Parents may also help their children at school by teaching them to use the software they use in their work. Some teachers and staff are already using popular business software to administer their activities and to give students experience with the tools of the modern workplace. Most college students and an increasing number of high schoolers now prepare reports on PCs with word processors instead of using typewriters or writing by hand. Spreadsheets and charting applications are routinely used to explain mathematics and economic theories and have become a standard part of most accounting courses. Students and faculty have also discovered new uses for popular business applications. For example, students studying a foreign language can take advantage of the major word-processor programs’ ability to work in different languages. Such programs include supplemental tools for checking spellings and looking up synonyms in multilingual documents.
In some families, children are probably introducing their parents to computing. Kids and computers get along just great, partly because kids aren’t invested in established ways of doing things. Children like to provoke a reaction, and computers are reactive. Parents are sometimes surprised by how taken with computers even their preschoolers are, but the fascination makes sense if you think about how much a young child enjoys interaction—whether it is playing peek-a-boo with a parent or stabbing at a remote control and watching channels change.
I like to watch my three-year-old niece play with Just Grandma and Me, a Brøderbund CD-ROM based on a children’s book. She has memorized the dialogue in this cartoon story and talks along with the characters, much as she does when her mother reads her a book. If my niece uses the computer’s mouse to click on a mailbox, the mailbox opens and a frog jumps out or sometimes a hand appears and pulls the mailbox door shut. Her ability to influence what she sees on the screen—to answer the question “What happens if I click here?"—keeps her curiosity high. The interactivity, combined with the underlying quality of the storyline, keeps her involved.
I’ve always believed most people have more intelligence and curiosity than current information tools encourage them to use. Most people have had the experience of getting interested in a topic and feeling the gratifying sense of accomplishment that comes from finding good material on it, and the pleasure of mastering the topic. But if a search for information brings you up against a blank wall, you become discouraged. You begin to think you’re never going to understand the subject. And if you experience that natural reaction too often, especially when you’re a child, your impulse to try again is diminshed.
I was fortunate to be raised in a family that encouraged kids to ask questions. And I was lucky in my early teens to become friends with Paul Allen. Soon after I had met Paul, I asked him where gasoline came from. I wanted to know what it meant to “refine” gasoline. I wanted to know exactly how it was that gasoline could power a car. I had found a book on the subject, but it was confusing. Gasoline, however, was one of the many subjects that Paul understood, and he explained it in a way that made it interesting and understandable to me. You might say my curiosity about gasoline is what fueled our friendship.
Paul had lots of answers to things I was curious about (and a great collection of science fiction books too). I was more of a math person than Paul, and I understood software better than anyone he knew. We were interactive resources for each other. We asked or answered questions, drew diagrams, or brought each other’s attention to related information. We liked to challenge and test each other. This is exactly the way the highway will interact with users. Let’s say another teenager wants to find out about gasoline—not in 1970, but three or four years from now. He may not be lucky enough to have a Paul Allen around, but if his school or library has a computer linked to rich multi-media information, he’ll be able to delve as deeply into the topic as he likes.
He’ll see photos, videos, and animations explaining how oil is drilled, transported, and refined. He’ll learn the difference between automobile fuel and aviation fuel—and if he wants to know the difference between a car’s internal-combustion engine and a jetliner’s turbine engine, all he’ll have to do is ask.
He’ll be able to explore the complex molecular structure of gasoline, which is a combination of hundreds of distinct hydrocarbons, and learn about hydrocarbons too. With all of the links to additional knowledge, who knows what fascinating topics this exploration will lead him to.
At first, new information technology will just provide incremental improvements over today’s tools. Wall-mounted video white boards will replace a teacher’s chalkboard handwriting with readable fonts and colorful graphics drawn from millions of educational illustrations, animations, photographs, and videos. Multi-media documents will assume some of the roles now played by textbooks, movies, tests, and other educational materials. And because multi-media documents will be linked to servers on the information highway, they will be kept thoroughly up-to-date.
CD-ROMs available today offer a taste of the interactive experience. The software responds to instructions by presenting information in text, audio, and video forms. CD-ROMs are already being used in schools and by kids doing their assignments at home, but they have limitations the highway won’t. CD-ROMs can offer either a little information about a broad range of topics the way an encyclopedia does, or a lot of information about a single topic, such as dinosaurs, but the total amount of information available at one time is limited by the capacity of the disc. And, of course, you can use only the discs you have available. Nevertheless, they’re a great advance over just-paper texts. Multi-media encyclopedias provide not only a research tool, but all sorts of material that can be incorporated into homework documents. These encyclopedias are available with teacher’s guides that include suggestions for ways to use the encyclopedias in the classroom or as part of assignments. I have been excited to hear from teachers and students about the ways they have used our products—only a few of which we had anticipated.
CD-ROMs are one clear precursor to the highway. The Internet’s World Wide Web is another. The Web offers access to interesting, educational information, although most of it is still plain text. Creative teachers are already using on-line services to devise exciting new kinds of lessons.
Fourth-graders in California have done on-line searches of newspapers to read about the challenges Asian immigrants face. Boston University has created interactive software for high school students that shows detailed visual simulations of chemical phenomena, such as salt molecules dissolving in water.
Christopher Columbus Middle School in Union City, New Jersey, was a school created out of crisis. In the late 1980s, the state test scores were so low and the absentee and dropout rates were so high among the children of the school district that the state was considering taking it over. The school system, the teachers, and the parents (well over 90 percent of whom were of Hispanic extraction and didn’t speak English as a first language) came up with an innovative five-year plan to rescue their schools.
Bell Atlantic (the local telephone company) agreed to help find a special networked, multi-media system of PCs linking the students’ homes with the classrooms, teachers, and school administrators. The corporation initially provided 140 multi-media PCs, enough for the homes of the seventh-graders, the homes of all seventh-grade teachers, and at least four per classroom. The computers were networked and linked with high-speed lines and connected to the Internet, and the teachers were trained in using the PCs. The teachers set up weekend training courses for the parents, over half of whom attended, and encouraged the students to use e-mail and the Internet.