By Jim R. Davies

Ocelots are endangered South American wild cats. How do I know this? On a whim I just looked up `ocelot' on a search engine. Within ten seconds of first wondering about the ocelot I'd found an interesting page. It's late year 2000 right now. How long would this have taken me in 1992, before the web? Unless I had an up-to-date encyclopedia, I'd have gotten in my car, driven to the library, parked, walked in (if it were open), found the card catalog, looked it up, found a book, then read it. The poor ocelots would have been extinct by the time I'd had a chance to learn anything about them.

The Spring Branch Middle School created that ocelot web page (2000). Think about this: A middle school in Texas did a class project, put it on the web, and then I found it and learned about the ocelot. Middle school students were leaning for themselves by researching and writing, and asynchronously educating me when I pulled up the page. The web brings a radical kind of collaborative learning and teaching where enthusiasts of every conceivable subject can create free educational materials for everyone else on earth with web access. Not all the information is accurate, but it's still a lot of stuff at your fingertips.

What will education look like in twenty years? Probably much like it does right now. What has already changed and will continue to change is how individuals educate themselves and each other. The web, combined with widespread and continuous access, will make quick information retrieval enormously easy, and this will make the primary difference in how people will learn differently in twenty years. That difference is taking effect now. In time it will be difficult for young people to conceive of the high threshold for learning we've had to put up with in the twentieth century.

We hear a lot about the web. Will other technologies help education catch up with the change in the world? Maybe. The last major technological intervention that had a huge impact on education was taking the chalkboard out of the teacher's arms and putting it on the wall. By putting it on the wall it became a powerful, shared artifact. The wall-mounted chalkboard can be thought of as increasing the bandwidth of communication.

So what is the next chalkboard? There have been literal attempts to improve upon the chalkboard idea. At the Georgia Institute of Technology a large, touch sensitive computer screen is souped up to aid in the classroom. The entire system saves notes and web pages visited, and connects each bit of writing to the appropriate spot in the recorded audio and video. All of this can be accessed over the web immediately, so that if you don't remember what a part of your notes means, you can hear and watch the lecture when that note was taken (Abowd, Brotherton, & Bhalodia 1998).

I have no doubts that computer mediated pedagogy, in some form, is the next chalkboard on the wall. I'll mention about a few examples. Distance learning is getting more common: Record the lecture, put it on the web, and have computerized tests. Is this kind of learning as good as having a teacher? No. Is this kind of learning as good as being in a lecture hall with three hundred other people? Probably. At least you can rewind and watch it over again. I have never really understood the point of a lecture class with more than thirty people in it. I suppose that if students saw a video of a lecture or just had to read something they would feel they weren't getting their money's worth. One can get knowledge from a book or a recording as easily as you can get it of a lecture. Removing the teacher from giving lectures to huge numbers of students frees them up for more interactive discussion sessions, where the focus is more on giving each student what they need than transmitting the same information to everyone, as though the teacher were, well, a television program.

Another example of educational technology is the Intelligent tutoring system. ITS's are even better than plain vanilla taped lectures, because the systems have some idea of what the student knows, doesn't know, or misunderstands (Wegner 1987). These systems are good for teaching limited domains, but you can't ask them questions like you can ask a teacher. Still, for many things, they can be quite effective and, well, cheap.

Pedestrian as it sounds, one of the best things about distance learning and intelligent tutoring systems is that they are inexpensive and easy to deploy. This increases the accessibility of the education, which means that more people can enjoy the benefits of it. This follows the trend of books and educational television programs. Educate the masses! Sure, learning about geology from a taped lecture, television program, or intelligent tutoring system isn't the same as taking a class, but lots of people would watch the TV show. But if the TV show weren't on, how many of those people would take the time to enroll in a geology class? How many people can afford the time and money to browse the classes at the local college as readily as they would TV channels? These technologies provide an important supplement to the traditional teacher-student relationship.

All that said, there won't be a good replacement for teachers in twenty years. Teachers are inspiring. It's just easier to be motivated by a live, engaging speaker than it is to be motivated by a book or recording. The importance of motivation cannot be underestimated.

Which brings me back to the Ocelot page. With potential exposure to so many millions of subjects, people can find what they really like, and teach themselves about it, and get into practice in learning on their own. How many people go through life without ever finding their passion? If it happens to anyone, it's a shame, but it's easy to see how it can happen. If someone is a born to be an engineer, but isn't exposed to engineering in public school, then she might never discover it. The web opens the world for these people. They can find and pursue interests that nobody else in their physical community has. They can educate themselves and learn what they love.

In the 80's, I was a fan of performance artist Laurie Anderson. So I bought her albums. What else could I do? It wasn't until 1994 when I got on the Internet that I was able to connect with others with the same interests. I created a web site about her (Davies 2000) featuring lyric interpretation, fan art, and an enormous amount of information I've collected over the years. Now anyone can find that information instantly. No one pays me to do this; I find it intrinsically rewarding to be providing this resource and introducing people to her work. I see this happening all over. Want to learn about Laurie Anderson? The ocelot? There are people who have volunteered their time and knowledge to online information sources for you. To me, this is a thrilling new facet of learning. Finding what you love makes learning fun and easy. And learning to learn is the most important thing for the future of education.

To know where education can and should be in twenty years it helps to look at what the world will be like in twenty years. If the industrialized world's labor shortage continues, there may be pressure to have more employment-specific skills taught earlier on in the educational system. Management. Computer programming. Finance. After all, it costs everyone money to train these people, and why should they need to be trained after they've had, from kindergarten to college, seventeen years of education?

It's a tempting but ultimately misguided view. People are changing jobs more frequently, and this trend is likely to continue. This has two important implications for education: First, education is becoming and will continue to become a lifelong process. Changing jobs requires retraining. New technologies and processes and organizations require learning. Second, if we know that children will grow up to change jobs six or seven times, it's clear that it's more important to teach them the fundamentals that will be important in any job: critical thinking, problem solving, learning, opportunistic thinking, writing, etc.

Luckily, the widespread collaborative learning that has started on the Internet recently will continue. People will have learned the things they love on their own, and gotten themselves into a mode of learning these skills that are critical for an adaptive individual facing a world where the pace of change is accelerating.

References:

Abowd, G. D., Brotherton, J. A., & Bhalodia, J. (1998) Classroom 2000: A System for Capturing and Accessing Multimedia Classroom Experiences. Computer-Human-Interaction '98 Demonstration Paper, May, 1998.

Davies, J. R. (2000). HOMEpage OF THE BRAVE. http://www.jimdavies.org/laurie-anderson/. Internet web page. October, 2000.

Spring Branch Middle School. The Ocelot. http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/expltx/gulf/sbranch/ocelot.htm. Internet web page. October, 2000.

Wenger, E. (1987). Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. Los Altos, CA.