Faculty will rightly continue to insist that there is no substitute for experiencing a work as it was meant to be experienced, but in general we will benefit from a more convenient access to databases, especially those in the fields where information quickly becomes obsolete.
While newsprint will never die – I hope! – many of us believe that it’s time to adapt every aspect of our operations to the reality of online news.
We will be able to enhance the Internet’s advantages and (maybe less so) avoid its dangers. I also believe that the revolution will be slower and less traumatic than many fear.
The computer screen is ill-suited to conveying broadly structured, tightly logical argumentation … The Internet conveys, on a large scale, the interactive and fluid nature of all academic work, but it also produces chaos that is often at best only a waste of time.
Technological developments are not going hand-in-hand with a change in the way people interact with computers. The currently dominant interaction metaphor of direct manipulation requires the user to initiate all tasks explicitly and to monitor all events. This metaphor will have to change if untrained users are to make effective use of the computers and networks of tomorrow.
The complexity of this new environment will demand a new style of human-computer interaction, where the computer becomes an intelligent, active and personalized collaborator.
In the past, education adapted the mind to a very restricted set of available media; in the future, it will adapt media to serve the needs and tastes of each individual mind … The Knowledge Machine (a metaphor for much more varied forms of media) will provide easier access to richer and fuller bodies of knowledge than can be offered by any printed encyclopedia.
People who want it to be an escapist thing … will be disappointed. Everybody else will be having these amazing experiences … It’s only in its dynamic quality that virtual reality becomes real. There might be some people who veg out in it, but I just think that’s extremely unlikely … If, 20 years from now, what’s going on in VR is just an amplified version of what goes on in television sets, it would be an overall failure.
In the future complex programs such as large databases will be virtual-reality cities which the user will move through to find information. “I believe in that not just because I think it’s a cool idea. It’s because I think that is the method of managing complicated things that people evolved to be good at.”
Needed is a specific locus of responsibility and accountability for infrastructure development and use, building on a stronger base of technological competence, within the Department of Education, and the setting of a national agenda for local, state, and federal efforts.