4: Prediction anticipates what will happen in the future. Observation notes what is happening in the present, a present that may extend from the recent past, through the immediate now, to well into the future. Let us observe three things that are happening at a rapid pace in our extended present. First, people are converting all the contents of all the world's cultures to digital form, making the results available to any person at any place at any time. Second, people are gaining flexible command of multiple ways to represent information, simulate interactions, and express ideas, extending the reach of intelligence, altering the spectrum of civilized achievement, and lowering thresholds to cultural participation. Third, people are externalizing diverse basic skills--to calculate, spell, remember, visualize, compare, select--into the digital tools with which they work, making practical mastery of such skills, once an outcome of education, increasingly a given at its outset. As these changes become evident in practice all around, educators sense that the spectrum of pedagogical possibility alters significantly.
5: To make a shift in the spectrum of pedagogical possibility clear, consider the history of architecture in the hundred years from 1850 or so. Until that time, throughout history and across cultures people simply did not build tall buildings except for a few towers for specialized ceremonial and military purposes. Then a series of innovations occurred, for reasons quite extraneous to the will of architects, that made unprecedented structures feasible. With new materials like structural steel, reinforced concrete, and plate glass, with new techniques for managing water, heat, light, and air, and with novel ways of moving people, these unprecedented structures proved so humanly habitable that specimens of them have been built the world around, with great variations of form and function and with diverse triumphs and failures on all sorts of measures--social, structural, economic, and aesthetic. The new building technologies did not determine, in a strong sense, how any particular city would look, but they did open a wide new spectrum of architectural possibility. Within the range of this possibility numerous cities have developed imposing skylines like New York's; even Paris, by explicitly adhering to traditional building codes in its central sections, reflects through its conscious restraint one of the possibilities of the new architecture.
6: Digital technologies are for education as iron and steel girders, reinforced concrete, plate glass, elevators, central heating, and air conditioning were for architecture. Digital technologies set in abeyance significant, long-lasting limits on educational activity. Consider how this change in possibility occurs through the three key developments in our extended present noted above.
7: First, high-speed, wide-area networks linking ubiquitous computers to copious digital libraries transform the cultural conditions under which educational interactions take place. Traditionally, the school and the classroom have been places where teachers and students are isolated from the general culture and where information and ideas have been relatively scarce -- the textbook is a meager selection of what a field of knowledge comprises, a skilled teacher is a bundle of ignorance relative to the sum of learning, and a school library a sparse collection at best. Networks reaching through the school into the classroom and to the desktop are ending the isolation and substituting a rule of abundance for that of scarcity.[Note 2] Such a new rule is not without its pitfalls, but to cope with these we must recognize that it is a new rule, deeply different from the old. In our extended present, the educational problem changes profoundly, shifting from determining strategies for disbursing scarce knowledge to finding ways to enable people to use unlimited access to the resources of our cultures.
8: Second, new media alter the ways of knowing and the opportunities for participating in the creation of knowledge. Multimedia, and its extension in virtual reality, is not merely a glitzy vehicle for edutainment hype. It is an epistemologically interesting development in our culture. For the most part, the work of thought has seemed to take place primarily through the manipulation of language, with the formal symbolization of mathematics and logic seen as extensions of more everyday linguistic forms. Multimedia make it increasingly evident that the work of thinking can take many forms -- verbal, visual, auditory, kinetic, and blends of all and each. Of course, nonlinguistic media are not new, but their status as serious means for creating knowledge is rising considerably. Knowledge consists primarily of cultural resources that people can store and retrieve on demand, as the need for it arises. Written, especially printed, media long held a privileged place in education because they were easy to store and retrieve to suit the needs of users. Work in other media tended to exist in performances and monuments, which did not suit the strategies of random access. Multimedia changes that condition. It subjects a far wider range of communications to the full rule of random access, changing the repertoire of resources that people can store and retrieve effectively and use on demand to serve the needs of disciplined thought and inquiry.[Note 3] People can use digital media both to acquire ideas and to express their thoughts in diverse ways. As a result, educators will find it increasingly difficult to favor the linguistic modality over all others, and they will need to broaden the norms of academic excellence.
9: Third, digital technologies expand personal potentialities. Distributed processing and ubiquitous computing may or may not aggregate into artificial intelligence in the strong sense, creating a species of machines that think in a significant way. But they are clearly coming to function as a means for augmenting our human intellectual skills. Word processors warn of anomalous spellings as they occur; spreadsheets allow anyone to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately; and databases permit those with good memory or bad to manage information sets that neither could handle on his own. All sorts of more specialized tools greatly lower the skill levels needed to participate effectively in wide ranges of cultural activity. Precision and exactness may become trivial proficiencies because getting it right will be easy, provided one doesn't get it wildly wrong through some accidental error. With regard to such accidental but sometimes very portentous error, the ability to estimate and guess results, traditionally an educationally suspect knack, becomes an increasingly prized skill. Thus, educators are sensing that changes in information technologies can deeply transform the hallmarks of having acquired a decent education. Established answers to the question "What knowledge is of most worth?" may not pertain under the conditions of learning and knowing that emerge with the digital augmentation of human intelligence.[Note 4]
10: Digital libraries, multimedia, and augmented skills change the limits of educational practice. This proposition is not a prediction, but an observation about the potentialities inherent in communications innovations taking place in our extended present. The basic proposition here is not so much a normative argument that educators should, for one or another reason, accept that these three developments are empowering the transformation of educational activity. Rather, the proposition is more factual, although tentative. We are there, it seems.
11: As educators experience changing conditions of communication in their work, they understand that these developments are profoundly altering the spectrum of pedagogical possibility. Individual educators may or may not welcome that condition, but critic and evangelist alike sense that the new conditions open the educational system to significant change. The new conditions, however, do not determine what will emerge. Educators are determining what emerges through the social construction of digital learning communities. Educational structures from kindergarten through graduate schools and adult education are increasingly in flux. Structures are wrenching open to change; but the course that change can and should take must be determined through the interplay of effort by many different groups. To understand such an interplay let us reflect on the dynamics of social construction.
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