Topic: Getting

Prestigious universities may develop nationwide offerings of standard courses, such as Psych 101, taught by telegenic, internationally recognized authorities. Under this strategy, presentations with high production values would be coupled with frequent, interactive teleconferences, mentoring via electronic mail, and occasional face-to-face meetings of locally enrolled students led by a practitioner. This approach would not intrigue learners interested in a residential college experience, but could be very attractive to students at commuter campuses. With sufficient economies of scale, this delivery method would have lower costs than our present system of similar standard courses duplicated at every institution.

The rise on the Internet of text-based shared synthetic environments illustrates the fascination that people have with participatory virtual worlds. The continual evolution of distributed simulations based on participants’ collaborative interactions keeps these shared virtual environments from becoming boring and stale. In contrast to standard adventure games, in which you wander through someone else’s fantasy, the ability to personalize an environment and receive recognition from others for adding to the shared context is attractive to many people … Shared virtual experiences on the national information infrastructure can complement books, plays, television, movies, and concerts by taking us beyond the daily grind; the challenge, however, is to move past escapism into metaphorical comprehension and catharsis.

While digital video will broaden the bandwidth of virtual interactions via information infrastructures, teleconferencing will never completely substitute for direct personal contact. We can expect a variety of social inventions to emerge that provide the best of both worlds. We are just beginning to understand how knowledge webs and virtual communities can reshape the content, process, and delivery of conventional distance education. Information infrastructures are the new type of learning device that is spurring this evolution, just as the steam engine was the driver for the industrial revolution.

Virtual communities can help bring about close cooperation and shared responsibility for learning among all the educational agents of society – families, social service agencies, workplaces, mass media, schools, and higher education. For example, involving families more deeply in their children’s education may be the single most powerful lever for improved learning outcomes. Virtual parent-teacher conferences and less formal social interchanges provide new opportunities for involving parents who will never come to a PTA meeting or a school-based event. I

Teachers must structure learning experiences that highlight how new ideas can provide insights in intriguing, challenging situations … In order to create a learner-centered environment in which students can take full advantage of information infrastructures, it is vital that educators augment the traditional curriculum with collaborative, learning-through-doing activities based on linked, online materials and orchestrated across classrooms, workplaces, homes, and community settings.

Via information infrastructures, educators and students can join distributed conferences that provide an instant network of contacts with useful skills – a personal brain trust scattered geographically, but offering just-in-time answers to immediate questions. Eventually, these informal sources of expertise will utilize embedded “groupware” tools to enhance collaboration.

The core skill needed in today’s workplace is not foraging for data, but filtering a plethora of incoming information. The emerging literacy we all must master requires immersing ourselves in a sea of information and harvesting patterns of knowledge, just as fish extract oxygen from water via their gills. In this environment, educators must understand how to structure learning experiences that make this kind of immersion possible. Preparing students for full participation in 21st century society will require expanding the traditional definitions of literacy and rhetoric to encompass “immersionlike” experiences of interacting with information.

The global marketplace and the communications and entertainment industries are driving the rapid evolution of regional, national, and global information infrastructures that enhance our abilities to access and interlink materials in remote archives. These powerful channels for transmitting data are ways of extending our nervous systems so that we can communicate and learn across barriers of distance and time, exploring and contributing to virtual think tanks. As a result, the means for creating, delivering, and using information in business, government, and society are swiftly changing. To successfully prepare students as workers and citizens, educators must incorporate experiences into the curriculum that enable students to create and utilize new forms of expression and that can be activated just in time, at any place, and on demand.

We are now embedding computers and telecommunications into our everyday context, making possible three innovative types of learning devices. Smart objects, with embedded microprocessors and wireless networking, explain their own functioning and help us create “articulate” educational environments that communicate with their inhabitants. Information infrastructures provide remote access to experts, interlinked archival resources, virtual communities, and “distributed” investigations involving many participants in different locations. Shared synthetic environments, by immersing us in illusion, help us develop a better understanding and appreciation of reality. The new messages emerging from these new media can dramatically improve instructional outcomes, but such an evolution of educational practice depends on careful design of the interface among the devices, learners, and teachers.

The integration of networking into K-12 education requires that mainstream educational services be available over the network. Providing such services, in turn, requires a highly organized effort to create the software, secure state government and community approval of materials and instructional environment, train thousands of teachers, and provide hands-on assistance to teachers confronting new applications. Integrating networking into education also requires an ongoing program of research into the design and implementation of infrastructure technology and applications for education, because the problem of providing and supporting access to network-based resources in education is larger and also contains more unknowns than support for research networking.