The Road Ahead

9 EDUCATION: THE BEST INVESTMENT

Great educators have always known that learning is not something you do only in classrooms, or only under the supervision of teachers. Today it is sometimes difficult for someone who wants to satisfy his curiosity or end his confusion to find the appropriate information. The highway is going to give us all access to seemingly unlimited information, anytime and anyplace we care to use it. It’s an exhilarating prospect, because putting this technology to use to improve education will lead to downstream benefits in every area of society.

Some fear that technology will dehumanize formal education. But anyone who has seen kids working together around a computer, the way my friends and I first did in 1968, or watched exchanges between students in classrooms separated by oceans, knows that technology can humanize the educational environment. The same technological forces that will make learning so necessary will also make it practical and enjoyable. Corporations are reinventing themselves around the flexible opportunities afforded by information technology; classrooms will have to change as well.

Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that different children must be taught differently, because individuals understand the world in different ways. Massproduced education can’t take into account children’s various approaches to the world. Gardner recommends that schools be “filled with apprenticeships, projects, and technologies” so that every kind of learner can be accommodated. We will discover all sorts of different approaches to teaching because the highway’s tools will make it easy to try various methods and to measure their effectiveness.

Just as information technology now allows Levi Strauss & Co. to offer jeans that are both mass-produced and custom fitted, information technology will bring mass customization to learning. Multi-media documents and easy-to-use authoring tools will enable teachers to “mass-customize” a curriculum. As with blue jeans, the mass customization of learning will be possible because computers will fine-tune the product—educational material, in this case—to allow students to follow somewhat divergent paths and learn at their own rates. This won’t happen only in classrooms. Any student will be able to enjoy the custom fit of a tailor-made education at mass-production prices. Workers will be able to keep up-to-date on techniques in their fields.

Every member of society, including every child, will have more information easily at hand than anyone has today. I believe that just the availability of information will spark the curiosity and imagination of many. Education will become a very individual matter.

There is an often-expressed fear that technology will replace teachers. I can say emphatically and unequivocally, IT WON’T. The information highway won’t replace or devalue any of the human educational talent needed for the challenges ahead: committed teachers, administrators, involved parents, and, of course, diligent students. However, technology will be pivotal in the future role of teachers.

The highway will bring together the best work of countless teachers and authors for everyone to share. Teachers will be able to draw on this material, and students will have the opportunity to explore it interactively. In time, this access will help spread educational and personal opportunities even to students who aren’t fortunate enough to enjoy the best schools or the greatest family support. It will encourage a child to make the most of his or her native talents.

Before the benefits of these advances can be realized, though, the way computers in the classroom are thought about will have to change. A lot of people are cynical about educational technology because it has been overhyped and has failed to deliver on its promises. Many of the PCs in schools today are not powerful enough to be easy to use, and they don’t have the storage capacity or network connections to permit them to respond to a child’s curiosity with much information. So far, education remains largely unchanged by computers.

The slowness of schools to embrace technology partly reflects conservatism in many corners of the educational establishment. It reflects discomfort or even apprehension on the part of teachers and administrators, who as a group are older than the average worker. It also reflects the minuscule amounts city school budgets have allotted for educational technology.

The average primary or secondary school in the United States lags considerably behind the average American business in the availability of new information technology. Preschoolers familiar with cellular telephones, pagers, and personal computers enter kindergartens where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art.

Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, commented on this. “There are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable television and no reasonable prospect of broadband services,” he said. “They are called schools”

Despite these constraints, genuine change is going to come. It won’t happen abruptly. On the face of it, the basic patterns of education will remain the same. Students will continue to attend classes, listen to teachers, ask questions, participate in individual and group work (including hands-on experiments), and do homework.

There seems to be a universal commitment to having more computers in schools, but the rate at which they are being supplied varies from country to country. Only a few countries, such as the Netherlands, already have computers in nearly every school. In France and many other places, although few installations have taken place, governments have

pledged to equip all their classrooms with computers. Britain, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China have begun the process of incorporating information technology into their national curricula, with a focus on vocational training. I believe most countries will decide to make increased investments in education, and computer use in schools will catch up to its use in homes and businesses. Over time—longer in less developed countries—we are likely to see computers installed in every classroom in the world.

The cost of computer hardware gets cheaper almost by the month, and educational software will become quite affordable when purchased in quantity. Already many cable and telephone companies in the United States have promised free or reduced-price network connections to schools and libraries in their areas. For example, Pacific Bell has announced a plan to provide free ISDN service to every school in California for one year, and TCI and Viacom offer free cable to schools in every community they serve.

Although a classroom will still be a classroom, technology will transform a lot of the details. Classroom learning will include multi-media presentations, and homework will involve exploring electronic documents as much as textbooks, perhaps even more. Students will be encouraged to pursue areas of particular interest, and it will be easy for them to do so. Each pupil will be able to have his own question answered simultaneously with the other students’ queries. A class will spend part of a day at a personal computer exploring information individually or in groups. Then the students will bring back their thoughts and questions about the information they have discovered to the teacher, who will be able to decide which questions should be brought to the attention of the full class. While students are at their computers, the teacher will be free to work with individuals or small groups and focus less on lecturing and more on problem solving.

Educators, like so many in today’s economy, are, among other things, facilitators. Like many other, similar workers, they will have to adapt and readapt to changing conditions. Unlike some professions, however, the future of teaching looks extremely bright. As innovation has improved the standard of living, there has always been an increase in the portion of the workforce dedicated to education. Educators who bring energy and creativity to a classroom will thrive. So will teachers who build strong relationships with children, because kids love classes taught by adults they know genuinely care about them.

We’ve all had teachers who made a difference. I had a great chemistry teacher in high school who made his subject immensely interesting. Chemistry seemed enthralling compared to biology. In biology, we were dissecting frogs—just hacking them to pieces, actually—and our teacher didn’t explain why. My chemistry teacher sensationalized his subject a bit and promised that it would help us understand the world. When I was in my twenties, I read James D. Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene and decided my high school experience had misled me. The understanding of life is a great subject. Biological information is the most important information we can discover, because over the next several decades it will revolutionize medicine. Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created. It seems amazing to me now that one great teacher made chemistry endlessly fascinating while I found biology totally boring.

When teachers do excellent work and prepare wonderful materials, only their few dozen students benefit each year. It’s difficult for teachers in different locations to build on one another’s work. The network will enable teachers to share lessons and materials, so that the best educational practices can spread. In most cases watching a lecture on video is much less interesting than actually being in the room with the teacher. But sometimes the value of being able to hear a particular teacher outweighs the loss of interactivity. A few years ago, a friend and I discovered in the University of Washington’s catalog videotapes of a series of lectures by the distinguished physicist Richard Feynman. We were able to watch the lectures on vacation ten years after Feynman gave the talks at Cornell. We might have gotten more from the lectures if we had been in the lecture hall or been able to ask him questions via a videoconference. But the clarity of his thinking explained many of the concepts of physics better than any book or any instructor I’ve ever had. He brought the subject to life. I think anyone studying physics should have these lectures easily accessible. With the information highway there will be lots of such uniquely valuable resources available to teachers and students.

If a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, happened to have a particularly good way of explaining photosynthesis, her lecture notes and multi-media demonstrations could be obtained by educators around the world. Some teachers will use material exactly as it comes off the highway, but others will take advantage of easy-to-use authoring software to adapt and combine bits and pieces of what they find. Feedback from other interested instructors will be easy to get and will help refine the lesson. In a short time the improved material could be in thousands of classrooms all over the world. It will be easy to tell what materials are popular, because the network will be able to count the number of times they are accessed, or to poll teachers electronically. Corporations wanting to help with education could provide recognition and cash awards to teachers whose materials are making a difference.

It is hard for a teacher to prepare in-depth, interesting material for twenty-five students, six hours a day, 180 days a year. This is particularly true if students’ extensive television watching has raised their entertainment expectations. I can imagine a middle-school science teacher a decade or so from now, working on a lecture about the sun, explaining not only the science but also the history of discoveries that made it possible. When a teacher wants to select a picture, still or video, whether it’s a piece of art or a portrait of a great solar scientist, the highway will allow her to select from a comprehensive catalog of images. Snippets of video and narrated animations from countless sources will be available. It will only take minutes to pull together a visual show that would now require days of work to organize. As she lectures about the sun, she will have images and diagrams appear at appropriate times. If a student asks her about the source of the sun’s power, she can answer using animated graphics of hydrogen and helium atoms, she’ll be able to show solar flares or sunspots or other phenomena, or she might call up a brief video on fusion energy to the white board. The teacher will have organized the links to servers on the information highway in advance. She will make the list of links available to her students, so that during study times in the library or at home, they will be able to review the material from as many perspectives as they find helpful.

Think of a high school art teacher using a digital white board to display a high-quality digital reproduction of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, which shows young men relaxing on the bank of the Seine River in the 1880s against a background of sailboats and smokestacks. The white board will pronounce the name of the painting in the original French—Une Baignade à Asnières and show a map of the outskirts of Paris, with the town of Asnières highlighted. The teacher might use the painting, which presaged Pointillism, to illustrate the end of Impressionism. Or she will use it to get into broader topics, such as life in France at the end of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, or even the way the eye sees complementary colors.

She might point to the orangish-red hat of a figure standing on the far right side of the composition and say: “Look at the vibrancy of the hat. Seurat has tricked the eye. The hat is red, but he has added tiny dots of orange and blue. You don’t really notice the blue unless you look closely.” As the teacher says this, the picture will zoom in on the hat, until the texture of the canvas is apparent. At this magnification, specks of blue will be obvious, and the teacher will explain that blue is the complement of orange. A color wheel will appear on the white board, and either the teacher or the multi-media document itself will explain: “Every color on this wheel is arranged opposite its complement. Red is opposite green, yellow is opposite purple, and blue is opposite orange. It is a quirk of the eye that staring at a color creates an afterimage of its complementary color. Seurat used this trick to make the red and orange hues of the hat more vivid by sneaking in dots of blue.”

Computers connected to the highway will help teachers monitor, evaluate, and guide student performance. Teachers will continue to give homework, but soon their assignments will include hypertext references to electronic resource material. Students will create their own links and use multi-media elements in their homework, which will then be submitted electronically on a diskette or across the highway. Teachers will be able to keep a cumulative record of a student’s work, which can be reviewed at any time or shared with other instructors.

Special software programs will help summarize information on the skills, progress, interests, and expectations of students. Once teachers have enough information on a student and are relieved of a lot of tedious paperwork, they will have more energy and time to meet the revealed individual needs of that student. This information will be used to tailor classroom materials and homework assignments. Teachers and parents will also be able to review and discuss the particulars of a child’s progress easily. As a result of this—and of the common availability of videoconferences—the potential for strong parent-teacher collaboration will grow. Parents will be in a better position to help their children, whether by creating informal study groups with other parents or by seeking additional assistance for their children.

Parents may also help their children at school by teaching them to use the software they use in their work. Some teachers and staff are already using popular business software to administer their activities and to give students experience with the tools of the modern workplace. Most college students and an increasing number of high schoolers now prepare reports on PCs with word processors instead of using typewriters or writing by hand. Spreadsheets and charting applications are routinely used to explain mathematics and economic theories and have become a standard part of most accounting courses. Students and faculty have also discovered new uses for popular business applications. For example, students studying a foreign language can take advantage of the major word-processor programs’ ability to work in different languages. Such programs include supplemental tools for checking spellings and looking up synonyms in multilingual documents.

In some families, children are probably introducing their parents to computing. Kids and computers get along just great, partly because kids aren’t invested in established ways of doing things. Children like to provoke a reaction, and computers are reactive. Parents are sometimes surprised by how taken with computers even their preschoolers are, but the fascination makes sense if you think about how much a young child enjoys interaction—whether it is playing peek-a-boo with a parent or stabbing at a remote control and watching channels change.

I like to watch my three-year-old niece play with Just Grandma and Me, a Brøderbund CD-ROM based on a children’s book. She has memorized the dialogue in this cartoon story and talks along with the characters, much as she does when her mother reads her a book. If my niece uses the computer’s mouse to click on a mailbox, the mailbox opens and a frog jumps out or sometimes a hand appears and pulls the mailbox door shut. Her ability to influence what she sees on the screen—to answer the question “What happens if I click here?"—keeps her curiosity high. The interactivity, combined with the underlying quality of the storyline, keeps her involved.

I’ve always believed most people have more intelligence and curiosity than current information tools encourage them to use. Most people have had the experience of getting interested in a topic and feeling the gratifying sense of accomplishment that comes from finding good material on it, and the pleasure of mastering the topic. But if a search for information brings you up against a blank wall, you become discouraged. You begin to think you’re never going to understand the subject. And if you experience that natural reaction too often, especially when you’re a child, your impulse to try again is diminshed.

I was fortunate to be raised in a family that encouraged kids to ask questions. And I was lucky in my early teens to become friends with Paul Allen. Soon after I had met Paul, I asked him where gasoline came from. I wanted to know what it meant to “refine” gasoline. I wanted to know exactly how it was that gasoline could power a car. I had found a book on the subject, but it was confusing. Gasoline, however, was one of the many subjects that Paul understood, and he explained it in a way that made it interesting and understandable to me. You might say my curiosity about gasoline is what fueled our friendship.

Paul had lots of answers to things I was curious about (and a great collection of science fiction books too). I was more of a math person than Paul, and I understood software better than anyone he knew. We were interactive resources for each other. We asked or answered questions, drew diagrams, or brought each other’s attention to related information. We liked to challenge and test each other. This is exactly the way the highway will interact with users. Let’s say another teenager wants to find out about gasoline—not in 1970, but three or four years from now. He may not be lucky enough to have a Paul Allen around, but if his school or library has a computer linked to rich multi-media information, he’ll be able to delve as deeply into the topic as he likes.

He’ll see photos, videos, and animations explaining how oil is drilled, transported, and refined. He’ll learn the difference between automobile fuel and aviation fuel—and if he wants to know the difference between a car’s internal-combustion engine and a jetliner’s turbine engine, all he’ll have to do is ask.

He’ll be able to explore the complex molecular structure of gasoline, which is a combination of hundreds of distinct hydrocarbons, and learn about hydrocarbons too. With all of the links to additional knowledge, who knows what fascinating topics this exploration will lead him to.

At first, new information technology will just provide incremental improvements over today’s tools. Wall-mounted video white boards will replace a teacher’s chalkboard handwriting with readable fonts and colorful graphics drawn from millions of educational illustrations, animations, photographs, and videos. Multi-media documents will assume some of the roles now played by textbooks, movies, tests, and other educational materials. And because multi-media documents will be linked to servers on the information highway, they will be kept thoroughly up-to-date.

CD-ROMs available today offer a taste of the interactive experience. The software responds to instructions by presenting information in text, audio, and video forms. CD-ROMs are already being used in schools and by kids doing their assignments at home, but they have limitations the highway won’t. CD-ROMs can offer either a little information about a broad range of topics the way an encyclopedia does, or a lot of information about a single topic, such as dinosaurs, but the total amount of information available at one time is limited by the capacity of the disc. And, of course, you can use only the discs you have available. Nevertheless, they’re a great advance over just-paper texts. Multi-media encyclopedias provide not only a research tool, but all sorts of material that can be incorporated into homework documents. These encyclopedias are available with teacher’s guides that include suggestions for ways to use the encyclopedias in the classroom or as part of assignments. I have been excited to hear from teachers and students about the ways they have used our products—only a few of which we had anticipated.

CD-ROMs are one clear precursor to the highway. The Internet’s World Wide Web is another. The Web offers access to interesting, educational information, although most of it is still plain text. Creative teachers are already using on-line services to devise exciting new kinds of lessons.

Fourth-graders in California have done on-line searches of newspapers to read about the challenges Asian immigrants face. Boston University has created interactive software for high school students that shows detailed visual simulations of chemical phenomena, such as salt molecules dissolving in water.

Christopher Columbus Middle School in Union City, New Jersey, was a school created out of crisis. In the late 1980s, the state test scores were so low and the absentee and dropout rates were so high among the children of the school district that the state was considering taking it over. The school system, the teachers, and the parents (well over 90 percent of whom were of Hispanic extraction and didn’t speak English as a first language) came up with an innovative five-year plan to rescue their schools.

Bell Atlantic (the local telephone company) agreed to help find a special networked, multi-media system of PCs linking the students’ homes with the classrooms, teachers, and school administrators. The corporation initially provided 140 multi-media PCs, enough for the homes of the seventh-graders, the homes of all seventh-grade teachers, and at least four per classroom. The computers were networked and linked with high-speed lines and connected to the Internet, and the teachers were trained in using the PCs. The teachers set up weekend training courses for the parents, over half of whom attended, and encouraged the students to use e-mail and the Internet.

Two years later, parents are actively involved with their children’s use of the home PCs and employ them themselves to keep in touch with teachers and administrators; the dropout rate and absenteeism are both almost zero, and the students are scoring nearly three times higher than the average for all New Jersey inner-city schools on standardized tests. And the program has been expanded to include the entire middle school.

Raymond W. Smith, chairman of the board and CEO of Bell Atlantic, comments, “I believe a combination of a school system ready for fundamental change in teaching methods, a parent body that was supportive and wanted to be involved, and the careful but intensive integration of technology into both the homes and classrooms . . . created a true learning community in which the home and school reinforce and support each other.”

At Lester B. Pearson School, a Canadian high school serving an ethnically diverse neighborhood, computers are an integral part of every course in the daily curriculum. For the 1,200 students there are more than 300 personal computers, and more than 100 different software titles are in use. The school says its dropout rate, 4 percent, when compared with a national average of 30 percent, is Canada’s lowest. Thirty-five hundred people a year visit to see how a high school can “incorporate technology in every aspect of school life.”

When the information highway is in operation, the texts of millions of books will be available. A reader will be able to ask questions, print the text, read it on-screen, or even have it read in his choice of voices. He’ll be able to ask questions. It will be his tutor.

Computers with social interfaces will figure out how to present information so that it is customized for the particular user. Many educational software programs will have distinct personalities, and the student and the computer will get to know each other. A student will ask, perhaps orally, “What caused the American Civil War?” His or her computer will reply, describing the conflicting contentions: that it was primarily a battle over economics or human rights. The length and approach of the answer will vary depending on the student and the circumstances. A student will be able to interrupt at any time to ask the computer for more or less detail or to request a different approach altogether. The computer will know what information the student has read or watched and will point out connections or correlations and offer appropriate links. If the computer knows the student likes historical fiction, war stories, folk music, or sports, it may try to use that knowledge to present the information. But this will be only an attention-getting device. The machine, like a good human teacher, won’t give in to a child who has lopsided interests. Instead it will use the child’s predilections to teach a broader curriculum.

Different learning rates will be accommodated, because computers will be able to pay individual attention to independent learners. Children with learning disabilities will be particularly well served. Regardless of his or her ability or disability, every student will be able to work at an individual pace.

Another benefit of computer-aided learning will be the way many students come to view tests. Today, tests are pretty depressing for many kids. They are associated with falling short: “I got a bad grade,” or “I ran out of time” or “I wasn’t ready.” After a while, many kids who haven’t done well on tests may think to themselves, I’d better pretend tests aren’t important to me, because I can never succeed at them. Tests can cause a student to develop a negative attitude toward all education.

The interactive network will allow students to quiz themselves anytime, in a risk-free environment. A self-administered quiz is a form of self-exploration, like the tests Paul Allen and I used to give each other. Testing will become a positive part of the learning process. A mistake won’t call forth a reprimand; it will trigger the system to help the student overcome his misunderstanding. If someone really gets stuck, the system will offer to explain the circumstances to a teacher. There should be less apprehension about formal tests and fewer surprises, because on-going self-quizzing will give each student a better sense of where he or she stands.

Many educational software and textbook companies are already delivering interactive computer products in mathematics, languages, economics, and biology that build basic skills this way. For example, Academic Systems of Palo Alto, California, is working on an interactive multi-media instructional system for colleges, to help teach basic math and English courses. The concept is called “mediated learning,” and it blends traditional instruction with computer-based learning. Each student begins by taking a placement test to determine which topics he or she understands and where instruction is required. The system then creates a personalized lesson plan for the student. Periodic tests monitor the student’s progress, and the lesson plan can be modified as the student masters concepts. The program can also report problems to the instructor, who can then give the student individual help. So far, the company has found that students in pilot programs like the new learning materials, but the most successful classes are those in which an instructor is more available. These results underscore the point that new technology, by itself, is not sufficient to improve education.

Some parents resist the use of computers because they believe they can’t monitor what their child is doing and can’t exert any control. Most parents are delighted when a child curls up with an engrossing book, but less enthusiastic when he spends hours at the computer. They’re probably thinking of video games. A kid can spend a great deal of time using a video game without learning much. So far, a great deal more has been invested in computer software meant to entertain than in software to educate. It’s easier to create an addictive game than it is to expose a child to a world of information in an appealing way.

However, as textbook budgets and parental spending shift to interactive material, there will be thousands of new software companies working with teachers to create entertainment-quality interactive learning materials. The Lightspan Partnership, for example, is using Hollywood talent to create live action and animated programs. Lightspan hopes its sophisticated production techniques will capture and retain the interest of the young viewers—ages five through eleven—and encourage them to spend more hours learning. Animated characters lead students through lessons that explain basic concepts, then into games that put them to use. The Lightspan lessons are grouped by two-year age spans and organized into series intended to complement elementary school curricula in mathematics, reading, and language arts. These programs will be available on televisions in homes and community centers as well as in classrooms. Until interactive television is widely available, this kind of programming will be offered on CD-ROMs or across the Internet to PC users.

All this information, however, is not going to solve the serious problems facing many public schools today: budget cuts, violence, drugs, high dropout rates, dangerous neighborhoods, teachers more concerned about survival than education. Offering new technology won’t suffice. Society will also have to fix the fundamental problems.

But while some public schools face major challenges, they are also our greatest hope. Imagine a situation in which most of the kids in inner-city public schools are on the dole, are barely able to speak the national language, have few skills and an uncertain future. This was America in the early 1900s, when tens of millions of immigrants had overwhelmed the schools and social services of our big cities.

Yet that generation and the next achieved a standard of living unequaled in the world. The problems of America’s schools are not insurmountable, just extremely complicated. Even today, for every disastrous public school there are dozens of successful ones you don’t read about. I’ve mentioned several examples here. It is outside the scope of this book to go deeply into this subject, but communities can, and have, won back their streets and schools. It’s always taken an intense local effort. One street at a time, one school at a time. Then parents must insist that their kids come to school ready to learn. If the attitude is “Let the school (or government) do it” kids will fail.

Once even the most modest positive atmosphere for education is established, the information highway will help raise the educational standards for everyone in future generations. The highway will allow new methods of teaching and much more choice. Quality curriculums can be created with government funding and made available for free. Private vendors will compete to enhance the free material. The new vendors might be other public schools; public-school teachers or retired teachers going into business for themselves; or some privately run, highway-based school service program wanting to prove its capabilities. The highway would be a way for schools to try out new teachers or use their services at a distance.

The highway will also make home schooling easier. It will allow parents to select some classes from a range of quality possibilities and still maintain control over content.

Learning with a computer will be a springboard for learning away from the computer. Young children will still need to touch toys and tools with their hands. Seeing chemical reactions on a computer screen can be a good supplement to hands-on work in a chemistry lab, but it can’t replace the real experience. Children need personal interaction with each other, and with adults, to learn social and interpersonal skills, such as how to work cooperatively.

The good teachers of the future will be doing much more than showing kids where to find information on the highway. They will still have to understand when to probe, observe, stimulate, or agitate. They’ll still have to build kids’ skills in written and oral communications, and will use technology as a starting point or an aid. Successful teachers will act as coaches, partners, creative outlets, and communications bridges to the world.

Computers on the information highway will be able to simulate the world as well as explain it. Creating or using a computer model can be a great educational tool. Several years ago, a teacher at Sunnyside High School in Tucson, Arizona, organized a club of students to create computer simulations of real-world behaviors. The students discovered the grim consequences of gang behavior by modeling it for themselves mathematically. The success of the club led eventually to a complete reorganization of the mathematics curriculum around the idea that education is not about making kids give the “right” answer, but about giving kids methods by which to decide whether an answer is “right”

The teaching of science lends itself particularly well to using models. Kids now learn trigonometry by measuring the height of real mountains. They triangulate from two points rather than just doing abstract exercises. There are already a number of computer models that teach biology. SimLife, a popular software program, simulates evolution, so kids get to experience the process instead of just getting facts about it. You don’t have to be a child to enjoy this program, which lets you design plants and animals and then watch how they interact and evolve in an ecosystem that you also design. Maxis Software, the publisher of SimLife also produces another program, SimCity, which lets you design a city with all of its interrelated systems, such as roads and public transportation. As a player, you get to be the mayor or city planner of a virtual community and to challenge yourself to meet your own goals for the community, rather than goals artificially imposed by the software’s design. You build farms, factories, homes, schools, universities, libraries, museums, zoos, hospitals, prisons, marinas, freeways, bridges, even subways. You cope with urban growth or natural disasters, such as fires. You change the terrain too. When you modify your simulated city by building an airport or raising taxes, the changes can have a predictable or unexpected effect on the simulated society. It is a great, fast way to find out how the real world works.

Or use a simulation to find out about what goes on out of this world. Kids can navigate the solar system or galaxy in a simulated spaceship by playing with a space simulator. Kids who may think they aren’t interested in biology or urban design or outer space can discover they are by exploring and experimenting with computer simulations. When science is made more interesting in these ways, it should appeal to a

broader set of students.

In the future, students of all ages and capabilities will be able to visualize and interact with information. For example, a class studying weather will be able to view simulated satellite images based on a model of hypothetical meteorological conditions. Students will propose “what if?” questions, such as “What would happen to the next day’s weather if the wind speed increased by 15 MPH?” The computer will model the predicted results, displaying the simulated weather system as it would appear from space. Simulation games will get much better, but even now the best of them are fascinating and highly educational.

When simulations get completely realistic, we enter the realm of virtual reality. I’m sure that at some point schools will have virtual-reality equipment—or maybe even VR rooms, the way some now have music rooms and theaters—to allow students to explore a place, an object, or a subject in this engrossing, interactive way.

Technology will not, however, isolate students. One of the most important educational experiences is collaboration. In some of the world’s most creative classrooms, computers and communications networks are already beginning to change the conventional relationships among students themselves, and between students and teachers, by facilitating collaborative learning.

Teachers at the Ralph Bunche school (P.S. 125) in Harlem created a computer-assisted teaching unit to show New York inner-city students how to use the Internet for research, to communicate with electronic pen pals worldwide, and to collaborate with volunteer tutors at nearby Columbia University. Ralph Bunche was one of the first elementary schools in the nation to put its own home page on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Its Web home page, the work of a student, includes links to such things as the school newspaper, student artwork, and a lesson on the Spanish alphabet illustrated.

Especially at the college level, academic research has been aided enormously by the Internet, which has made it easier for far-flung institutions and individuals to collaborate. Computer innovation has always taken place at universities. Several universities are centers for advanced research into new computer technologies, and many others maintain large computer labs that students use for collaboration and homework. Also, today some of the most interesting home pages on the Internet’s World Wide Web are posted on behalf of universities around the world.

Some universities put the network to less global uses. At the University of Washington, lesson plans and assignments for some classes are posted on the World Wide Web. Lecture notes are often published on the Web too, a free service I would have loved in my college days. Elsewhere, an English teacher requires all his students to have e-mail addresses and use e-mail to participate in after-hours electronic discussions. Class members are graded on their e-mail contributions, just as they are on classroom contributions and homework.

College students everywhere already understand the joys of e-mail, both for educational purposes and to keep in touch inexpensively with family and friends, including high school friends who have gone to other universities. A growing number of parents of college students have become regular e-mail users because it seems to be the best way to contact their kids. Even some elementary schools allow older students to have Internet accounts. At Lakeside, my old school, the school’s network is now connected to the Internet, which permits kids to browse for on-line information and exchange national and international e-mail. Nearly all Lakeside students requested e-mail accounts, and in one typical twelve-week period they received a total of 259,587 messages—an average of about 30 messages per student each week. About 49,000 messages were from the Internet during the twelve-week period, and the students sent about 7,200 messages.

Lakeside doesn’t know how many messages each student sends, and it doesn’t know what the messages are about. Some e-mail relates to school studies and activities, but doubtless a lot of it, including much of Lakeside’s traffic on the Internet, concerns students’ outside interests. Lakeside doesn’t view this as an abuse of the electronic mail system, but as another way to learn.

A number of secondary school students, like those at New York’s P.S. 125, are discovering how the long-distance access afforded by computer networks can help them learn from students from other cultures, and participate in discussions all over the world. Many classrooms, in different states and countries, are already linking up in what are sometimes called “learning circles.” The purpose of most learning circles is to let students study a specific topic, in collaboration with faraway counterparts. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was falling, West German students were able to discuss the event with their contemporaries in other countries. One learning circle that was studying the whaling industry included Alaskan Inuit students, whose Eskimo villages still depend on whales for food. Students outside the village got so interested, they invited an Inuit tribal elder to their class for a learning circle discussion.

One ambitious plan for students using computer networks is the GLOBE Project, an initiative pushed by Vice President Al Gore. GLOBE stands for Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment. The hope is that it will be funded by a variety of governments as well as by private contributions. It would ask grade-schoolers to collaborate internationally on collecting scientific information about Earth. Children would routinely collect statistics, such as temperature and rainfall, and relay them across the Internet and satellites to a central database at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Maryland, where the information would be used to create composite

pictures of the planet. The composites would be relayed back to the students, as well as to scientists and the general public. No one knows how much scientific value the data would have, especially the data collected by the very young, but gathering the facts and seeing the composite pictures would be a fine way for large numbers of children from many nations to learn about global cooperation, communication, and environmental issues.

The highway’s educational possibilities will also be open to the world’s unofficial students. People anywhere will be able to take the best courses taught by great teachers. The highway will make adult education, including job training and career-enhancement courses, more readily available.

A lot of parents, professionals, and community or political leaders will have the opportunity to participate in the teaching process, even if only for an hour here or there. It will be practical, inexpensive, and, I think, commonplace for knowledgeable guests to lead or join discussions, via videoconferences, from their homes or offices.

Having students connected directly to limitless information and to each other will raise policy questions for schools and for society at large. I discussed the issue of regulation of the Internet. Will students routinely be allowed to bring their portable PCs with them into every classroom? Will they be allowed to explore independently during group discussions? If so, how much freedom should they have? Should they be able to look up a word they don’t understand? Should they have access to information that their parents find objectionable on moral, social, or political grounds? Be allowed to do homework for an unrelated class? Be permitted to send notes to each other during class? Should the teacher be able to monitor what is on every student’s screen or to record it for later spot-checking?

Whatever problems direct access to unlimited information may cause, the benefits it will bring will more than compensate. I enjoyed school but I pursued my strongest interests outside the classroom. I can only imagine how access to this much information would have changed my own school experience. The highway will alter the focus of education from the institution to the individual. The ultimate goal will be changed from getting a diploma to enjoying lifelong learning.