[ Back to the Futures Page ]Last modified May 1, 1996 (gls).
The Internet has tremendous potential for students and teachers. First, it is an accessible place for information. With the availability of online resources, anyone can reach data, people, and ideas and can search any area of knowledge deeply and thoroughly.
Second, anyone can publish. Sorting through an array of data, organizing it into a useful presentation, then communicating this knowledge both motivates and enhances learning.
Third, with new tools (and we are seeing only the beginning of a sizeable supply of innovative tools designed to spark our creativity), people can construct applications and materials in new ways. Some of the emerging tools will provide incredible opportunities to expand knowledge and may even change the way people read, think, and learn.
Collaborative tools, virtual reality, dynamic linking, and advances in languages and browsers also mean profound change as the Internet becomes a fully robust environment. As the Internet grows, we must consider the implications for learning. So we come to our question: What is the future of networking technologies for learning?
In an attempt to explore this question, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology commissioned a series of white papers on various issues related to networking technologies for education. The Department convened the authors for a workshop in November 1995 to discuss the implications. In addition, the Office is currently gathering input from the field.
The topics of the commissioned white papers are described in the following abstracts:
Over the course of the industrial revolution, motors shrunk 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, enabling innovative types of learning devices. Smart objects explain their own functioning and help us create "articulate" educational environments. Information infrastructures provide access to experts, interlinked archival resources, distributed investigations, and virtual communities. Through illusion, shared synthetic environments aid us in better understanding and appreciating reality. The new messages these new media make possible can dramatically improve instructional outcomes, but such an evolution of education practice depends on careful design of the interface among learner, teacher, and tool.
Although a number of schools in the nation have invested in video teleconferencing facilities, and indeed have realized some benefit from them, we do not expect this approach to ultimately be a pedagogically valuable or cost effective way of extending distance learning to the nation's students. Rather, we see the extension of the desktop-based technologies that have made the Internet and World Wide Web such phenomenal successes as the route to bringing digital synchronous and asynchronous research and learning capabilities to classrooms and students.
The integration of enhanced network-based, full-media environments will flourish in the next few years, making possible the discovery of information, mentors, experts, and interested peers, and the participation of temporally emergent virtual teams and communities of interest. Using universally available, specialized tools for handling various media and disciplinary material, educators and students will be able to move from asynchronous discussions and direction, to fully synchronous interactions that focus on the "work" of the moment and allow for shared and remotely directed presentations of material.
A number of the emerging technologies are about to appear on the Web, including mobile code, integrated, full-media, interactive bulletin boards and e-mail, and virtual environment-based discussion tools; these new tools will provide teachers and students with a rich and customizable set of capabilities based on increasingly common standards and widely available software. Students and teachers will be able to establish, discover, join, monitor, and contribute to specific "neighborhoods" of interest, or "classrooms." Foci for learning will emerge across the Net, enabling participants to self-direct their investigations or be directed in areas of current interest. Such Web-based collaborations will become a common occurrence and a base for students and teachers to obtain assistance with local projects and reach beyond their local resources.
New technologies and new applications of these technologies will offer significant reductions in the cost of school networking and in the capabilities of networks available to students, teachers, and the general public.
The connectivity revolution is well underway, and the component revolution is now beginning. This paper examines the potential of independently produced, scriptable, interoperable components to serve as elements in deep curriculum reform. The need for novel mathematics and science content to serve students of the next century cannot be met with existing curricular structures, nor can serious alternatives to the existing structures be created without substantial application of potent technologies. This process must include a dramatic increase in connectivity involving all players in the educational enterprise and their available resources. It must also include the widespread and routine application of rich educational environments, simulations, analytical and visualization tools, and the like. These tools need to become freely composable elements in the hands of a broad class of activity builders, who can use them to create larger, more coherent, and intellectually deeper activities than have been possible using historically available instructional elements. Activities need to include a rich, easily linkable (as in drag/drop) mix of real data, simulations, tools, and instructional scaffolding in order to enable mainstream students to make sense of complex and subtle phenomena that traditionally have been the province of an intellectual elite. Illustrations are drawn from the mathematics of change--in other words, calculus and dynamical systems.
Four major classes of networking use have the potential to make a major impact on science education over the next decade: resources, tools for inquiry, collaborative inquiry, and Net courses. This paper assumes that personal digital assistants (PDAs) will become a popular class of computers for precollege learners, and that configuring them as network clients will become an important way to overcome their inherent limitations. This means that the entire content of the networked world could be in every student's hand, with implications that go far beyond science education.
The resources on the network will continue to grow as the Internet is increasingly seen as an ideal publishing medium for references, instructional materials, and thin-market material. Filters, guides, knowbots, and automated accountants will make finding and selecting appropriate materials easier while controlling costs. Current events with scientific implications, such as natural disasters, earthquakes, space shots, major discoveries, and astronomical events, will be increasingly enriched with educational materials and brought into the classroom through the network. With every science and technology museum online, informal science learning opportunities will abound.
Because of applets and improvements in client software, networking will become highly interactive and responsive. This will give learners easy access to inquiry tools such as spreadsheets, graphers, symbolic processors, and all kinds of simulations. Mouse-based lab interfaces will be available for networked PDAs, allowing students to study a wide range of phenomena outside the lab, in classrooms, corridors, playgrounds, athletic fields, streets, homes, streams, fields, and forests. Scaffolding applications will help beginning students organize their inquiries and reflect on their learning.
Collaborative inquiry will take many forms, from scientist-led efforts like GLOBE, through student-led research. Collaboration will start in the classroom with students attacking different parts of a problem and sharing their results over the network. This will grow to include worldwide collaboration in communities of student-researchers of great richness and variety. Shared instrumentation available only through networks--remote telescopes, cameras on satellites, seismometers in schools, automated weather stations, tunneling microscopes--will greatly enrich the range of collaborations in which students can participate.
Net courses of all kinds will be available, ranging from little more than organized tours of network resources to sophisticated courses offered by scientific and educational experts. Some will be free while others will charge. Guides will be available online to interview students and recommend particular Net courses. Evaluations of the Net courses and the guides will also be available. The availability of Net courses will provide much-needed choice at the upper end of the educational spectrum, but will represent a major challenge to the core educational mission of schools.
Whether these new network-based resources have a positive effect on science education depends on the way they are used and who has access. The new resources, the new opportunities for inquiry and collaboration all support the kinds of learning that schools have not done well and are at the heart of the new standards. On the other hand, if these technologies are implemented by sacrificing needed equipment or in-service support, if the most popular Net courses are heavily fact-oriented like SAT prep courses, if students become "data robots" for scientists, if less time is spent in hands-on investigations, then nothing will be gained. About all one can reliably predict is that well-funded and well-run schools will be more likely to implement the better applications of networking, while the rest will do nothing or implement the less-progressive applications.
"I think, therefore I am," said Rene Descartes about human consciousness. Since Descartes knew the power of the written word he might have said: "I write, therefore I am immortal." Not all written words will help a person achieve the immortality of Descartes or Shakespeare, but in most cases writing helps us extend who we are, and how we think, across the boundaries of time and space.
It is this power of the written word that is so often missing in language instruction in the classroom. How does children's writing help extend their existence across time and space?
We send children to school so that they will be able to learn what previous generations have discovered about life. We want our children "to stand on the shoulders of giants" so that they may see farther into the future.
Current developments in communication technology provide a way for students to experience writing as an act that extends them across time and through space. This technology invites children to leap off the "shoulders of giants" onto satellites circling the globe, extending their vision still farther.
This paper focuses on the human side of networking. How are classrooms being changed with the introduction of global links? What future can we see from the vantage point of satellites? The paper makes two main points:
Neither of these technological benefits are without risks. In fact, the dark side of technology causes fear in teachers and parents and poses risks that need to be carefully reviewed. This, too, is part of the human side of networks discussed in this paper.
A natural synergy is emerging between the arts and technology in education, as evidenced by the arrival of arts content, both people and resources, on the Internet. Computer-mediated communications are helping artists, arts educators, and generalists to define needs and shape a vision for arts education that relies on technology as a useful tool and resource. It is clear that arts and education institutions must collaborate with the technology industry to enable interactive opportunities between artists and audience, as well as multiple ways of delivering and assimilating information about the visual and performing arts. This paper defines the expectations of potential users and provides some examples of forward-looking projects that ensure the arts are a value-added component of technology and learning in the future.
Active construction of knowledge, participation in learning collaboratives, and building on learners' interests and experiences outside of school are major threads in educational reform and new curriculum standards. This paper provides examples of student work that not only demonstrates their own learning, but also makes a contribution to their community, to the learning of others, and to the base of knowledge available on the Internet. We construct a brief vision of learning, teaching, and knowledge-building in the future, assuming broad participation in these activities. We also identify some developments in software and educational practice that are necessary to help more students participate in and benefit from these kinds of projects.
Education reform and the integration of technology into learning share a profound symbiosis: technology requires the rich learning environments envisioned by reformers; reform demands the power of technology to put people at the center of their own learning. Systemic adoption of reform will take a critical mass of educators, who must await the realization of the promises of technology to transcend isolation and join in collaborative professional growth.
Reform requires those of us who are educators to rise to the level of performance typically encountered in master teachers, and this can invoke a sensation of paralysis. The resulting inertia mirrors the way that fear of technology prevents many of our peers from having the experiences which would enable them to embrace, then direct the potentials we technology-savvy educators rhapsodize about.
While our search for models of the new practices and paradigms is still in the discovery stage, we can find in the arts an example that illuminates the types of changes that will be required, as well as the unexpected means by which large-scale transformation can occur. These lessons emerge from comparing one of the cultural high points of the industrial revolution (the emergence of the symphony orchestra) with America's contribution to world culture: jazz.
This paper reflects on how educators can use information technologies to revive the progressive tradition. As networks make all intellectual resources available at any place at any time, the need to segment students according to age and capacity will diminish. In place of the image of the ladder of grades with students climbing upward, let us imagine instead a learning community with its youngest children entering at its very center, then moving outward as they grow through a series of concentric circles, with parents, teachers, and other adults ringed around them, and with lines of interactive electronic communication linking all from the center of these circles out to the full range of cultural institutions and specialized resources of the society.
This paper focuses on issues involved in making large, rich, and complex data resources accessible to and interpretable by the K-12 community. It uses the American Museum of Natural History and the Library of Congress projects as backdrops for thinking through these issues.
As more and more publishers gain access to the part of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, traditional publishers and their audiences are reevaluating the creation and distribution of educational materials and all sorts of content.
Although the potential of the WWW as a multimedia printing press is obvious to all, many questions remain about the willingness of consumers and educators to pay for electronic information and about the kinds of content and exchanges that best suit this medium.
This white paper examines the near-term and long-term implications for educational and mainstream publishers as the WWW makes possible new types of content and new means of publishing, distribution, and learning. The ability for authors to create their own content and publish themselves on the Web, and the ability for publishers to update their content as well as to package and distribute information in new ways, makes this an exciting time to be in the publishing industry. This paper examines trends in the marketplace and forecasts where publishing is going via the Web.
Appendix: The Rise of Publishing on the Internet: A History
This appendix succinctly reviews the history of the Internet as a mode for publishing. It also defines some common terms associated with publishing on the World Wide Web and explains in brief how HyperText Mark-Up Language works.
American schools are typically spending less than three percent of their budgets each year on textbooks and other copyrighted works, and many teachers and students are either doing without the material or pirating it. This paper examines the following issues:
Section One present a short summary of actual educational practices. Section Two reviews present national policy regarding intellectual property. Section Three presents the attitudes of educators and others toward copyright law and their needs for resources. Section Four provides some options for finding a balance between the need of educators and the rights of copyright holders.
Over the next 10 years, there will be dramatic changes in the use of networked technology for work, play, and learning. New technologies will be developed, test beds will be installed, software will be designed, and in schools, new technology-based curricula will be developed along with the teacher training programs needed to implement them. There will be a crucial need to assess the impact of these innovations on the outcomes, processes, and structures of education. To make these assessments, there will also need to be new evaluation designs and developments. In this paper we discuss:
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Last modified May 1, 1996 (gls).