Transitions in Computer-Mediated Communication
Online literacy will grow in importance as a important component of education at many levels.
Online literacy will grow in importance as a important component of education at many levels.
There will continue to be a a gradual increase in the recognition of online scholarship within the social-power structure of academia.
There will be a continued rapid growth in the number of online scholarly publications, with a very fast growth rate for Web-based ones.
It’s supposed to be commercial. The commercialization of the Internet is the proof that what we are doing was worthwhile. It was not just an intellectual exercise for a few professors.
By the year 2000, long-distance video conversations will be a commonplace feature of the Information Superhighway.
For historians, the Internet is going to become an important tool, but there aren’t very many of us who know what’s on it now.
A university student living in a remote area can take an entire degree over the Internet without ever having set foot at SFU or any other campus.
Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames – but think of your own experience: Can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.
Who will choose the new punctuation, the new layouts, the new indexing schemes? For good or ill, it will probably be the same kind of people who chose them after the time of Gutenberg – publishers, eager to sell … The standard-setters won’t necessarily be those with the deepest pockets. They’ll be the people who figure out how to organize, punctuate, and navigate the terabytes of information that are only milliseconds away.
Computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They’ll eat up the book budgets and require librarians who are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars … The result won’t be a library without books – it’ll be a library without value.