Archived: New_Functions

A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning

New Functions

Perhaps the most interesting, and potentially important, developments will be those that are unique to the networks and depart strongly from what is currently available. These are, of course, the most difficult to predict.

Guides and Agents

It seems clear that future network users will suffer from infoglut; the volume of resources available on the Internet will be completely overwhelming. There will be lots of gold, but more fool's gold, tailings, and junk. If you search for evolution, you may get Darwin's Origin of Species, fourth grade essays, creationist dogma, and erudite scientific papers. Mediocre and dreadful resources will be on the networks in far greater quantity than excellent ones, as always. There will be lots of drill and practice, courses that preach radical relativism (your theory is as good as mine), and untested student activities by the terabyte, generated by teachers of all degrees of competence. Every government agency, every lobby, every professional society, every public interest group, will generate network-based units that cover math and science topics that support their world view. NASA already sells space platforms thinly disguised as instructional material; the nuclear industry will convert its units on the virtue of its source of energy, as will the coal, natural gas, and corn/ethanol lobbies. The religious right will champion creationism and produce biology material innocent of Darwin and sex; racists will have units on the genetics of Lamarck and Schotkey. Old and out-of-date textbooks will be copied wholesale onto the net and sold.

There will soon be hundreds of network activities that will advertise hands-on, computer-based, collaborative project activities based on constructivist principles and consistent with all the standards. A few will be excellent but the vast majority will be junk. It's easy to generate the form without the substance: to create hands-on activities that result in thoughtless manipulations, computer use that degenerates to competitive games, network collaboration that goes no further than pen pals, student projects that only require students to mindlessly cut and paste Net resources, constructivism that devolves into ignorance, and material that "mentions" lots of items in the standards just to make sure there is content "coverage."

With lower costs of publication, these dregs will flood the networks. Because it is easier and faster to produce bad material than good, the junk will be there first, giving educational networking a black eye.

The strengths of some resources and weaknesses of others will not be obvious without extensive study and thought. This will create the need for guides to the material. But no one guide will be satisfactory for all, so there will be many. Some will be self-appointed, some will represent professional societies, and some will be subsidized by organizations with various slants on what needs to be done to improve education. Many of the guides will have crazy or ideological slants. There will be a need for guides to guides, and guides to these. Perhaps the most valuable evaluation services will be offered by insightful professionals who derive their income solely from the quality of the evaluations they provide.

Some hope that there will be technological solutions to the glut of network information in the form of intelligent "agents" that learn what you want and search the network for matches. I doubt it. Certainly, searches will get better than the literal word matches currently required, but they will never evolve to the point that the computer search will have even the most rudimentary understanding. As a result, we will continue to rely on the recommendations of thoughtful people we have learned to trust. The only thing the network adds is that these experts can be anywhere.

Virtual Museums

Science and technology museums are beginning to move onto the net. Within the decade, every museum large and small will have a network presence. They will have to do this to attract visitors to their physical sites and extend their impact.

The obvious approach many will follow will be some sort of telepresence that attempts to duplicate the museum experience over the network, using pictures and three-dimensional, walkabout software like Quick Time Virtual Reality. The more thoughtful approach will be to rethink the educational role of museums and recast it using the strengths of network capacities. Highly interactive simulations, games, and collaborations will result, as well as access to archives and otherwise unavailable material. The collections of individual museums will be interconnected with hyperlinks into a huge, rich storehouse of highly accessible knowledge, as well as to vast oceans of unassimilated holdings that students can chew on. Once again, some of this will be free, but the best will charge a small fee that helps offset maintenance and development costs.

This body of informal learning resources will interact with formal education in many ways. Netcourses and net schools will draw heavily from the virtual museum resources, creating paths through them that add up to courses and entire curricula. Schools will be able to plan coordinated virtual and real visits that will result in far more learning.

Index
Impacts on Science Education
Extensions of Traditional Functions