Via information infrastructures, educators and students can join distributed conferences that provide an instant network of contacts with useful skills – a personal brain trust scattered geographically, but offering just-in-time answers to immediate questions. Eventually, these informal sources of expertise will utilize embedded “groupware” tools to enhance collaboration.
Predictor: Dede, Chris
Prediction, in context:In 1995, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology commissioned a series of white papers on various issues related to networking technologies. The department convened the authors for a workshop in November 1995 to discuss the implications. The following statement is taken from one of the white papers, “The Evolution of Learning Devices: Smart Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Shared Synthetic Environments,” by Chris Dede of the graduate school of education at George Mason University. Dede writes:”Via information infrastructures, educators and students can join distributed conferences that provide an instant network of contacts with useful skills – a personal brain trust scattered geographically, but offering just-in-time answers to immediate questions. Eventually, these informal sources of expertise will utilize embedded ‘groupware’ tools to enhance collaboration. On the Internet, online archival resources are linked increasingly into the World Wide Web, accessible through ‘webcrawler’ programs such as Netscape. In time, guides based on artificial intelligence will help users navigate through huge amounts of stored information. Another type of emerging electronic environment is the virtual exhibit that duplicates museums and other real-world settings. Virtual exhibits make possible a wide variety of experiences without the necessity of travel or scheduling. Distributed science projects enable students to conduct shared experiments dispersed across time and space; often each team member learns more than would be possible in isolation about the phenomenon being studied and about scientific investigation. Combined, all these capabilities to enhance information gathering and creation form knowledge webs.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: E-learning
Name of publication: The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning
Title, headline, chapter name: The Evolution of Learning Devices: Smart Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Shared Synthetic Environments
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney