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

The Whole World in Their Hands

Bob Tinker, President
The Concord Consortium

Overview

Information technologies have the potential to make huge improvements in education over the next decade as they reshape society and create new learning opportunities. Whether this potential will be realized for all students depends on the ability of education to reinvent itself at the local level. In this paper, I will briefly examine the impact of networking on learning in general and science education in particular. Then I will ask how these new resources will influence the educational system and its ability to reach all students.

Writing a futures piece is risky; I will be wrong in many cases, and on rereading this paper in ten years we will laugh at both the obvious things missed and the impossibly naive and optimistic claims included. The case of the Internet is a humbling example of the difficulty of making predictions: although many of us have been fervently dedicated to networking and its applications to education, we totally missed the significance of the standardization that led to the Internet and its explosive growth in the last year. Ten years from now, we are likely to be only a fraction of the way toward achieving most of the optimistic predictions, and education, once again, will have demonstrated its imperviousness to change.

In any case, I have been sufficiently reckless to set down here some ideas about how information technologies might impact education in general, and science education in particular. I begin by making some assumptions about information technology implementations and their impact on learning and the educational system. The simplest prediction of the future is based on extrapolation, where current fucntions are spliced onto the new technology to give extensions of the present educational functions. This can result in some very exciting developments. The most interesting future changes, however, may come from technology-enabled new approaches to learning that have no analog in our pre-information age. Only after all these preliminaries, am I ready to sketch out what future science learning might look like, in progressive schools that use these options, and in the bulk of schools that will try to avoid it. Warning to the reader: the resulting picture is a bit depressing because I see the impact of technology may be thrust on most schools unwillingly and in ways that do not let them take full advantage of its potential.