Widespread use of information technology will markedly raise educational expectations. Today, we believe that all educated people should read and write well, but this expectation is only about 200 years old. Before the development of the printing press, mass production, mechanization, and industrialization that made cheap printed material possible, expectations for literacy were much lower. Widespread literacy was unthinkable.
Information technology will influence society and education as much as print technology has, and the effect won't take hundreds of years to appear. Already, information technology is transforming the workplace. Within one generation—30 years—our ideas of what every educated person should be able to do will change drastically, too. A few of today's educational expectations may fall by the wayside, but for the most part, we will add the new expectations to the old ones. This heightened public expectation will raise the bar for literacy.
Information technology will soon be as readily available as paper and pencil. Many people worry what will happen when students don't have a calculator, but nobody worries what will happen when they don't have a pencil and paper. The technologies of print are so ubiquitous that depending on them doesn't worry us. It will be the same with calculators and word processors. To understand technology's impact, we must imagine a world in which everyone can get calculators, word processors, and video cameras as easily as they get pencils, paper, and books today. I believe that such a world will arrive within a generation.
New Tools, Expanded Capabilities
Many people find it hard to believe that information technology will be as intuitive and easy to use as paper and pencil. Today's computers are so difficult to learn and to use that only professionals find it worthwhile to spend hundreds of hours mastering them. Will everybody take the time? Let's not forget that pencils and paper are easy to use only because we have spent hours learning and practicing in school! Learning to use a word processor is not more difficult than learning to write by hand. But even if learning to create electronically takes more time, the results are worth the trouble because the things we create with information technology are much more useful than their print counterparts.
Say you write a story with a pencil. Want to send it to Aunt Margaret in Poughkeepsie? You need an envelope, a stamp, and several days. Want to enlarge the letters so that Aunt Margaret can read them? Either you write it all again or you need a fancy copy machine. Want to send it to all your relatives? You need a copier and lots of envelopes and stamps. Change your mind and want to rewrite? You'll have to start over again. When you write electronically, you can do all these things and many more in seconds at almost no cost. Similar conclusions apply to numbers that we calculate by hand versus with a spreadsheet, to drawings or diagrams, even to sounds we make acoustically versus digitally. Creating something in a digital electronic representation gives a result that is more easily stored, copied, shared, revised, and combined with other things. Hence, the electronic form and the ability to create it will be more highly valued and thus worthwhile to learn.
Many people find it hard to accept that using technology will challenge students more. They believe that technology, by making things easier and doing things automatically, will reduce demands on students and lead to less effort and thought. For instance, spell checkers will ruin students' spelling. Perhaps they will, though it's also possible that immediate correction may make students even better spellers. Still, even when using technology reduces skills that have been automated, it also enables people to do new and more challenging things. Getting good at revising when one writes with a word processor is a greater challenge than becoming a better speller. Some people will want to do the new things that the technology enables them to do because these abilities will bring extra value to their lives. When other people recognize this extra value, they will want it for themselves. And when nearly everybody does these more powerful things, the public will expect all educated people to do them.
New Expectations
- Use several symbol systems;
- Apply knowledge in life;
- Think strategically;
- Manage information; and
- Learn, think, and create as part of a team.
Educational innovators have advocated these criteria as general expectations for all educated people in past generations, but in the next generation, most people will need them to live satisfactory lives. Here's why.
Using symbol systems. Today, a basic, worldwide expectation is that educated people should be able to read and write in a common language. In the next generation, educated people will be expected to master several symbol systems.
Using information technology, everyone will be able to send and receive messages in visual and graphic forms, such as drawings, photographs, and diagrams. Everyone will be able to send and receive messages by using logical, mathematical, and scientific notations, such as graphs, charts, tables, equations, and computer languages. Everyone will be able to send and receive messages that make sophisticated use of sounds—voices, background music, sound effects—as well as movement—animation, films—and, ultimately, programmed interactions—today's computer games.
Now that sending and receiving these messages are as easy as e-mail, educated people need to be competent producers and critical consumers of messages expressed in these symbol systems. Computer programs already give teachers and students the tools for composing interactive multimedia messages that include video, active tables made with spreadsheets, graphs generated automatically from tables of data, and much more. Many new curriculums emphasize the ability to go back and forth between different representations of the same situations. We can trace much of the widespread enthusiasm for multisensory education and multiple intelligences to a dawning awareness of the multimedia expressive possibilities of information technology.
Applying knowledge. Past generations expected educated people to show what they knew by repeating what they had learned. The problem has always been that merely repeating what we've learned is much easier than using that knowledge to solve an unfamiliar problem. Alfred North Whitehead called this inert knowledge, and in the United States, in particular, inert knowledge gets no respect. Colonials made fun of the inept schoolmaster Ichabod Crane. The bombastic orator spouting high-sounding, empty words is a stock character in U.S. literature, famously caricatured in Huckleberry Finn and gently chided in The Wizard of Oz.
In past generations, school and society were unable to provide the material means and guidance that students needed to learn to apply their knowledge flexibly to a range of concrete situations. It was all educators could do to provide a book and a chalkboard and to teach verbal lessons. With information technology, students learning about the growth of cities, say, can manage the growth of a simulated city. Students learning about genetics can apply their knowledge in computer programs that simulate breeding.
The next generation will need educated persons who can do more than talk about such subjects. The person who understands the world but cannot use that understanding to reshape it is at a disadvantage. Educated people will be expected to creatively use what they know; to express themselves; to design, build, and invent.
Thinking strategically. Fundamental to using knowledge in life is using strategic thinking. Today, as in past generations, educators sometimes assign problems that require students to apply their learning to a new situation, but problem solving is seldom sufficient to enable students to use their knowledge flexibly and creatively in real-life situations. In life, problems don't appear already formulated. Finding the problems is the first challenge. Once we've found them, real-life problems are usually much more complicated than textbook problems. Seldom will a few steps lead to the solution. Instead, they require a strategy, a broad plan of attack that envisions many steps in sequence. We may need to break down each step in turn into further steps.
Tackling such problems seems unrealistic when students must approach them with only their wits and pencil and paper. Our compromise has been to let students learn to solve neat little problems in school and then work up to complicated problems in college and on the job. But age 18 is a little late to begin developing the resourcefulness and the strategic-thinking skills needed for tackling really complex problems, and 12 years of solving neatly formulated problems is not good preparation.
Today, students and teachers can use information technology to scaffold work on complex, authentic problems. Students collaborate with their peers and with adult scientists to collect and analyze data on such problems as acid rain, stream pollution, and indoor air pollution.
In the next generation, educated people will be expected to tackle big, authentic problems and use their knowledge to plan and carry out solutions. When anyone can use powerful tools to solve little problems, the ability to think strategically becomes important. Strategic thinking requires finding the little problems hidden in the messy big ones, formulating those problems, developing a plan of attack, and selecting and sequencing the neat little problems so that taken together, they solve the big messy one. Strategic thinking also requires taking stock of goals, resources, and knowledge; moving confidently between the details of a problem and the broad plan of action; and explaining what and why every step of the way.
Managing information. In past generations, educators struggled to transmit the culture and to give students the power to learn by reading. Just providing books, libraries, teachers, and school buildings stretched resources to the limit. Today, students in the most remote hamlet can find lifetimes of knowledge online. The abilities to read and to acquire knowledge are now not enough. People must determine what they really need to know and check whether they already know it in some way that they do not immediately recognize. If not, they must find out what relevant knowledge is out there, where it is, how long it will take to acquire it, and how difficult acquiring it will be. Having located the needed pieces of knowledge, the educated person of the next generation will have to validate and apply them. This is what we mean by managing information.
Today, many teachers coach students in using the bibliographic resources available over the Internet and the World Wide Web. Increasing numbers of high school students are participating in research and action projects that involve them in the knowledge-management problems of professionals. In the next generation, all educated people will be competent researchers and knowledge managers, keeping track of what they know and don't know and finding ways to learn what they need.
Learning, thinking, and creating together. In past generations, teachers worked hard on self-management skills. They trained students in self-control and self-discipline—to behave politely, obey rules, manage time, meet deadlines. The next generation will also need social and organizational skills. The more challenging and rewarding tasks in an information age will be too big and too complex for a single person to do, no matter how talented and well disciplined. No single person can design a computer or build a plane or make a movie. Big, complex jobs require lots of people with varied skills and knowledge, and mobilizing and coordinating these people require social and organizational skills.
In the next generation, people will use technology to support teamwork and collaboration at a distance. Students and teachers will work in distributed teams, coordinating their work and following long-term plans. Already, bold experiments in project-based learning foster productive collaborative work in classrooms.
Raising the Bar: What Does It Mean for Educators?
Educational systems are hard-pressed to meet today's expectations, so raising the bar so far in one generation will put enormous pressure on an already troubled institution. We don't need a crystal ball to see that we're in for rough times. Educators will be caught between rising educational expectations and strong opposition to both the information society and its educational imperatives.
Opponents will vigorously resist pressures to use more technology. Traditionalists will demand more attention to common knowledge, basic skills, and print literacy. Critics of technology will urge more attention to goals beyond symbols, such as direct experience, feelings, intuition, human relationships, and humanitarian or spiritual concerns. Both visions will compete vigorously with the new expectations. We can expect some wild fights.
Students who are struggling with and failing to meet today's expectations—disproportionately poor, minority, and at-risk students—will face an even tougher challenge. Teachers—who may be the first in their families to attend college, who studied for years to master the technologies of print, and who taught for years in overcrowded and poorly equipped schools—will hear the next generation say that their skills no longer qualify them as fully educated people. School systems whose leaders have toiled for years to bring all students up to high standards will hear from the next generation that these standards are not high enough.
It's highly doubtful that more effort and resources alone will enable schools to meet the new expectations. New approaches will also be needed. The new expectations themselves point to possible new directions. Students should be more motivated to work on authentic problems, and most students will welcome the chance to assume more responsibility for their learning, to work in teams, and to assemble portfolios of their work. Thus, students' talents and energies can play a bigger role in their schooling and propel them to new heights of achievement. Students can also support one another. Peer tutoring is an effective technique, and more can surely be done to help students learn from one another.
Also, the technology that created the problem can help solve it. For instance, technologies that support translation from one symbol system to another should help students leverage knowing some symbol systems into learning others. Telecommunication will allow scientists and other professionals to supplement and support teachers. The technologies of collaboration allow new forms of advisement. Each child could have a team of advisors, including the child's parents and teachers and other consultants who know the child. Using collaboration tools, the team could coordinate its work and advise and monitor the child's learning more effectively. Electronic portfolios of student work might make up for the fact that today's tests do not measure students' ability to use dynamic symbol systems; apply knowledge in life; think strategically; manage information; and learn, think, and create with other students.
Although the new expectations generated by an increasingly technological society pose many challenges, they also provide many opportunities. The next generation should be an exciting time to work in education!
