People using technology will replace the overly expensive, information-poor and isolated classrooms of today. Public education has a choice. It will either actively embrace these new technology-driven opportunities or be replaced by private firms who will use them.
The issues of the next several years are both the means and methods of using technology to improve educational productivity. As important is the re-formation of public policy to ensure access to everyone, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, technology comfortable or ignorant.
More parents working at home, combined with dissatisfaction in public schools will swell the ranks of children being educated at home.
Mobile access to the Internet by way of digital radio-equipped notebook computers will become commonplace. Infrared communication will be used for local links so that lecturers can automatically download their notes, charts, and graphs into students’ notebooks. Business cards will be replaced with “info-squirts” between notebooks. People sitting down at face-to-face meetings will be able to ‘Internet’ instantly this way. Of course, security is going to get very interesting in this environment.
We’re … seeing the emergence of financial-transaction support on the Internet, and perhaps bill-paying will at last become a part of that landscape. Teachers and parents will be able to confer by e-mail, and Johnny won’t be able to claim that there is no homework because you’ll see it on the Web page for his school and classes.
We got started down the track of binary representation, and its unbelievably fragile. If one bit is off, you get something entirely different. We built computers on the wrong foundation, and I think you’ll just see more and more kluges in the software until someday someone will figure out a completely new paradigm, a completely different way of thinking about data.
The infomercenaries who think they can increase their earning power through for-hire short-term engagements will also be disappointed. If they are hired for their specific skills, as is likely to be the case, their wages will be made up of pay for work hours and an allowance for depreciation of their knowledge assets. The company hiring them will have no reason to finance their learning new skills. The infomercenaries will therefore have to look at their short-term wages as an exploitation of their accumulated know-how, which they will have to fund out of their own pocket to avoid technological obsolescence.
It’s up to citizens to demand our part of the deal. If you dismiss this as a bunch of computer nerds, you do your grandchildren a disservice.
The problem with going out on the Internet is akin to creating a New York City and telling everybody to go there. The benefits will never get back to the small community because it’s a different dynamic. New York is just not St. Louis.
We need to acknowledge the importance of machines flat out and include them in our generalized political positions … I am not hopeful about this prospect, but it is still necessary to make the attempt. If no attempt is made, or if none is successful, then surely the Internet will be configured in the interests of the corporations and the nation state, though of course there are inherent resistances and intentional resistances under any circumstances.