Digital Technology and its Impact on Education

The Present
Many believe a revolution is taking place in education in the way people learn and the way instruction is given. The education community has been hearing of reforms and revolutions for the past few decades, but most of them have been nonexistent or without any long-term merit or real value. Some believe the method of an instructor lecturing while students listen and "absorb" is really the only viable way to teach or learn. About two decades ago, when personal computers started to become affordable, many thought that computers would revolutionize education, that computer-based teaching and learning would become the savior of education and the solution to falling test scores. This has never really happened. Over the past two decades, many teachers have successfully prepared students, some with computers in the classroom and some without. Teachers could avoid computers, either because they chose not to learn how to use them or because they had none in their classroom or school to use. Teachers entering the profession have not been required to understand computational technology in order to graduate from college.


The Future
This paper focuses on applying information and collaboration technologies to K-12 schools, although the issues discussed, with very few exceptions, also apply to community colleges and universities, undergraduate through Ph.D. As used in this paper, the term "teacher" refers to a K-12 teacher or college professor, and the term "computer" includes any current desktop computing platform Macintosh, PC, UNIX, or other unless specifically stated. All new technologies discussed in this paper either run on all these platforms or will very soon, and all require a reasonably fast processor (68030, 486, or faster), with 8 to 16 megabytes of RAM and a hard drive of at least 500 MB. Thus, older desktop computers may not be as useful in the classroom of the 1990s.

Workplace of the Future
NCSA has just finished the beta version of a new framework for collaboration on the World Wide Web called the NetWorkPlace. Completed for Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, this environment of asynchronous communication and collaboration tools allows distributed team members to work on the Web in a new and potentially revolutionary way. Some of the current tools include a Web-based group calendar, chatting capability, capability for threaded discussion and group meetings, writing tools, document storage and publication tools, a project management tool, a forms tool, workspace management tools, and more. New asynchronous tools are currently under development, and the synchronous tools being developed through the Habanero effort will become features of this workplace very soon. NCSA is also implementing tools and capabilities for classrooms and schools to use the new collaborative framework, and within a few months we plan to produce a framework for a "virtual school."


Conclusion
Technology is affecting education in revolutionary ways, and the momentum toward these changes is irreversible. Teachers who have begun to use the Web see this change occurring, even if they only have experience with static information-gathering and display capabilities. Most of these educators have not yet used or even seen the potential of collaborative technologies for their classroom and their school. The majority of the capabilities discussed in this paper have not yet become functional in the classroom, but they will very soon.