We should be able to monitor and forecast diseases as well as we monitor the weather if we take on new technologies. Having an Internet backbone to national and global disease monitoring can yield accurate and timely information concerning disease conditions.
Integrating prevention with telecommunications can … be the key to the next renaissance of health … The concept of the global health network is that the new networking technologies improve information transfer a million-fold.
The information superhighway can markedly improve public health … There should be a national and global commitment to tele-preventive medicine as the integration of telecommunication systems with public health has the greatest promise for improvement of health of our children, and ourselves.
We plan to develop our node as a community resource which will help to revitalize our economically depressed area.
Eventually we want to allow the students to access all of the school’s resources from home. This is part of our long-range goal to blow the walls off the school, bring the world into the school, and put the school out in the world.
Representatives from more than half of the participating organizations predicted that curriculum reform was the prime purpose for educational networking and geared their work toward achieving this goal. Many also predicted the creation of digital libraries accessible through the Internet for teaching and learning would be key and geared their major efforts in this direction. NSNT members also proposed educators could benefit in the future from using networks in the process of project-based learning (organized around problem-solving or themes that provide motivating context) and collaborative learning (in which students and teachers become near equals in the learning process).
Instead of today’s model, where you have one expert at the front of the room talking to a lot of people, it’s reversed: You have one user at a computer with hundreds of experts built in.
We must be careful not to look to this technology with hopes that it will be the next band aid for education. Installing computers, software, networking hardware, telephone lines and cabling in our schools will not change the way our children think unless we use these tools in new ways which take advantage of the possibilities the new tools have to offer.
It is easy to imagine that the mainstream high-bandwidth applications will be video-oriented with a purely commercial basis. But I think it likely that there will always be a sort of Frontier Internet, where the ferment of new ideas brews best, while other networks cater to the more market-driven mass of usage of what will by then be “conventional multimedia.”
The same technology that will put every “Star Trek” episode ever made within reach of a few clicks of your set-top device, will also give you access to educational resources beyond those available on even the finest university campus today. Imagine a virtual university where the best lecturers in the world are on tap at the moment you are ready to concentrate on learning.