¶7

Consider interactions between information technologies and educational practice as these play out in the fullness of time. Some events take place in a present tense that marks a short duration – days, weeks, months, perhaps a year or two. Others unfold in a prolonged process that spans a long duration – decades, generations, even centuries. [Note 03] Over such a long duration, innovations in information technologies are interacting with new educational practices to make significant changes in human experience possible. As actors in that drama, educators must determine the human worth of those changes through the character of their practice.

¶8

With respect to events, "now," the present, can have varying duration, ranging from the instantaneous crisis of a high-speed accident to many decades for a global change in technology or demography. Prediction anticipates what will happen in a postulated future. Observation notes what is happening in the present, a present that may extend from the recent past, through the immediate instant, to well into the future. Let us not predict, but observe. Let us observe three things that are happening around us at a rapid pace in our extended present, the now that encompasses the incorporation of digital information technologies into our culture. [Note 04]

• First, using emergent information systems, people are converting all the contents of all the world's cultures to digital form, making the results available to any person at any place at any time.
• Second, using digital multimedia, people are gaining flexible command of multiple ways to represent knowledge, simulate interactions, and express ideas, extending the reach of intelligence, altering the spectrum of civilized achievement, and lowering thresholds to cultural participation.
• Third, using powerful software, people are externalizing diverse basic skills – to calculate, to spell, to remember, to visualize, to compare, to select – into the digital tools with which they work, making practical mastery of such skills, once an outcome of education, increasingly a given at its outset.

These changes become increasingly evident in practice the world around, and educators who incorporate them into their activities sense that the spectrum of pedagogical possibility alters radically thereby. The constraints on feasible educational action loosen.

¶9

A shift in the spectrum of pedagogical possibility would not be an unprecedented human occurrence. Such shifts have happened before, both in education and in other sectors of activity. They are the very stuff of historical change. For example, consider the transformation of architecture since 1850. Until that time, throughout history and across cultures, people simply did not build tall buildings except occasionally a tower or pyramid for specialized, ceremonial or military purpose. Then a series of innovations occurred, for reasons quite extraneous to the will of architects, that made unprecedented structures feasible. With new materials like girders of iron or steel, reinforced concrete, and plate glass, with new techniques for managing water, heat, light, and air, as well as novel ways of moving people with elevators and escalators, these unprecedented structures proved so humanly habitable that high-rise buildings have been built the world around, with great variations of form and function, and with diverse triumphs and failures on all sorts of measures – social, structural, economic, and aesthetic. The new building technologies did not determine, in a strong sense, how any particular city would look, but they did open a wide new spectrum of architectural possibility. Within the range of this possibility numerous cities have developed imposing skylines like New York's, and even Paris, by largely adhering to traditional building codes within its city center, reflects through its conscious restraint one of the possibilities of the new architecture.

¶10

Digital technologies are for education as iron and steel girders, reinforced concrete, plate glass, elevators, central heating and air conditioning were for architecture. Digital technologies set in abeyance significant, long lasting limits on educational activity. [Note 05]

¶11

Existing limits are clear. Around the world, a remarkably ubiquitous educational system works well for some and poorly for others. Its elitism and class bias are global, structural features of the educational system built over the past four centuries. Educators designed the traditional system to make optimal use of a powerful information technology, that of printed text. In our extended present, the means of communication available to educators are changing rapidly, and educators now have to determine what to seek to accomplish with those changing conditions. Consider how this change in possibility occurs through the three strategic developments in our extended present – digitization, multimedia, and augmented intelligence.

¶12

First, a change in possibility results as high-speed wide-area networks, linking people through ubiquitous computers to copious digital libraries, transform the cultural conditions under which educational interactions take place. Traditionally, the school and the classroom have been places where teachers and students are isolated from the general culture and where information and ideas have been relatively scarce – the textbook was a meager selection of what a field of knowledge comprises, a skilled teacher was a bundle of ignorance relative to the sum of learning, and a school library a sparse sampling of the culture at best. Networks reaching through the school into the classroom and to the desktop are ending the isolation and substituting a rule of  abundance for that of scarcity. [Note 06] Such a new rule is not without its pitfalls, as the concern to protect children from pornography on the Web shows all too well, but to cope with its hazards we must recognize that it is a new rule, deeply different from the old. In our extended present, the root pedagogical problem changes profoundly, shifting from stratagems for disbursing scarce knowledge to finding ways to enable people to use with purpose and effect their unlimited access to the resources of our cultures. [Note 07]

¶13

Second, changes in educational possibility arise as new media alter the ways of knowing and the opportunities for participating in the creation of knowledge. Multimedia, and its extension in virtual reality, is not merely a glitzy vehicle for edutainment hype. It is an epistemologically interesting development in our culture. [Note 08] For the most part, the work of thinking has appeared to take place as people manipulate their spoken and written languages, with the formal symbolization of mathematics and logic appearing to be extensions of more everyday linguistic forms. Multimedia make it increasingly evident that the work of thinking can take place through many forms – verbal, visual, auditory, kinetic, and blends of all and each. Of course, it is not the case that non-linguistic media are themselves new. Rather their status as serious means for creating knowledge is rising considerably, evident for instance in the rapidly spreading techniques of scientific visualization. The newness of the "new media" lies in their growing suitability for serious intellectual work. [Note 09]

¶14

Knowledge consists primarily of cultural resources that people can store and retrieve on demand, as the need for it arises. Written, especially printed, media have long had a privileged place in the house of intellect because they were easy to store and retrieve to suit the needs of users. [Note 10] Without random accessibility, continuously exercised, ideas become esoteric, hermetic, and then lost in the flux of time. Work in media other than print has been awkward, either to store or to retrieve. As words once were, music, theater, and dance have largely existed in performance, making them hard to store. They have achieved a lasting presence for audiences in the repertoires of recurring performances. [Note 11] Painting, sculpture, and architecture have existed in unique materializations, creating a problem of retrieval. They have achieved currency by enduring in a known physical place as a monument or part of a public museum collection. Much in our cultural heritage has therefore required storage by recurring performance or retrieval by personal pilgrimage. Neither means is conducive to flexibility or equity. Such media are limited with respect to use on demand – only in special circumstances could they serve one well to make a telling point. Multimedia changes that condition. It subjects a far wider range of communications to the full rule of random access, changing the repertoire of resources that people can store and retrieve effectively and use on demand to serve the needs of disciplined thought and inquiry. [Note 12] People can use digital media both to acquire ideas and to express their thoughts across diverse modalities such as the verbal, visual, auditory, and kinetic. As a result, educators are finding it increasingly difficult to favor the linguistic modality over all others and they need to broaden the norms of academic excellence to include intellectual recognition of skills now put too often at the periphery of the curriculum.

¶15

Third, changes in educational horizons emerge as digital technologies expand personal potentialities. Distributed processing and ubiquitous computing may or may not aggregate into artificial intelligence, AI in the strong sense, creating a species of machines that think and act in autonomous, self-sustaining ways. But they are clearly coming to function as a means for augmenting intelligence with respect to our human intellectual skills, AI in a weaker yet important sense. [Note 13] Computers are beginning to augment numerous intellectual skills, to the consternation of some. Word processors warn of anomalous spellings as they occur; spreadsheets allow anyone to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately; and databases permit those with good memory or bad to manage information sets that neither could handle on their own. All sorts of more specialized tools greatly lower the skill levels needed to participate effectively in wide ranges of cultural activity. Precision and exactness may become trivial proficiencies. Getting it right becomes easy, provided one does not get it wildly wrong through some accidental error. Such accidental error can be very portentous error. Hence, the ability to estimate and guess approximate results – to traditionalists an educationally suspect knack – is becoming an increasingly prized skill. As they encounter work by their students using such augmentations, educators are sensing that changes in information technologies can deeply transform the hallmarks of having acquired a decent education. Established answers to the question – What knowledge is of most worth? – may not pertain under the conditions of learning and knowing that emerge with the digital augmentation of human intelligence. [Note 14]

¶16

In sum, digital libraries, multimedia, and augmented skills change the limits of educational practice. Ponder this proposition, not as a prediction, but as an observation about the potentialities inherent in the communications innovations now taking place in our extended present. The basic proposition here is not so much a normative argument that educators should, for one or another reason, adopt the proposition that these developments are empowering the transformation of educational activity. Rather, the proposition is both more factual, although tentative. We are there, it seems. With digital information technologies, what is pedagogically possible changes. Possible educational attainments are different and greater than they have hitherto been. As educators, individually and in groups, encounter the changing conditions of communication under which they work, they sense that these changes inherently involve a profound alteration in the spectrum of pedagogical possibility. They do not adopt a new idea; they recognize an altered condition. With long-term developments like digital libraries, multimedia, and augmented skills, the spectrum of what may prove pedagogically feasible expands. [Note 15] Historical circumstances challenge us to implement the new possibilities effectively, with their humane worth fully consummated.

¶17

This challenge brings us to the second topic, the social construction of complicated historical developments. For the most part, American educators have looked to the psychological sciences for guidance with respect to practical issues of educational application, while expecting the historical and sociological sciences to yield at most informative descriptions. [Note 16] Such expectations are too low. We aim here at practical applications anchored in historical and sociological thinking. Technological innovation in communication and education is not primarily a psychological phenomenon, but rather a significant driver of historical, social, and cultural transformation. Educators can ground thoughtful reforms in active response to historical change. We need to recognize that historical and sociological understanding can be an essential foundation for practical action, a grounding for a distinctive mode of action that is difficult to practice but powerful in its consequences. Social action is complicated action. As educators experience changes in the communications constraints, they sense that these developments open the existing educational system to new possibilities. Individual educators may or may not welcome that condition, but critic and evangelist alike recognize that the new conditions open educational work to significant change. The new conditions, however, do not determine what is emerging. People engaging in diverse activities are determining what emerges through the social construction of digital learning communities. Educational structures from Kindergarten through graduate school and adult education are increasingly in flux. Structures are wrenching open to change; but human agents must determine the course that change can and should take, working through the interplay of effort by many different groups. To understand such interplay, and what may be at stake within it, let us reflect on the dynamics of social construction.