57: Digital libraries, multimedia educational scenarios, and wide-area networking, three related and maturing technologies, have the promise to make advanced media serve as powerful engines of equity. Each of these technologies is of great educational significance. The libraries of the very richest schools currently represent minor academic resources compared to the aggregate resources of the digital library that becomes accessible at the desktop in any school or home with appropriate connections to the national information infrastructure. Educational experiences, activated by engaging multimedia scenarios and projects, can appeal to diverse learning styles and engross students of all backgrounds in cooperative, inquiry-based educational work. Wide-area networking can enable desktop videoconferencing and group work in a responsive, content-rich context, and these new forms of educative communication can overcome the traditional isolation of the classroom, bringing youthful minds actively into the laboratory, the archive, the field station, the theater, and the office.
58: These technologies, deployed without reserve, do not result simply in increased information access. They result in a substantial transformation in the conditions limiting full participation in cultural and intellectual work. An educational system engaging all in real participation--in constructing knowledge, developing skills, crafting designs, creating works, formulating theories, testing hypotheses, employing interpretation, exercising judgment--can enable all students to attain an unprecedented improvement in educational quality. In pursuit of these possibilities, educators need to move from isolated pilot projects, which merely suggest the power of these technologies, to implementing a large, decisive demonstration of it. An unequivocal, undeniable example of what educators can accomplish with the new technologies is the policy key to the social construction of a new educational system.[Note 33]
59: Evaluations of pilot projects do not change controlling public expectations. The cost-benefit equation to be achieved with the thorough use of advanced media in education can prove to be extremely advantageous for the whole society, but, at the same time, it is a very difficult equation to demonstrate in the arena of public discourse. The reason is simple: the benefits of advanced media in education will be very, very great relative to the current state of schooling, yet those benefits can be realized only by raising expenditures on education by a significant increment. How can educators convince a public and its leadership, one largely bent on cutting expenditures above all else, that increased costs will be worth greatly increased benefits? Evaluation studies of this or that pilot, showing incremental gains of this or that level in this or that grade, do not suffice to make the needed point in policy debate. A sustained, dramatic, large-scale, decisive demonstration, concentrated in a prominent locality that represents the chronic recalcitrant difficulties of contemporary life, will be necessary.
60: Educators need to bring to bear the full resources of digital libraries, multimedia curriculum design, and wide-area networking in all the classrooms of a well- defined area where all agree that education is working poorly. The social construction of a new system ultimately involves mobilization of great historical energy. Such effort does not arise by relying solely on incremental adjustments to established procedures in stable institutions. Hope, expectation, and a sense of efficacy need to mount. Activity needs to build to an uncertain turning point and then resolve, because proponent and foe alike see results evident in the daily news that provide clear proof that a new system works along a spectrum of possibilities far more preferable than the old. Educators need to identify a large challenge with a well-defined, substantial population, a challenge that people hold insoluble, and they need to address that challenge fully, stinting neither effort nor expense, not in one school or a few, but in all the schools in the area of work, in a sustained, dramatic disclosure of new possibilities. That challenge lies with the education of impoverished children in American inner cities.
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