Once even the most modest positive atmosphere for education is established, the information highway will help raise the educational standards for everyone in future generations. The highway will allow new methods of teaching and much more choice. Quality curriculums can be created with government funding and made available for free. Private vendors will compete to enhance the free material. The new vendors might be other public schools; public-school teachers or retired teachers going into business for themselves; or some privately run, highway-based school service program wanting to prove its capabilities. The highway would be a way for schools to try out new teachers or use their services at a distance.
The highway will also make home schooling easier. It will allow parents to select some classes from a range of quality possibilities and still maintain control over content.
Learning with a computer will be a springboard for learning away from the computer. Young children will still need to touch toys and tools with their hands. Seeing chemical reactions on a computer screen can be a good supplement to hands-on work in a chemistry lab, but it can’t replace the real experience. Children need personal interaction with each other, and with adults, to learn social and interpersonal skills, such as how to work cooperatively.
The good teachers of the future will be doing much more than showing kids where to find information on the highway. They will still have to understand when to probe, observe, stimulate, or agitate. They’ll still have to build kids’ skills in written and oral communications, and will use technology as a starting point or an aid. Successful teachers will act as coaches, partners, creative outlets, and communications bridges to the world.
Computers on the information highway will be able to simulate the world as well as explain it. Creating or using a computer model can be a great educational tool. Several years ago, a teacher at Sunnyside High School in Tucson, Arizona, organized a club of students to create computer simulations of real-world behaviors. The students discovered the grim consequences of gang behavior by modeling it for themselves mathematically. The success of the club led eventually to a complete reorganization of the mathematics curriculum around the idea that education is not about making kids give the “right” answer, but about giving kids methods by which to decide whether an answer is “right”
The teaching of science lends itself particularly well to using models. Kids now learn trigonometry by measuring the height of real mountains. They triangulate from two points rather than just doing abstract exercises. There are already a number of computer models that teach biology. SimLife, a popular software program, simulates evolution, so kids get to experience the process instead of just getting facts about it. You don’t have to be a child to enjoy this program, which lets you design plants and animals and then watch how they interact and evolve in an ecosystem that you also design. Maxis Software, the publisher of SimLife also produces another program, SimCity, which lets you design a city with all of its interrelated systems, such as roads and public transportation. As a player, you get to be the mayor or city planner of a virtual community and to challenge yourself to meet your own goals for the community, rather than goals artificially imposed by the software’s design. You build farms, factories, homes, schools, universities, libraries, museums, zoos, hospitals, prisons, marinas, freeways, bridges, even subways. You cope with urban growth or natural disasters, such as fires. You change the terrain too. When you modify your simulated city by building an airport or raising taxes, the changes can have a predictable or unexpected effect on the simulated society. It is a great, fast way to find out how the real world works.
Or use a simulation to find out about what goes on out of this world. Kids can navigate the solar system or galaxy in a simulated spaceship by playing with a space simulator. Kids who may think they aren’t interested in biology or urban design or outer space can discover they are by exploring and experimenting with computer simulations. When science is made more interesting in these ways, it should appeal to a
broader set of students.
In the future, students of all ages and capabilities will be able to visualize and interact with information. For example, a class studying weather will be able to view simulated satellite images based on a model of hypothetical meteorological conditions. Students will propose “what if?” questions, such as “What would happen to the next day’s weather if the wind speed increased by 15 MPH?” The computer will model the predicted results, displaying the simulated weather system as it would appear from space. Simulation games will get much better, but even now the best of them are fascinating and highly educational.
When simulations get completely realistic, we enter the realm of virtual reality. I’m sure that at some point schools will have virtual-reality equipment—or maybe even VR rooms, the way some now have music rooms and theaters—to allow students to explore a place, an object, or a subject in this engrossing, interactive way.
Technology will not, however, isolate students. One of the most important educational experiences is collaboration. In some of the world’s most creative classrooms, computers and communications networks are already beginning to change the conventional relationships among students themselves, and between students and teachers, by facilitating collaborative learning.
Teachers at the Ralph Bunche school (P.S. 125) in Harlem created a computer-assisted teaching unit to show New York inner-city students how to use the Internet for research, to communicate with electronic pen pals worldwide, and to collaborate with volunteer tutors at nearby Columbia University. Ralph Bunche was one of the first elementary schools in the nation to put its own home page on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Its Web home page, the work of a student, includes links to such things as the school newspaper, student artwork, and a lesson on the Spanish alphabet illustrated.
Especially at the college level, academic research has been aided enormously by the Internet, which has made it easier for far-flung institutions and individuals to collaborate. Computer innovation has always taken place at universities. Several universities are centers for advanced research into new computer technologies, and many others maintain large computer labs that students use for collaboration and homework. Also, today some of the most interesting home pages on the Internet’s World Wide Web are posted on behalf of universities around the world.
Some universities put the network to less global uses. At the University of Washington, lesson plans and assignments for some classes are posted on the World Wide Web. Lecture notes are often published on the Web too, a free service I would have loved in my college days. Elsewhere, an English teacher requires all his students to have e-mail addresses and use e-mail to participate in after-hours electronic discussions. Class members are graded on their e-mail contributions, just as they are on classroom contributions and homework.
College students everywhere already understand the joys of e-mail, both for educational purposes and to keep in touch inexpensively with family and friends, including high school friends who have gone to other universities. A growing number of parents of college students have become regular e-mail users because it seems to be the best way to contact their kids. Even some elementary schools allow older students to have Internet accounts. At Lakeside, my old school, the school’s network is now connected to the Internet, which permits kids to browse for on-line information and exchange national and international e-mail. Nearly all Lakeside students requested e-mail accounts, and in one typical twelve-week period they received a total of 259,587 messages—an average of about 30 messages per student each week. About 49,000 messages were from the Internet during the twelve-week period, and the students sent about 7,200 messages.