The next generation of personal computers will offer multi-media capacity including animation, full-motion video and context-organized instructional databases. When high-bandwidth networks become easily accessible, adult education has a prospect of becoming the growth industry of the 21st century.
Cable TV services with 500 or more channels are just too much for a printed guide to describe in any kind of usable format. Instead of scanning TV listings, users will have to start using a combination of search methods and agent-based program recommendations.
There will be a new taste to our news-gathering process. Online news offers a satisfying wholeness – rather than knowing how to design a page or write a headline, we can become the information experts of a newborn profession.
Advances in software and hardware seem to force writers to be editors, editors to be designers, and designers to try all three, four hours before the issue goes out. Maybe the online, organic news connection can move beyond that, giving us a channel for pure news delivery, through a vehicle of incredible flexibility and power.
Demoting reading from its privileged position in the school curriculum is only one of many consequences of Knowledge Machines … What follows from imagining a Knowledge Machine is a certainty that school will either change very radically or simply collapse. It is predictable that the education establishment cannot see farther than using new technologies to do what it has always done in the past, teach the same curriculum … The possibility of freely exploring worlds of knowledge calls into question the very idea of an administered curriculum.
Telephone companies, cable companies and anyone else in the wire business should beware. Copper and glass are all very well, but the most important wires are still the ones etched in silicon.
The mass media will rapidly lose the vast political power they have exercised for so long. Power will move into constantly shifting communities of shopkeepers, housewives, Yale bulldogs, fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, nature-cure quacks, pacifists and phesbian leminists.
Interactive entertainment brings “on-demand” movies and interactive games into your living room, and your children get straight A’s in school as they travel around the world on the Information Superhighway, gathering information for reports and taking courses from teachers who live thousands of miles away.
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.