The prediction, in brief:

Soon, there will be billboard-free toll roads, and many of these will have educational value. They will be important to education because most useful education resources take people time to create, operate, maintain, and update, and involve intellectual property that often requires income reward. Some of this time and property will be provided free by public-spirited volunteers, foundations, and companies. But donated resources will always be a small and unstable fringe effort, rarely able to scale up to have a significant impact on education. All the large-scale, network-based educational programs will be on a fee-for-service basis.

Predictor: Tinker, Bob

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 Whole World in Their Hands,” by Bob Tinker, the president of Concord Consortium, he has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and a reputation as a pioneer in constructivist uses of educational technology. Tinker writes:”The information highway is now, first and foremost, an advertising medium crowded with billboards, where the pitches vary from the hard sell of auto dealers to the soft sell of people and institutions vying to become known by being helpful. Soon, there will be billboard-free toll roads, and many of these will have educational value. They will be important to education because most useful education resources take people time to create, operate, maintain, and update, and involve intellectual property that often requires income reward. Some of this time and property will be provided free by public-spirited volunteers, foundations, and companies. But donated resources will always be a small and unstable fringe effort, rarely able to scale up to have a significant impact on education. All the large-scale, network-based educational programs will be on a fee-for-service basis.”

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 Whole World in Their Hands

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