As people in advantaged societies start to enjoy random access to unlimited cultural resources, the policy problem shifts from one of allocating scarce resources to managing relatively abundant ones … The policy problem in education increasingly becomes one of ensuring that all resources are optimally represented in the system and that the navigational tools available to teachers and students dependably enable them to identify and activate the resources that advance their power of cultural participation at the moment when they engage a seminal question. What sorts of policies will conduce to these developments?
Predictor: McClintock, Robert
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, “Renewing the Progressive Contract with Posterity: On the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities,” by Robert McClintock, the director of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University. McClintock writes:”What we see now with the World Wide Web is a hint at the fullness of cultural participation that is becoming the birthright of each and every child … Soon, educational policy will need to be redefined … all the resources of the world’s cultures will in principle be available to any person at any place at any time … As people in advantaged societies start to enjoy random access to unlimited cultural resources, the policy problem shifts from one of allocating scarce resources to managing relatively abundant ones. Let us explore the character and consequences of such a shift … In field after field, the range of cultural resources that have substantial educative worth has far exceeded what publishers could cram into textbooks or schools could purchase for their libraries … As digital resources become the basis of the curriculum, the need for these exclusions disappears and the policy problem in education increasingly becomes one of ensuring that all resources are optimally represented in the system and that the navigational tools available to teachers and students dependably enable them to identify and activate the resources that advance their power of cultural participation at the moment when they engage a seminal question. What sorts of policies will conduce to these developments?” [McClintock answers his own question by listing policies that: encourage the full development of the comprehensive digital library; bring high-speed wide-area networks to schools, libraries, and homes; encourage schools to shape their curricula, teachers to design their courses, and students to work together in autonomous groups on substantial projects within those courses; shift issues of curriculum design away from questions of scope and sequence towards ones of problem posing and project initiation; redirect assessment away from measuring how well students know mandated minima to disclosing how ably they manage inquiry and solve problems; situate the locus of learning in small groups interacting with each other to work on genuinely difficult problems; allow schools to redesign the physical spaces of education and to restructure the management of time; make it the responsibility of everyone in education – students, teachers, administrators, and parents – to be simultaneously both teacher and learner.]
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: Renewing the Progressive Contract with Posterity: On the Social Construction of Digital Learning Communities
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