Technology in Education and the Next Twenty-Five Years
When Thomas Edison invented the motion picture, educators hailed it. They understood that this new technology, by bringing the world to the classroom, would move education a giant step forward. But much earlier, photographs, or "still pictures," were not so well received. In the 1860s there were controversies over the use of photographs and illustrations in textbooks. Many felt the pictures would dilute the meaning of education and would "dumb down" the lessons children needed to learn. It seems that telecommunications services are experiencing a similar mixed reception among educators. Many support it, others are skeptical.
To understand the impetus behind modern telecommunications services, we need to think for a moment about the distinctly human need to communicate.
All forms of communication are simply ways of sending codes -- mutually understood symbols that represent bits of experience. The need to code and share experience may be traced to speech and language, the first code. The development in early mankind of infinitely variable strings of understandable speech distinguished the Homosapien forever from the world of animals. For most of the history of mankind, the oral-aural symbol was the main conduit of communication. People could talk to those with whom they came in direct contact.
Evolution of Human Communication
Five thousand years ago civilization developed a second tier of symbols to represent the phonemic elements of speech: phonetic writing. With the advent of writing, people could interact with more distant groups, the literate few whom written documents could reach by messenger or post. Writing enabled some people to move beyond time and geography and extend their influence to the next generation and across the earth. Just as speech had allowed people to experience vicarious environments and to conjure their own experiences in the imaginations of others, writing permitted this ability at a distance.
In the last century we developed two additional modes of sending codes: broadcasting, which allows the sending of oral, written, and visual messages from one location to many other locations; and, telephonic communication systems, which permit communication back and forth between individual senders and receivers, mimicking spoken dialog.
Modern telecommunications service is a continuation of our human legacy of sharing and conveying precise renderings of experience. It is a natural extension of our inherent social need to deliver, ever more quickly and accurately, our experiences and knowledge. Speech and language are the mediums of expressing private experiences publicly. Indeed, many modern virtual worlds look, feel, and sound like the real thing.