Virtual communities can help bring about close cooperation and shared responsibility for learning among all the educational agents of society – families, social service agencies, workplaces, mass media, schools, and higher education. For example, involving families more deeply in their children’s education may be the single most powerful lever for improved learning outcomes. Virtual parent-teacher conferences and less formal social interchanges provide new opportunities for involving parents who will never come to a PTA meeting or a school-based event. I
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:”Formal education comprises only a small fraction of how students spend their time. No matter how effective the schooling, students are unlikely to make major gains in learning if the other parts of their lives are not educationally fulfilling. Virtual communities can help bring about close cooperation and shared responsibility for learning among all the educational agents of society – families, social service agencies, workplaces, mass media, schools, and higher education. For example, involving families more deeply in their children’s education may be the single most powerful lever for improved learning outcomes. Virtual parent-teacher conferences and less formal social interchanges provide new opportunities for involving parents who will never come to a PTA meeting or a school-based event. In many regions across the United States, community networks are emerging that, among other missions, enhance education by enabling distributed discourse among all the stakeholders in quality schooling.”
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