June 1997 — Features

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Computers in Education: A Brief History

Workers in many industries require a new and different type of training. Education and training, as conventionally practiced, fail to provide many individuals with the level of understanding and skills to be productive contributors in a world of fast-changing technology, says Barbara Means of SRI International. She is experimenting with the concept of distant mentoring as an alternative instructional tool that can bridge the gap between concepts stressed in formal education and the competencies required by the workplace. She has developed mentoring and advisory systems for use in high-technology industries. [22]

2. Learning-on-Demand

Gerhard Fischer of the University of Colorado is developing knowledge-based environments to support learning-on-demand. As job content changes rapidly in the new science-based information world, new pedagogies are needed to upgrade oneís knowledge and to develop skills that answer current and immediate problems on the job. [23]

3. Organizational Learning

The recent explosion of use of intranet facilities in the work environment has created a new awareness of the need for organizational learning. In complex work environments, workers must work collaboratively with other people and must also utilize the specialized knowledge of others in order to do their jobs. New organizational infrastructures are being formed to greatly enhance and extend what any single individual or organization can accomplish.

In the future, continuing education will require more than just additional courses. Learning and work are becoming indistinguishable. A new role for education will be to broadly gather information from distributed sources and provide it, on-demand, to individuals and organizations as they require it.

THE SUPERCOMPUTER AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

In the 1980s, supercomputers appeared on the scene. Supercomputers permitted the solution of previously intractable problems and the discovery of new phenomena. The merging of powerful computers with high-bandwidth communication networks made it possible, through distributed technologies, to allow global access to knowledge and information anywhere in the world.

This has greatly expanded access to information and increased the speed with which ideas are disseminated. It produces a new form of knowledge, an "infosphere," based on the interaction of people, information, technology and new social organizations. This evolving infrastructure will inevitably lead to a major restructuring of education.

In 1984, NSF established five supercomputer centers and connected them with a high-bandwidth backbone so that computers could talk to computers. In 1985, NSF built a national network, NSFNET, to make large systems available to all colleges and universities for research and education. It now links over 1,500 networks and well over 100,000 computers and over one million users all over the world. [24]