also their users.
Many people are still reeling from the first impact of high-performance computing and communications: shifting from the challenge of not getting enough information to the challenge of surviving amid too much information. The core skill needed in today's workplace is not foraging for data, but filtering a plethora of incoming information. The emerging literacy we all must master requires immersing ourselves in a sea of information and harvesting patterns of knowledge, just as fish extract oxygen from water via their gills. In this environment, educators must understand how to structure learning experiences that make this kind of immersion possible. Preparing students for full participation in 21st century society will require expanding the traditional definitions of literacy and rhetoric to encompass "immersionlike" experiences of interacting with information.
Two new forms of expression that take advantage of the unique power of information infrastructures are knowledge webs and virtual communities. Both illustrate how information infrastructures can have a major impact on conventional instruction by expanding learning resources beyond the individual teacher and classroom materials, to encompass rich, widely distributed sources of information, expertise, and fellowship.
Via information infrastructures, educators and students can join distributed conferences that provide an instant network of contacts with useful skills?a personal brain trust scattered geographically, but offering just-in-time answers to immediate questions. Eventually, these informal sources of expertise will utilize embedded "groupware" tools to enhance collaboration. On the Internet, online archival resources are linked increasingly into the World Wide Web, accessible through "webcrawler" programs such as Netscape. In time, guides based on artificial intelligence will help users navigate through huge amounts of stored information.
Another type of emerging electronic environment is the virtual exhibit that duplicates museums and other real-world settings. Virtual exhibits make possible a wide variety of experiences without the necessity of travel or scheduling. Distributed science projects enable students to conduct shared experiments dispersed across time and space; often each team member learns more than would be possible in isolation about the phenomenon being studied and about scientific investigation. Combined, all these capabilities to enhance information gathering and creation form knowledge webs.
The curriculum is already overcrowded with low-level information; teachers frantically race through required material, helping students memorize factual data to be regurgitated on mandated, standardized tests. Using information infrastructures as a fire hose to spray yet more information into educational settings would make this situation even worse. Without skilled facilitation, many learners who access current knowledge webs will flounder in a morass of unstructured data.
A vital, emerging form of literacy that educators ought to be communicating is how to transform archival information into personal knowledge. Moving students from access through assimilation to appropriation is no simple process, however. Teachers must provide unsophisticated learners with educational experiences that enable them to construct their own knowledge and make sense of massive, incomplete, and inconsistent information sources. In order to create a learner-centered environment in which students can take full advantage of information infrastructures, it is vital that educators augment the traditional curriculum with collaborative, learning-through-doing activities based on linked, online materials and orchestrated across classrooms, workplaces, homes, and community settings.
Virtual communities are an important component of new pedagogical strategies based on information infrastructures, one that can dramatically improve learning outcomes. Learning is social as well as intellectual. Individual, isolated attempts to make sense of complex data can easily fail unless the learner is encouraged by some larger group that is constructing shared knowledge. In addition, institutional evolution is a communal enterprise; educational innovators also need emotional and intellectual support from others who have similar challenges in their lives.
Moreover, formal education comprises only a small fraction of how students spend their time. No matter how effective the schooling, students are unlikely to make major gains in learning if the other parts of their lives are not educationally fulfilling. Virtual communities can help bring about close cooperation and shared responsibility for learning among all the educational agents of society?families, social service agencies, workplaces, mass media, schools, and higher education. For example, involving families more deeply in their children's education may be the single most powerful lever for improved learning outcomes. Virtual parent-teacher conferences and less formal social interchanges provide new opportunities for involving parents who will never come to a PTA meeting or a school-based event. In many regions across the United States, community networks are emerging that, among other missions, enhance education by enabling distributed discourse among all the stakeholders in quality schooling.
Peer tutoring is another educational use of virtual communities. This instructional approach aids all students involved, on both an intellectual and an emotional level, but is difficult to implement in traditional classroom settings. Outside of school, virtual interactions, enhanced by groupware tools, make it easy for students to relate to each other and also prepare them to use distributed problem-solving techniques in adult workplaces. Telementoring and teleapprenticeships between students and workplace experts are other ways of applying the capabilities of virtual communities to distributed learning.
To succeed in sustaining communion among people, distributed learning must balance virtual and direct interaction. A relationship based only on telephone conversation lacks the vibrancy that face-to-face interchange provides. Similarly, while digital video will broaden the bandwidth of virtual interactions via information infrastructures, teleconferencing will never completely substitute for direct personal contact. We can expect a variety of social inventions to emerge that provide the best of both worlds.
We are just beginning to understand how knowledge webs and virtual communities can reshape the content, process, and delivery of conventional distance education. Information infrastructures are the new type of learning device that is spurring this evolution, just as the steam engine was the driver for the industrial revolution.
Shared synthetic environments are a representational container that can accommodate a broad range of educational uses, such as virtual factories, hospitals, or cities. Moreover, this type of distributed learning strategy uses "edutainment" to build on the curiosity, fantasy, and motivation that the entertainment industry stimulates in youngsters. While home video game consoles are not now particularly powerful, in 8 to 10 years they will be quite sophisticated in graphics and distributed simulation capabilities, but still relatively inexpensive because so many are sold. Since video game consoles are widely found even in poor and rural households, they offer a promising installed base of learning technologies?if we develop educationally rich material that takes advantage of these systems.
Even without the added enhancement of visual imagery, the rise on the Internet of text-based shared synthetic environments (i.e., MUDs, MUSEs, MOOs) illustrates the fascination that people have with participatory virtual worlds. The continual evolution of distributed simulations based on participants' collaborative interactions keeps these shared virtual environments from becoming boring and stale. In contrast to standard adventure games, in which you wander through someone else's fantasy, the ability to personalize an environment and receive recognition from others for adding to the shared context is attractive to many people. Part of why we read fiction or watch dramatic productions is to escape the ordinary in a manner that increases our insights or refreshes us to plunge back into real-world challenges. Shared virtual experiences on the national information infrastructure can complement books, plays, television, movies, and concerts by taking us beyond the daily grind; the challenge, however, is to move past escapism into metaphorical comprehension and catharsis.
"Visualization," for example, is an emerging type of rhetoric that enhances learning by using the human visual system to find patterns in large amounts of information. People have very powerful capabilities to recognize patterns among images; much of our brain is "wetware" dedicated to this purpose. As a result, when tabular data of numerical variables?such as temperature, pressure, and velocity?are transfigured into graphical objects that shift their shape, texture, size, color, and motion to convey the changing values of each variable, learners also gain increased insights. For example, graphical data visualizations that model thunderstorm-related phenomena (downbursts, air flows, cloud movements) can help meteorologists and students understand the dynamics of these weather systems.
As information infrastructures increasingly enable people to access large databases across distances, visualization tools can expand human perceptions so that we recognize underlying relationships that would otherwise be swamped in a sea of numbers. One good way to enhance creativity is to make the familiar strange and the strange, familiar; adding sound and even tactile sensations to visual imagery can make abstract things tangible, and vice versa. Expanding human perceptions?for example, allowing a medical student to see the human body through X-ray vision like Superman's?is a powerful method for deepening learners' motivation and their intuitions about physical phenomena. My current research centers on assessing the potential value of sensory immersion and synthetic environments for learning material as disparate as electromagnetic fields and intercultural sensitivities (Salzman, Dede, and Loftin 1995).
As with business, however, the evolution of technology creates new markets and expanded competitors for schools and colleges. As one illustration, prestigious universities may develop nationwide offerings of standard courses, such as Psych 101, taught by telegenic, internationally recognized authorities. Under this strategy, presentations with high production values would be coupled with frequent, interactive teleconferences, mentoring via electronic mail, and occasional face-to-face meetings of locally enrolled students led by a practitioner. This approach would not intrigue learners interested in a residential college experience, but could be very attractive to students at commuter campuses. With sufficient economies of scale, this delivery method would have lower costs than our present system of similar standard courses duplicated at every institution. While many faculty would disparage this type of instruction, state legislatures could easily see it as an attractive way to cut their expenditures for higher education?a method applicable to every course for which a substantial textbook market exists.
In this particular evolution of distance education, colleges and universities would be reshaped as profoundly as American business has been altered by the technologies that helped create the global marketplace. Given their responsibilities for socialization and custodial protection, public schools would be less affected by the erosion of geographic monopolies through distributed learning technologies. But the home schooling and educational voucher movements see emerging learning devices as an attractive alternative means of delivering instruction. If smart objects, information infrastructures, and shared synthetic environments are not incorporated into public school classrooms, teachers may find a decade from now that they have a smaller fraction of students enrolled and fewer taxpayers willing to provide funding.
Educators must help all students become adept at distanced interaction, for skills of gathering information from remote sources and of collaboration with dispersed team members are as central to the future American workplace as learning to perform structured tasks quickly was to the industrial revolution. Also, by increasing the diversity of human resources available to students, distributed learning can enhance equity and pluralism, while preparing young people to compete in the world marketplace. Virtual classrooms have a wider spectrum of peers with whom learners can collaborate than any local region can offer and a broader range of teachers and mentors than any single educational institution can afford.
In a few years, high-performance computing and communications will make knowledge utilities, virtual communities, shared synthetic environments, and sensory immersion as routine a part of everyday existence as the telephone, television, radio, and newspaper are today. This evolution of learning devices won't be a "silver bullet" that magically solves all problems of education, however. Thoughtful and caring participation is vital for making these new capabilities truly valuable.
How a medium shapes its users, as well as its message, is a central issue in understanding the personal impact of emerging learning devices. The telephone creates conversationalists. The book develops imaginers, who can conjure a rich mental image from sparse symbols on a printed page. Much of television programming induces passive observers; other shows, such as Sesame Street and public affairs programs, can spark viewers' enthusiasm and enrich their perspectives. Through the evolution of smart objects, information infrastructures, and shared synthetic environments, our society is encountering powerful new interactive media capable of great good or ill. Today's "couch potatoes," vicariously living in the fantasy world of television, could become tomorrow's "couch funguses," immersed as protagonists in 3-D soap operas while the real world deteriorates. The most significant influence on the evolution of education will not be the technical development of more powerful devices, but the professional development of wise designers, teachers, and learners.
Dede, C. 1995. "The evolution of constructivist learning environments: Immersion in distributed, virtual worlds." Educational Technology 35(5) (September-October): 46-52.
Dede, C. 1994. The technologies driving the national information infrastructure: Policy implications for distance education. Los Alamitos, CA: Southwest Regional Educational Laboratory.
Laurel, B. 1991. Computers as theater. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.
Rheingold, H. 1993. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. New York: Addison-Wesley.
Salzman, M., C. Dede, and B. Loftin. 1995. Learner centered design of sensorily immersive microworlds using a virtual reality interface. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education. Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education.
Sproull, S., and S. Kiesler. 1991. Connections: New ways of working in the networked world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Weiser, M. 1991. "The computer for the 21st century." Scientific American 265(3) (September): 94-104.
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