Better learning will not come from finding better ways for the teacher to instruct but from giving the learner better opportunities to construct. (Seymour Papert [4])
The extent to which the capacity of information technologies goes beyond simply telling students and presenting information is the extent to which it will truly change education. Indeed, as we have seen with computers, 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. Therefore, let us first imagine what the very best, most flexible, risk-taking schools will do with these resources, and then ask how the rest of education will be influenced.
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. I hope that teachers will use approaches that go far beyond what was called for in the science standards in the present era and that their assessments of students will be endorsed by the best universities and colleges as far better predictors of creativity and lifelong success than the SATs and AP exams.
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. With help from information technologies, we will learn how to integrate increasingly sophisticated concepts about thinking into the curriculum, with the result that students will learn to learn much sooner and with much greater insight. This insight will greatly accelerate what students learn and how well they learn from the disorganized resources present on the Internet. When this personal skill is combined with the full resources available, the result could well force a total rethinking of what can be taught and when.
In this imaginary tour of best practices, I have purposely avoided assuming that the learners surveyed will be students in traditional schools with grades. 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 other will be adults on the job.
The following is a highly speculative picture of what might result at different levels:
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. These explorations, some as part of networked groups, some with microcomputer-based labs, will give students a broad exposure to examples of categories, change, regularity, and cause and effect in the natural world. Kids may not realize it, but some of their activities will involve pre-engineering design challenges.
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. Experimental investigations will mature as the students mature, enabling them to coordinate multiple variables in various disciplines using increasingly sophisticated measurement techniques, supported with network materials rich in images and video. 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. Programs like the Global Lab and GLOBE will help students collect global data and share their results with other students and interested scientists.
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. For the school without a qualified physics teacher or for the disgruntled student who cannot stand to be lectured by the teacher the school has, there is certain to be at least one far superior netcourse alternative.
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.
Home schooling will become more attractive when network resources become available, and this alternati7e will pressure schools to increase their quality or face widespread public rejection.
These competitive pressures coming from the network will improve many schools. These schools will use their natural advantage of history and locality, draw on the excellent network resources, and emerge stronger. Some ambitious public and private schools will even extend their borders, accepting tuition-paying students from anywhere, with preference given to create multicultural virtual groups. These schools may find the added income actually reduces property taxes, to the delight of their towns.
Parents in some failing districts will demand wholesale in-school netcourses, which will shift the primary functions of the staff in these schools to providing the technology, advising, proctoring, and coaching sports. In other cases, parents will demand and get the average per-student expenditure as chits that they will use outside the existing public school structure for qualified netcourses and net schools.
Of course, these more radical changes will improve the quality of student learning only when there is sufficient wisdom and sophistication in communities to find the little good on the Net and reject the many slick but inferior network-based educational packages that will certainly be pressed on districts and parents. Edutainment will be trumpeted as a harmless way to learn and have fun on the Net; complete net schools backed with impressive educational pseudoresearch will be sold to unsuspecting districts. Insidious advertising will slip in as a way of reducing the costs.
The availability on the network of excellent materials, even if almost drowned by junk, may excite discriminating parents who might pressure schools to do better. Of course, the opposite will happen more frequently; the stern parent will find justification on the network for more disciplined learning, as will the creationist, white supremacist, and every other crazy faction. Communities without the resources to have discriminating educators and parents will transfer to these plentiful but inadequate network resources, thereby trading one poor educational strategy for another.
In some cases, telecommuting will replace busing programs. This, of course, is regressive from the view of the larger society. All forms of distance education can be a means of retaining ghettoized housing patterns and reducing social contact between racial and ethnic groups while addressing educational inequities. Moderates will argue that we cannot burden education with trying to solve all of society's problems; it is true that fair and equitable educational opportunities represent a great goal that, with the current savage inequalities, remains too far out of reach.
Whether these new network-based resources have a positive effect on science education depends on how they are used and who has access to them. The new resources, the new opportunities for inquiry, collaboration, and metacognition, all support the kinds of learning that many schools have found difficult to offer. On the other hand, if these technologies are implemented by sacrificing needed equipment or in-service support, if the most popular netcourses are heavily fact-oriented, such as SAT prep courses, if students become "data robots" for scientists, if less time is spent in hands-on investigations, then nothing will be gained. About all one can reliably predict is that well-funded and well-run schools will be more likely to implement the better applications of networking, while the rest will do nothing or implement the less-progressive applications.
NOTE:
[4]Papert, S. 1991. Introduction in Harel, Idit (ed.) Constructionist learning. The Media Laboratory, MIT: Cambridge, MA. [Return]