Topic: Getting

Over the next 10 years, it is anticipated that these public and private investments will result in dramatic changes in the relationships among schools, homes, and workplaces … This infusion of technology into the lives of our citizens, teachers, and students promises to expand the boundaries of educational systems, extend participation to those traditionally not involved in education, and increase educational opportunities and access to educational experiences for all.

As people in advantaged societies start to enjoy random access to unlimited cultural resources, the policy problem shifts from one of allocating scarce resources to managing relatively abundant ones … The policy problem in education increasingly becomes one of ensuring that all resources are optimally represented in the system and that the navigational tools available to teachers and students dependably enable them to identify and activate the resources that advance their power of cultural participation at the moment when they engage a seminal question. What sorts of policies will conduce to these developments?

Educators need to look beyond the myopic topic of computers in education to the question of what they can and should accomplish as educators making full use of digital tools. Educators should use these wonderfully powerful tools to pursue historically challenging goals – fulfilling basic human rights; securing the physical well-being of all in a sustainable global environment; eliminating prejudice, poverty, despair, and disease.

Moderates will argue that we cannot burden education with trying to solve all of society’s problems; it is true that fair and equitable educational opportunities represent a great goal that, with the current savage inequalities, remains too far out of reach.

In some cases, telecommuting will replace busing programs. This, of course, is regressive from the view of the larger society. All forms of distance education can be a means of retaining ghettoized housing patterns and reducing social contact between racial and ethnic groups while addressing educational inequities.

Changes will improve the quality of student learning only when there is sufficient wisdom and sophistication in communities to find the little good on the Net and reject the many slick but inferior network-based educational packages … Complete net schools backed with impressive educational pseudoresearch will be sold … Insidious advertising will slip in as a way of reducing the costs. The availability on the network of excellent materials, even if almost drowned by junk, may excite discriminating parents who might pressure schools to do better. Of course, the opposite will happen more frequently; the stern parent will find justification on the network for more disciplined learning, as will the creationist, white supremacist, and every other crazy faction. Communities without the resources to have discriminating educators and parents [may trade] one poor educational strategy for another.

Parents in some failing districts will demand wholesale in-school netcourses, which will shift the primary functions of the staff in these schools to providing the technology, advising, proctoring, and coaching sports. In other cases, parents will demand and get the average per-student expenditure as chits that they will use outside the existing public school structure for qualified netcourses and net schools.

Competitive pressures coming from the network will improve many schools. These schools will use their natural advantage of history and locality, draw on the excellent network resources, and emerge stronger. Some ambitious public and private schools will even extend their borders, accepting tuition-paying students from anywhere, with preference given to create multicultural virtual groups. These schools may find the added income actually reduces property taxes, to the delight of their towns.