The Whole World in Their Hands
Home schooling will become more attractive when network resources become available, and this alternative will pressure schools to increase their quality or face widespread public rejection.
Home schooling will become more attractive when network resources become available, and this alternative will pressure schools to increase their quality or face widespread public rejection.
The competitive nature of these resources will undermine the monopolistic hold schools have on their communities; schools will either have to become excellent or face the extinction of their educational role. The pressure to compete will come in several forms: pressure for better courses, for vouchers, and for home schooling. The first pressure will be on courses that are difficult to staff. Soon there will be hundreds of physics netcourses, for instance, from which students can choose … When there is a sufficient quantity of quality netcourses, the most telling argument against school choice and vouchers – the lack of choice in poor districts – collapses. Network resources can exist anywhere, provided computers with network access are available. And at least some of these resources will be relatively inexpensive, enabling even the poorest students to enroll.
[In the pre-college years of school,] opportunities for original work using networked telescopes, seismographs, scanning microscopes, and supercomputers will be commonplace. Students will contribute to and analyze global environmental datasets, polls, and other network science projects. Learners will collect their best work and evidence for skill mastery into portfolios that will be available on the network to teams of evaluators. These external evaluations will change the relation between students and their teachers, who increasingly will be seen as allies and guides. These evaluated portfolios will become the primary evidence used in college admissions and job applications.
[In the pre-college years of school,] the prior [networked technologies-enhanced] treatment of algebra, graphical analysis, and dynamics will free new space in the precollege curriculum for a real mathematics sequence, where the goal is not applied mathematics but the exploration of mathematical reasoning for its own sake. This sequence will combine experimental axiomatic geometry and algebra with the formalism of calculus, all making extensive use of computer tools and network collaboration based on specialized interests.
Because of the skills and knowledge covered by the elementary curriculum, mathematics at the middle levels will be freed from much of the beginning algebra abstractions and instead will concentrate on numerical modeling, estimation, and, later, the use of algebraic formalism … The concentration on modeling, particularly dynamic modeling, will provide a key underpinning for a range of scientific theorizing, since dynamic models with feedback help students predict the future of everything from astronomy to the stock market, from global warming to school demographics. This will give kids a powerful, general technique to move between quantitative observations and theory … With increasing exposure to measurements in various fields of science and technology, kids will be able to design their first extended investigations and share their thinking and results with others throughout the world.
Starting at 6, kids will be designing and carrying out their own technology-rich investigations … This will be followed by the introduction of graphing and graphing analysis, starting when kids are about 10 and using data gathered from real-time probes in microcomputer-based labs. We will also see far earlier introduction of decimals in the context of experimental measurement, at the expense of fractions, which will be treated as an anachronistic novelty during one week in the middle level. Experimental probability and statistics will be introduced with the earliest experiments, then, building on students’ computer-based numerical and graphical skills, treated quantitatively beginning around age 11. The resulting measurement and analytic skills will enable 11- to 13-year-olds to explore a range of scientific areas through observation and measurement.
While there will continue to be students and teachers, the network will support many more combinations of physical locations, ages, and occupations. Some students will be in familiar graded schools, others will be at home, while others will be adults on the job.
If we survey science in the very best learning environments in 2005, I hope that we will see totally different content, supported throughout by technology. Information technologies will be used as enablers for learning … but few kids will actually be learning from a networked computer. In general, I dream that we would see involvement of students in a variety of virtual communities, engagement of teachers as lifelong learners and researchers, use of online student portfolios and assessment, and regular use of the full range of network resources … A whole new class of information organizers and intelligent scaffolding software will help students structure their ideas and reflect on their thinking. These tools will finally help realize the promise of metacognition, understanding how you think and learn … The result could well force a total rethinking of what can be taught and when.
The best utilization of information technologies requires a substantial restructuring of the classroom, of student evaluation, of teacher training, and of the apparently immutable external pressures from colleges and standardized tests. The likelihood of dramatic, widespread change in all these areas is remote; better schools and inspired teachers will, as always, cause changes to happen in important but isolated instances. But the vast bulk of schools will continue to ignore these wonderful resources, just as today they ignore many existing excellent print and software resources.
Some hope that there will be technological solutions to the glut of network information in the form of intelligent “agents” that learn what you want and search the network for matches. I doubt it. Certainly, searches will get better than the literal word matches currently required, but they will never evolve to the point that the computer search will have even the most rudimentary understanding. As a result, we will continue to rely on the recommendations of thoughtful people we have learned to trust. The only thing the network adds is that these experts can be anywhere.