In grade school, I heard a lot about how television was going to revolutionize classrooms. My own school was part of a pilot program in the Chicago area that put televisions in every classroom with great fanfare. We were going to have access to great science and social studies programs that would excite our young minds and give us access to some of the best teachers and instructional material in the nation. Sound familiar?
I recall now that we watched a few shows on Channel 11, the educational station. I can't remember what they were about, but I do remember vaguely that they were boring and disappointing after all the hype. I know for a fact that the classroom televisions soon gathered dust and were basically ignored by the teachers.
In high school, there was similar excitement about a "Resource Retrieval Center"--or something like that. It consisted of a group of computer-type terminals that were supposed to be able to call up information on command and revolutionize learning. No doubt it was a noble experiment that taught its designers some valuable lessons--such as why it might make sense to wait about 20 years until the right hardware became available. But for students, the retrieval center was a dud, and quickly became a place to hang out and goof off during library hours. After being introduced with great fanfare, the center was quietly shut down after a year.
Let me be clear: these are dim memories. In each case, I mainly remember a flurry of excitement, some "gee-whiz" stories in the media, and the disappointing reality.
My clearest memories from my school days are about teachers who had an impact: a grade school teacher who made reading exciting, or a high-school algebra teacher who made algebra fun. Some teachers were inspiring, others were not. But it was people, not technology that made the difference. And I am convinced of this: nothing in the foreseeable future will make classroom teachers any less important for my children than they were for me.
Perhaps 50 years in the future, we'll all have microchip brain implants or other sci-fi inventions that totally change the way we learn. But for the next 10 years or so, I think we'll be looking at how new information technologies will help improve on current methods of instruction, not at a classroom revolution.
For the next few years, the biggest impact of the information highway on my children's lives will probably have more to do with their entertainment options--500 channels and all that--than with their education. After that, I think the information highway is likely to have a big impact on their work lives, just as it already has had on my own.
Don't get me wrong: I am actually very excited about what the information highway will mean for our children's education. When I think of how much information will be at my children's fingertips when they write their high-school term papers, I don't know whether to be envious about their ability to download reams of information or to be grateful that I just had to deal with the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature.
Likewise, when I read about grade-school children being able to download up-to-the minute pictures from the Hubble space telescope of comets striking Jupiter, I realize that the times really are changing. The new point-and-click access to the entire world of information, as is now available with Internet technologies like MOSAIC and the World Wide Web, is truly astounding.
What's more, I know that people who really know the capabilities of the new information technologies are almost giddy about the changes that are about to occur. Consider, for example, this introduction to one of the most popular guidebooks to the Internet, which is virtually turning into Route 66 of the Information Highway:
"The Internet is, by far, the greatest and most significant achievement in the history of mankind. What? Am I saying that the Internet is more impressive than the pyramids? More beautiful than Michelangelo's David? More important to mankind than the wondrous inventions of the industrial revolution? Yes, yes, and yes."
Has Harley Hahn, author of The Internet Complete Reference, gone off the deep end? Or is something really big happening this time? Despite my well-earned skepticism about techno-hype, I suspect that the Internet enthusiasts are onto something this time.
The reason has to do with people. The new information technologies are not just about making libraries easier to access or putting more educational programs onto more video monitors. The new information technologies are about putting people in touch with each other, with almost infinitely flexible choice of media: audio, video, text, or someday even 3-D objects.
While it is still not clear to me how the Internet will change my children's classroom experience in the next few years, it is easy to imagine that in five or ten years, children will not study Japan just by reading about it in a text book. They will be able to enter on on-line dialog with Japanese children in Tokyo who are learning about the United States. They will be able to exchange not only essays about their customs and traditions, but homemade videos about their everyday lives.
The information highway will not only put children in touch with their counterparts in other nations or other parts of the country, it will do the same for their teachers, their parents, their neighbors, and so on. According to technology author George Gilder, the magic of networking is related to what he calls the "Law of the Telecosm": that the value of networks increase by a factor of n-squared as the number of nodes on the network (n) increase.
In other words, the value of networks is in connecting people. The connections, while valuable in and of themselves, will increase people's interest in learning and their capacity for learning. Ideas which work well in one classroom will rapidly be transmitted to others, as they pass from student to student and from teacher to teacher.
At a different level, scientific research that is underway in Atlanta can immediately be challenged and improved upon by suggestions that might come the next day from Beijing. The invention of networks that copy and transmit almost costlessly any type of information that humans are capable of producing will someday probably be rank with the invention of writing or, later, the invention of the printing press as technologies that have profoundly altered the course of civilization.
I am also not alone in suspecting that these new technologies will ultimately transform the work place and economic systems more than did the "wondrous inventions of the industrial revolution" two hundred years ago. The industrial revolution changed the world profoundly by providing mechanical substitutes for human and animal muscles and energy, amplifying what humans could accomplish beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations.
I believe that the information revolution is likely to change the world even more profoundly by providing silicon and fiber-based substitutes and enhancements not for our muscles but for our brains. If I am correct, the new tools will also eventually amplify what we humans can accomplish beyond most of our wildest imaginations.
The key reason that excitement is justified now has to do with the laws of physics, and the exponential improvements in communications and computing technologies that are being delivered by quantum mechanics. Advances in microchip technologies, for example, are proceeding at an exponential pace, with efficiencies in computer processing roughly doubling every 18 months.
According to technology expert Gilder, at the current pace of development, the equivalent computing power of 16 Cray supercomputers which now cost roughly $320 million should be available on one silicon chip the size of a fingernail by the early part of the next decade for a few hundred dollars at most.
Fiber-optic and various wireless communications technologies are widely expected to proceed at an even more blistering pace in the next several decades, permitting the creation of information pipelines with virtually limitless carrying capacity.
I don't think any of us can predict what type of impact these changes will have on our lives in the next ten or twenty years. But they will have to mean far more to my children's lives than putting a few more educational programs on their computer monitors or 500 channels on their cable television.
What does seem safe to assume is this: these new technologies will continue to accelerate the already dizzying pace of change in the global economy and our societies. Who can doubt that the new information technologies played a key role in toppling communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, by providing dissidents with contact with the outside world and new forms of communication--like fax messages--among themselves?
Likewise, who can doubt that new networking technologies and client-server systems are a driving force in the radical restructuring and "re-engineering" of our larger corporations? These technologies have clearly provided business with new tools that are eliminating tens of thousands of middle-management jobs devoted to paper-shuffling and routine data reporting? I think it's a good bet that we are still in the early stages of such corporate restructuring.
If I am correct, these changes suggest that we could be on the cusp of a powerful boom in productivity that will ultimately lead to an improved standard of living for everyone. But there will no doubt be more painful side-effects in the working world, including reduced job security and, most ominously, growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots.
As the information revolution progresses, a key challenge for our education systems will be how to prepare our children for a rapidly changing world in which they may end up having a number of different careers, not a lifetime job. Another key challenge will be how education systems can prevent a division of societies into information haves and have-nots.
The enormity of the challenge can be grasped by taking a global perspective. According to a recent article in the Financial Times of London: "Most of the world's population does not even have access to a basic phone line; and that is the best that technology, plus huge investment, is likely to deliver to even a small minority of people within the foreseeable future." Just getting basic phone networks in place in the developing nations will cost $55 billion per year over the next six years, according to the Financial Times.
There can be no doubt that the sums of money involved in expanding the global communications network to all nations--and building an information "superhighway" in America--will be enormous. Given severe budget constraints at all levels of government these days, that means the private sector will have to lead the way, driven in large measure by the profit motive. Governments around the world recognize this, which is why telecommunications industries are being deregulated and privatized almost everywhere.
Does this mean that the information highway is destined to be a limited-access tollway, where only the wealthy can ride in their limousines? Or are there steps that we can take, particularly in the educational arena, to promote a vision of the information highway as a multiple-access freeway which can promote the common good, not just private fortunes?
These are important questions that will be widely debated in coming years, and I can't even pretend to have the answers at this stage of the game. But let me make some recommendations about where to look for answers.
1. Public-Private Partnerships. Educators should start with the assumption that private-sector businesses, energized by the profit motive, will be the driving force which implements the information highway. Since businesses are, in an important sense, the "customers" of public schools, there need to be private-public partnerships at every level of education to make sure that schools are teaching skills that businesses will need as the information revolution progresses and to make sure that they have access to the right equipment to be effective.
For their part, businesses need to recognize that their own success in the future will depend on the success of their "suppliers" of educated workers, namely the schools. School boards, Parent-Teacher Organizations, and Chambers of Commerce around the country need to keep open lines of communication regarding these issues and to learn from some of the innovative experiments that have already been made along these lines.
2. Support for Extended Libraries. More than a century ago, when far-sighted and civic minded educators saw the growing importance of universal literacy for our society, a grass roots movement arose to put public libraries into every community in the country. Private philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie played an important role in providing seed money for the rapid spread of the library movement.
With the growing recognition that computer literacy and widespread access to the information highway will be important for the future of our society, why not build on the excellent infrastructure already provided by our current library system to make public libraries into relatively open access gateways into the information highway? While it is unrealistic to hope for every schoolchild to have personal equipment for accessing the information highway, public access centers with good equipment and some free (or donated) access time to various information providers would go along way toward providing more open access.
3. The Important Role of Private Philanthropy and Community Activists. What better legacies could be left behind by some of our information-industry millionaires (or "Bill"-ionaires) than extended libraries based on their philanthropy combined with community initiatives? And what better focus for civic-minded activists and educators than to promote an open-access vision of the information superhighway in tandem with private business and governmental organizations alike? Horace Mann and Andrew Carnegie, where are you now?
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