Introduction
When Alvin Toffler wrote about the world of the future, he described a world where "machines will deal with the flow of materials; men with the flow of information and insight. Machines will increasingly perform the routine tasks; men the intellectual and creative tasks. Machines and men both, instead of being concentrated in gigantic factories and factory cities, will be scattered across the globe, linked together by amazingly sensitive, near-instantaneous communications. Human work will move out of the factory and mass office into the community and the home" (Toffler, 1970, p. 402). If we can forgive him for his sexist language, perhaps we can also appreciate how some of his expectations have come to pass. Manufacturing has become more dispersed. Factories in Hong Kong, Korea, and China have taken the place of factories in Britain, Germany, and the United States. The ability to control processes and production in disparate locations is something of a testament to our technological prowess. Distanced manufacturing and dispersed corporate structures have not led to slow progress or to poor quality. Our standards have risen, not fallen, and creativity continues to bloom.
Communication systems allow our various divisions and branches to work together. Call centers handling customer service and ordering and billing questions are placed where labor and land are available. Their site is more influenced by the tax rate than by their proximity to markets. In today's service oriented marketplace, call center revenues that were $1 Billion in 1995 are expected to top $1.5 Billion by 1998 (Byte, Dec. 1996, p. 28). This dispersed tool of commerce echoes Toffler's prediction of using technology to disperse the work force. Since more and more of our work is service, the dispersal of the service force is a natural outcome of his predictions. Our expectations for this communication system are evidenced by current technological trends. Curt Harler remarks in the December 1996 issue of Byte magazine that "Call-center managers are switching from telephony-tied operations to ones that gather data from wherever it originates and from whatever medium it's generated in". In the same issue of Byte magazine, Lucent technologies (formerly known as Bell Labs) advertises its "Inferno (tm) Networking Software" that allows video games to talk to computers talking to cell phones accessing e-mail instead of voice mail that can be sent via television. If this sounds like an interconnected future, it certainly makes Toffler's prediction of "amazingly sensitive near-instantaneous communications" more certain.
Educational Objectives and Systems
How do we train for this dispersed and creative future? Toffler describes the educational system in place in 1970 as being the product of the industrial age; unsuited for the super-industrial future (Toffler, 1970. p. 400). He states that education's "prime objective must be to increase the individual's 'cope-ability' -- the speed and economy with which he can adapt to continual change. And the faster the rate of change, the more attention must be devoted to discerning the pattern of future events" (Toffler, 1970. p. 403). This cope-ability is described as the ability to foresee possible future outcomes and make "repeated, probabilistic, increasingly long-range assumptions about the future. And so must (their) teachers".
Toffler describes schools more suited to the future, and less suited to the industrial past. The schools he describes include more opportunity for input from parents using home schools "sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, electronic video recording, holography and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term 'learning contracts' with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses or course modules" (Toffler, 1970). These technological improvements have occurred to some extent, but we haven't seen much holography in educational contexts as yet. It seems that holography is more used in credit card cryptography and driver's license validation than in 3-D learning. Online computer mediated communication, complete with video, is available today. Educational boards and schools are integrating computers into primary classrooms, but the home school paradigm that Toffler describes is negated by the two income family and the poorly educated low income parent. It might be a pleasant vision of the future, where the best educated adults in history educate their even better educated offspring, but the realities of the inner cities and the expenses of the metropolis have made the ideals of home schooling available to very few students.
What would it take?
Interconnectivity with the nearby schoolroom is available today. Internet connections in many homes and the easy connection of schools to the local telephone system make these channels commonly available, but infrequently utilized. Bill Gates, writing in his recently updated book The Road Ahead, quotes Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as saying "'There are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable television and no reasonable prospect of broadband services,' he said. 'They are called schools'" (Gates, 1996. p. 209). There is no lack of discussion on educational topics on internet Newsgroups, but the connection of the discussion with the schools and the parents is not obviously commonplace.
The World Wide Web has much information available on distance education. It is clearly a topic of discussion and a current issue. The information available on the internet-enabled World Wide Web should bring it to the most probable users; connected households. Whether its currency will result in changes in policy remain to be seen. In Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte describes the computer as a teaching engine "that children would teach, and thus learn by teaching" (Negroponte, 1995. p. 199). He attributes this idea to Papert of MIT and pegs the date of the initial concept at April 11, 1970. The idea is now ready to be implemented. "Today, when more than a third of all American homes contain a personal computer, the idea's time has really come" (Negroponte, 1995, p. 199). But the idea of computer mediated or computer assisted teaching is difficult to implement when "preschoolers acquainted with cell phones, pagers, and personal computers go into kindergartens where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art" (Gates, 1996). This is luckily not always the case. My ten year old fourth grader and his seven year old, second grade cousin's classes both have white boards instead of chalkboards and computers in their classrooms. At least one computer lab is connected to the internet, and they both have the opportunity to utilize computer learning systems. The hardware is there but their teachers are not well versed in these systems in some cases, and rely on computer experts instead of their own knowledge of computer learning systems. The opportunity is there, but the application is lagging.
While teaching by teaching may be the vision of Papert and Negroponte, "creating knowledge" can be done using computers in many ways. "While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching -- but good teaching and by good teachers -- a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself" (Negroponte, 1995). This is certainly creating knowledge within the student. "The computer changed this balance radically. All of a sudden, learning by doing became the rule rather than the exception" (Negroponte, 1995). This is pretty much par for the computer golf course. We all learn our software applications by doing. If children are allowed to experience the world, inventing it as they go, constrained by the laws of physics and counseled by the wisdom of the ages, imagine the knowledge that they will create within themselves. "Since computer simulation of just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. Instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog" (Negroponte, 1995). Negroponte's vision of the present goes well beyond Toffler's vision of the future, but in a consistent manner. Allowing children to learn on their computers in their homes using simulations has merit, but not widespread current application. Perhaps the computer games children play are teaching things to children that they would not learn otherwise. Perhaps they are learning things we do not know they learn. Some continuing studies of computer games, and what they teach, could lead to better understanding. Coordinated education using home computers is still rare. With teachers being slow to implement computer assisted teaching in schools, the opportunity to implement integrated home learning is hampered. Again we have the tools but not the applications.
One school that has implemented computer technologies and internet applications can be found at <http://wwwjua.lkwash.wednet.edu> as described by Bill Gates in The Road Ahead (Gates, 1996). Gates' view of education is splendidly optimistic. He says in The Road Ahead "I expect education of all kinds to improve significantly within the next decade. I believe that information technology will empower people of all ages, both inside and outside the classroom, to learn more easily, enjoyably, and successfully than ever before". Although Gates is not an educator, his Microsoft Corporation has been extremely successful at manipulating the computer market. If his vision becomes reality through his efforts, our educational systems may change dramatically as a result. He states that one reason technology has not been widely implemented by educators could be that "The rapid rate at which hardware becomes obsolete isn't a good fit with the school purchasing model: Buy once, use forever" (Gates, 1996, p. 210). Certainly the corporate market has struggled to keep up with the ever increasing spiral of technology. Schools, typically slower to spend on new technology, would be hard pressed to keep up. The solution to this spiral of technology has not been found. Gates remarks that "only a 3 percent addition in the total annual expenditure in education" would make adequate hardware available, but a three percent increase in educational taxes would be hard to pass nationwide. All new taxes are resisted with an almost religious zeal. And nobody suggests increasing class size to make up the difference. This lack of funding is certainly part of the problem. By the time a corporate computer is no longer useful to the company, it is not well suited to educational use either. While Apple Computer has donated thousands of PCs to schools, they have not done well financially in the recent past, and their magnanimous nature has not been rewarded with widespread sales. Perhaps Bill Gates would donate that 3% from his personal billions.
Gates remarks upon the educational system's ability to change in response to societal changes. He points out the dramatic increase in secondary schooling as a result of the mass media "explosion" in the 1890s. "Imagine what education was like then. Tens of millions of immigrants were overwhelming the schools and social services of our big cities. Many of the students could barely speak the national language. They had few skills and little hope. Yet that generation and the next achieved huge increases in their standard of living, in part because the educational system adapted to their needs" (Gates, 1996, p. 211). Gates' analysis of the societal changes in the early 1900s may leave out political and military impacts, and may overestimate the percentage of immigrants, but it does accurately reflect the increase in secondary education in response to a need for literacy and widely available written media. The standard and expected high school enrollment in the 50s and 60s was in dramatic contrast to the limited secondary education of the 1880s and 1890s. In about fifty years, four years of commonplace education were added to American educational standards. Will college education be as commonplace in the year 2000 as high school was when the century was new? Will our standard of education come to expect a college degree from everyone? Will college drop outs be the exception? Our high school drop out rates in cities says this vision is a long way off. If electronic media can help this happen, now is the time to begin. In our inner cities, we are losing the race.
Gates' splendidly optimistic vision includes a world where "Workers will be able to keep up-to-date on techniques in their fields. People anywhere will be able to take the best courses taught by the greatest teachers. The net will spread the availability of adult education, including job training and retraining and career-enhancement courses, all over the world. Computers with social interfaces will figure out how to present information so that it's customized for the particular user" (Gates, 9116, p. 219). He describes college level basic math and English courses designed by Academic Systems of Palo Alto, California using "mediated learning" that "blends traditional instruction with computer-based learning" (Gates, 1996). The personalized lesson plans developed after computerized assessment provides a truly customized curriculum that still uses intensive teacher involvement. They found that "the most successful classes were those in which and instructor was available a good part of the time" (Gates, 1996). Interactive live-action and animated learning programs are also being developed by The Lightspan Partnership using Hollywood talent to teach using computer systems mediation. This vision will require effort, but if it makes Bill Gates money, it might just happen.
Education at a distance
Contemporary discussions of education-at-a-distance, so called "distance education" have advised caution and perhaps have made students reluctant to participate. Steve Levicoff, Ph.D., advises great caution in his posting to educational Newsgroups entitled "Distance Education: The *Unofficial* FAQ (A Periodic Posting)". In this document he advises great caution because he has evidence of "degree mills" and even "accreditation mills" designed to earn profits, not create knowledge. This is certainly a troubling image. Distance learning being described as a "scam" would not bode well for the aspiring student or the aspiring practitioner either.
Gates cites statistics indicating that "Home schooling accounts for roughly 1 million K-12 students in the U.S., about 2 percent of the total. About half of that 2 percent are homeschooled for religious or cultural reasons, but the rest are taught at home by parents who believe they can do a better job than the schools. A main reason the parents say they believe they can succeed is 'the computer'" (Gates, 1996, p. 213). This is a small fraction, but if the computer penetration leads the homeschool revolution, the penetration rate cited by Gates at 50 percent of families (and he should know!) could signal a significant change. Perhaps a distance learning revolution in home schooling awaits an economic incentive in the form of tax or investment relief.
Virtual versus community
The virtual classroom is a technical possibility, but would we really want it that way? I have one professor that is unsatisfied by our hard working graduate students with outside jobs and their inability to engage in "hallway learning" (Crable, 1996). This lack of catch-as-catch-can interaction is troubling to Professor Crable, in my understanding, because he is only able to interact within the classroom context, not in the more informal discussions held in the hallways and eateries of a university community. I have had classes that included a large amount of semi-social interaction with the professor. These classes were in cultural studies and media, where that type of social interaction is especially helpful. Lacking that experience would have lessened my learning. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid describe the computer revolution on campus as being limited to "the use of PCs as sophisticated typewriters, and the explosion of campus e-mail" (Brown and Duguid, 1996). They attribute this reluctant adoption of computer technology and the reticence of the virtual campus to tradition and community. The traditional educational establishment is selling four years in a college town, and parents and students are still buying. There is more to this than just a fraternity or sorority. "People leave college knowing not just things, but knowing people, and knowing not just academic facts, but knowing social strategies for dealing with the world" (Brown and Duguid, 1996). The establishment of an academic network can help in later life. "Alumni do remember groups they joined, scholars they worked with, tasks they accomplished, and friendships they made. We don't have to look much further than the group of Rhodes Scholars around our current president to see how college activities and networks can be far more important in later life than a degree's formal content" (Brown and Duguid, 1996). I remember that Herbert Marcuse and Linus Pauling both taught during my undergraduate years at UC San Diego. I remember the field trips to Burney to work with the Pitt River Tribe members as part of my Native American Studies class. I remember the time an anti-war protester burned himself to death on the quad. I remember going to jazz concerts while taking a music course. I met an instructor as an undergraduate who has become a friend over the decades. I now give a lecture in his projects class every semester, and have for almost ten years. These artifacts of my university life would not be there if I hadn't been there in body, soul and mind. I became part of the academic community in every university that I attended. I carry that community with me still.
The article by Brown and Duguid stresses that the university enculturates the student into the academic culture and the student becomes part of the academic world community. This is consistent with J.W. Carey's view of communication as community in "A cultural approach to communication" (Communication, 1975, vol. 2, p. 1-22). Brown and Duguid discuss the simple task of providing knowledge to the student for recall and use. The article also discusses the more complicated task of making the student part of a community of scholars. This difference is more pronounced in graduate studies, where the graduate student is more focused on becoming a scholar than the undergraduate would be. The opportunity to interact with experts in a field of study that is important to the student provides more than simple learning. It provides a sharing of community that magnifies abilities of the student and the community alike.
There are virtual communities though. They really do exist. I subscribe to an on-line mailing list called FutureCulture that I found while doing some internet research in ComS 200. The topic of "culture in the future" sounded interesting, and so I subscribed. The group consists of technically knowledgeable people from all over the world. The language we use is English, but English is the second language for many of the members. Even for the English speaking natives, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, America, and France are represented. The Netherlands, Iceland, Brazil, Germany, and Hong Kong all have members. Most are university students, some are teachers and even professors. Some work in high technology fields, many with internet professions as their livelihood. We consider ourselves a community and defend our community values. We do not tolerate rudeness and inappropriate postings. We also will not tolerate censorship or any moderator. We respond appropriately to inappropriate posts, and some will implement kill-files if a pest becomes an irritant. We argue and discuss and share our lives. We learn from each other and try to help out when we can. It is truly a virtual community and it works.
Virtual versus real life
There are questions of non-verbal communication in virtual communities that must be addressed. Physical attractiveness and similarity would be less important in the virtual campus. It might be hard to relate to virtual comrades when face-to-face meetings occurred. John Slatin reports on his excellent experiences with a text based interactive computer mediated classroom. This is consistent with the working world where "Zuboff shows that middle managers and executives spend much of their time in talk -- everything from hallway chat and telephone schmoozing to formal presentations and meetings. Success depends heavily upon "people skills" used in transactions which are oral and transitory -- action-centered rather than intellective. Computerization transforms these activities, as it transforms other kinds of work, into text -- electronic mail, computer conferencing, electronic calendars, and the like" (Slatin, 1992). Since education might be wise to follow the corporate example that it trains some students to entertain, the incorporation of computer text into even the traditional campus, as Slatin has done, makes sense. Slatin did not portray a virtual campus. His class was in a traditional university, but incorporated text based computer mediated communication as part of the class. This seemed to increase participation by the students, eliminate teacher domination (the Atlas complex, relieved!), and facilitate creative discussions even though the classmates were not "eye to eye and knee to knee". There was the additional advantage that "The transformation of traditionally ephemeral classroom talk into text by means of interactive written discourse does not simply re-organize knowledge of subject matter, then. It changes relationships among people by changing their relationship to knowledge" (Slatin, 1992). Slatin also points out the advantage of text based discussion, even beyond the ability to archive the textual talk; the teacher can obtain "unprecedented access to what's going on in the minds of students, and their understanding of the course material. It also provides unprecedented access to the processes by which, individually and collectively, the classmembers reach that understanding" (Slatin, 1992, p. 32). These insights could lead to improved teaching strategy and tactics. This text based classroom could improve traditional university learning environments, while paving the way for some virtual university work as well. If the insights gained in text based classrooms could be utilized in virtual learning situations, the virtual classroom might reach a higher level than currently expected with video lecture of e-mail conferencing. The synchronous nature of Slatin's experience must also be factored into the discussion. Since most of his classes were synchronous, with mandatory attendance, the temptation to "skip reading e-mail" was removed. I have seen more than one scholarly or professional e-mail list go into stasis, and I suspect that the failure to interact must have something to do with their demise.
Hunter McEwan talks of teaching as interpretation, regarding texts in a broad sense as the source of knowledge. This runs counter to our view that knowledge must be created in the student, not dispensed or interpreted into a student-as-vessel. He does maintain that each interpretation can be different, but misses the point of allowing the student to learn; facilitating is the method we choose, not forcing. As an addition to our discussion of McEwan's work, our instructional communication class discussed Reuven Feuerstein and his work in mediated instruction. A quick search of World Wide Web resources revealed a center dedicated to his research, and other related information. This type of interactive searching can be useful to the student of the traditional CSUS campus as well as the virtual campus experience. It seems that a blending of virtual resources with traditional campus community could build regular interactions and avoid temptations to "skip e-mail".
Theory and research
While Scott Kuehn presents a strong argument for additional focused work on Computer Assisted Instruction, several standard theories and models of communication behavior must be included. Beyond the obvious questions of how much do we lose without non-verbal cues, we are curious to find out if computer assisted instruction will alleviate communication apprehension, as suggested by Slatin's work? Is this commonplace and expected? Could this be a widespread method to treat even high levels of communication apprehension and anxiety? What about intercultural contexts? Would Kim's intercultural identity model apply in computer assisted instruction? Would the lower levels of anxiety associated with disembodied textual interaction remove stress necessary to accomplish enculturation? Studies of the medium itself, along the lines suggested by Kuehn, seem to echo the words of Marshall McLuhan when Kuehn advises that "Content analysis of computer-mediated communication can reveal user adaptations and innovations to the medium. Similarly, a focus on usage, response and impact of the CMC system can provide a view of the contribution of the technological system to communication in the classroom environment" (Kuehn, 1994, p. 175). I associate with an instructor named Alan Sondheim who moderates the e-conference mailing list who is interested in how the routing of bits of information shape our view of the communication moment. This is medium based research taken to the meta-meta-meta level.
Kuehn suggests uses and gratifications analyses be done on computer mediated communication (CMC). Uses and gratifications could help explain the "explosion of e-mail" without the associated explosion of CAI. Another possible area of mass media investigation could be cultivation analysis. This requires content analysis, and could determine linkages between conventional mass media and alternative media such as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), MUD: Object Oriented (MOOs), chat lines, ThePalace, Newsgroups, and e-mail lists. It could also serve to document the balkanization of media contexts into the individualized compartments that Gates predicts. These are all vital areas for future research.
Barriers to CyberSpace
While discussions of the internet are raging, and legal battles over free speech and copyrights ring up billable hours for media attorneys, the working knowledge of the internet is still not in everyone's hands. It is sometimes difficult to grasp all of the interconnected types of CMC that are possible in today's world. The software libraries are too vast to reasonably reconcile in a mental map. The use of Liszt list server searching tools will allow the user to get some idea of the vast reaches of e-mail interaction currently in progress. I have provided an example of distance education lists and another of education lists and there are LOTS more.
There is a lot of communication apprehension at many levels, exacerbated by some hostility from the "old-timers". It seems that some netizens would like everyone else to just go away.
These are real barriers to progress. Only by creating knowledge
of electronic media in our colleagues and in our students and
in our friends can we find out how far these new virtual horizons
of communication really reach. Use the searching tools.
Push the envelope.
Citations
Gates, B. (1996). The Road Ahead. New York: Penguin Books.
Negroponte, N. (1995). Being Digital. New York: Random House. (Vintage Books edition).
Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House. (Bantam Books edition).