Education and Technology

If you want to see the future of education, don't watch children in the average classroom. Watch children play a video game. You'll see them engaged, excited, interacting, and learning—even if it's only about how to get to the next level of the game. Because of their immersion in this computerized world, children absorb information differently from their parents. Instead of following information passively from beginning to end—as people tend to do with television shows, newspapers, and books—children interact with the new technologies.

Schools now have an opportunity to apply the information technologies that are so effective outside the classroom for educational purposes. Taking advantage of these new technologies will require profound changes in the roles of teachers, students, and schools. Instead of being the repository of knowledge, teachers will be guides who help students to navigate through electronically accessible information. They will use the new technologies to build networks with each other, with parents and students, with academic and industrial experts, and with other professionals.

Turning opportunity into reality requires four important changes:

• Industry must develop educational devices from comparatively low-price game hardware and software, thereby dramatically lowering the costs of educational technology.
• Communities and government should include technological change when setting the agenda for systemic change in education.
• Software-makers must tie the content of their products to quality information and to the national education standards as they are implemented.
• Teachers must receive extensive training in how to use emerging information technologies.

Computers will not solve all the problems of education; many difficult issues will remain. But the new information technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine how we educate our children.