Archives: Expert Predictions

Synchronous and asynchronous communication among students locally and worldwide – using combinations of speech, text, drawings, and pictures – will be commonplace. Two-way video will be expensive and less used outside business, because of the demands it makes on bandwidth and simultaneity. The most common piece of software will be client network tools descended from today’s browsers, that integrate access, authoring, and application control. The huge market for these tools will ensure interoperability between platforms and networks, creating a network as seamless and transparent as the current telephone network.

Wide bandwidth digital networks – pipes – will reach into every home and school in a decade, whether the data is moved over the power line, cable, telephone, satellite dish, fiber, or dedicated digital line. In homes, these pipes will terminate in a server computer that might called a set-top box because a TV will be connected to it. But the server will do much more than simply provide a TV signal; it will also provide network access to all the computers in the home, including the kids’ handheld computers, using wireless, infrared, and wires. Schools will also have ubiquitous networking.

It is important to understand the difference between today’s reality, where students occasionally use a computer in school, often as part of a group, and the future, where they will always have their personal handheld computer available … Soon there will be schools where all students have their own networked computer that they can use year in and year out, at home, in school, on the bus, on vacation, and in the family car … Wireless networking will be common, so students will have the full resources of the world at any place. And because they are small and mass-produced, handhelds will be less expensive than desktop computers. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that the most common educational computers in 10 years will be small, networked, handheld computers.

Ubiquitous networking may finally help small handheld computers come into their own. The network can reach handhelds through a simple serial wire, infrared, or wireless digital radio and turn them into Internet clients and servers. With this capacity, a student can hold the entire cyberspace infosphere.

Very soon every teacher and student will need access to the information represented on the Web in order to be competitive in their work and in their lives.

Remotely controlled Mosaics represent a collaborative capability that could make distance teaching a much easier and more meaningful way to learn … Anything on the Web would become material for shared, real-time presentation and discussion … Specialized educational software could be integrated into the virtual classroom; an instructor could demonstrate to a remotely located student how to execute an application. The ability to run simulations on remote or local machines is another application that is very important in teaching computational science and indeed could be useful in teaching chemistry, physics, and other high school science subjects.

The traditional education system, being more evolutionary than revolutionary, is unlikely to transform itself any time soon into an environment that teaches and encourages collaboration as a part of learning; emerging technologies, however, can catalyze this change much sooner than it would happen otherwise.

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.

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.

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.