NLII Viewpoint, Fall/Winter 1997
Dede identifies four new forms of expression enabled by high-performance computing and communications: (1) knowledge webs, which complement teachers, texts, libraries, and archives as sources of information; (2) interactions in virtual communities, which complement face-to-face relationships in classrooms; (3) synthetic environments, or virtual worlds, which extend learning-by-doing in real-world settings; and, (4) sensory immersion techniques such as visualization, which present abstract, symbolic data in tangible form as powerful means for students to attain insights into real-world phenomena.
Echoing the theme of how technology expands choice, Dede comments, "Emerging, representational containers like hypermedia enable a broader, more powerful repertoire of pedagogical strategies." The result is to create a new alternative instructional paradigm--popularly referred to as distributed learning--which obviates the distinction between conventional distance education and conventional classroom education, leading to a reconceptualization of the mission, clients, process, and content of both.
In contrast to the popularly held view that the Net in itself constitutes a powerful educational tool, Dede makes the important point that "access to data does not automatically expand students' knowledge; the availability of information does not intrinsically create an internal framework of ideas that learners can use to interpret reality." To be motivated to master concepts and skills, students need to see the connections between what they are learning, the rest of their lives, and the mental models they already use. The role of the teacher is to structure learning experiences that move students from their assimilating of inert facts to their generating of mental models.
Perhaps the only point I would take issue with is Dede's insistence on keeping a balance between face-to-face, direct exchange and technology-mediated instruction: "Technology-mediated communication and experience supplement, but do not replace, immediate involvement in real settings." I believe there are many instances when mediated experience should, in fact, replace face-to-face interchange. An obvious example is the need to replace bad teaching with high-quality, personalized multimedia materials. There is little evidence that wholly mediated learning experiences detract from successful learning outcomes; in fact, the evidence is just the opposite. Insistence on balance can sometimes become an obstacle to fully exploring the potential of technology-mediated learning.
--Carol A. Twigg
The development of high-performance computing and communications is creating new media, such as the World Wide Web and virtual reality. In turn, these new media enable new types of messages and experiences; for example, interpersonal interactions in immersive, synthetic environments lead to the formation of virtual communities. The innovative kinds of pedagogy empowered by these emerging media, messages, and experiences make possible a transformation of conventional distance education--which replicates traditional classroom teaching across barriers of distance and time--into an alternative instructional paradigm: distributed learning.
New Media and Distance Education
What does the evolution of new media mean for distance educators? A medium is in part a channel for conveying content; new media such as the Internet allow us to readily reach wider, more diverse audiences. Just as important, however, is that a medium is a representational container enabling new types of messages (e.g., a picture is worth a thousand words). Because the process of thinking is based on representations like language and imagery, the process of learning is strongly shaped by the types of instructional messages we can exchange with students. Emerging representational containers like hypermedia enable a broader, more powerful repertoire of pedagogical strategies. The global marketplace and the communications and entertainment industries are driving the rapid evolution of high-performance computing and communications. Regional, national, and global information infrastructures are being developed to enhance our abilities to sense, act, and learn across barriers of distance and time. The ways in which information is created, delivered, and used in business, government, and society are swiftly changing. To successfully prepare students as workers and citizens, educators must incorporate experiences creating and utilizing new forms of expression, such as multimedia, in the curriculum. Information infrastructures offer channels for delivering these technology-intensive learning experiences to any place on demand.
The information superhighway metaphor now widely used to convey the implications of high-performance computing and communications is inadequate. Such an analogy is the equivalent of someone in 1896 declaring that the airplane will be the canal system of the 20th century. Backward-looking metaphors focus on what we can automate--how we can use channels to send conventional forms of content more efficiently--but they miss the true innovation: redefining how we communicate and educate by using new types of messages and experiences to be more effective. Because emerging forms of representation such as hypermedia and virtual reality are in the early stages of development, we are just beginning to understand how they shape not only their messages but their users.
Many people are still reeling from the first impact of high-performance computing and communications--shifting from the challenge of not getting enough information to the challenge of surviving too much information. The core skill for today's workplace is not foraging for data but filtering a plethora of incoming information. The emerging literacy we all must master requires diving into a sea of information and immersing ourselves in data in order to harvest patterns of knowledge, just as fish extract oxygen from water with their gills. As educators, understanding how to structure learning experiences to make such immersion possible is the core of the new rhetoric. Expanding traditional definitions of literacy and rhetoric into immersion-centered experiences of interacting with information is crucial to preparing students for full participation in 21st-century society.
Four New Models
Conventional distance education is similar to traditional classroom instruction except that it uses technology-based delivery systems. In contrast, emerging forms of distributed learning are leading to a reconceptualization of education's mission, clients, process, and content. This new instructional paradigm is based on shifts in what learners need to be prepared for the future as well as on new capabilities in the pedagogical repertoire of teachers. The following four new forms of expression are shaping the emergence of distributed learning as a new pedagogical model.
Knowledge Webs. Knowledge webs enable distributed access to experts, archival resources, authentic environments, and shared investigations. We are accustomed to asking a well-informed person in our immediate vicinity for guidance. We are accustomed to consulting printed information, watching a news program, visiting exhibits (such as a zoo or museum), and conducting informal experiments to understand how reality works. Often, these information-gathering and creation activities are constrained by barriers of distance, restricted access, scheduling difficulties, and the limits of one's personal expertise in investigation.
Using information infrastructures, educators and students can join distributed conferences that provide an instant network of contacts who have useful skills and immediate answers to questions. In time, these informal sources of expertise will utilize embedded groupware tools to enhance collaboration. On the Internet, online archival resources are increasingly linked to the World Wide Web, accessible through webcrawlers like Mosaic and Netscape. Eventually, artificial-intelligence-based guides will facilitate navigating through huge amounts of stored information.
Virtual exhibits that duplicate real-world settings (e.g., museums) are emerging; these environments make a wide variety of experiences possible without the necessity of travel or scheduling. Distributed science projects enable shared experiments to be conducted across time and space, with each team member learning more about the phenomenon being studied and about scientific investigation than would be possible in isolation. Combined, all these capabilities to enhance information-gathering and creation form knowledge webs.
However, access to data does not automatically expand students' knowledge; the availability of information does not intrinsically create an internal framework of ideas that learners can use to interpret reality. Although presentational approaches transmit material rapidly from source to student, this content often evaporates quickly from learners' minds. To be motivated to master concepts and skills, students need to see the connection between what they are learning and the rest of their lives and the mental models they already use. Even when learners are drilled in a topic until facts are indefinitely retained--we all know that the sum of a triangle's internal angles is 180 degrees--this knowledge is often "inert;" most people don't know how to apply the abstract principles they memorized in school to real-world problems. To move students from assimilating inert facts into generating mental models, teachers must structure learning experiences that highlight how new ideas can provide insights in intriguing and challenging situations.
The curriculum is already overcrowded with low-level information; teachers frantically race through required material, helping students memorize factual data to be regurgitated on mandated, standardized tests. Using information infrastructures as a fire hose to spray more information into educational settings would make this situation even worse. Without skilled facilitation, many learners who access current knowledge webs will flounder in a morass of unstructured data.
A vital, emerging form of literacy that educators must communicate is how to transform archival information into personal knowledge. However, moving students from access through assimilation to appropriation requires educational experiences that empower knowledge construction by unsophisticated learners, helping them make sense of massive, incomplete, and inconsistent information sources. Weaving learner-centered, constructivist usage of linked, online materials into the curriculum and culture of traditional educational institutions is the next stage of evolution for conventional distance education.
Virtual Communities. Virtual communities that provide support from people who share common joys and trials are a second way to enhance distributed learning. We are accustomed to face-to-face interaction as a way to get to know people, share ideas and experiences, enjoy others' humor and fellowship, and find solace. In a different manner, distributed learning using information infrastructures can satisfy these needs at any time and any place. Some people (e.g., those who are shy, reflective, and comfortable with emotional distance) even find asynchronous, low-bandwidth communication more "authentic" than face-to-face verbal exchange. They can take time before replying to compose a more elegant message and refine the emotional nuances they wish to convey. This alternative conception of authenticity may reflect a different dimension to learning styles than the visual, auditory, symbolic, and kinesthetic differentiations now used.
To dramatically improve learning outcomes by evolving new pedagogical strategies, distance educators need the information infrastructures that virtual communities make possible. Learning is social as well as intellectual. Individual, isolated attempts to make sense of complex data can easily fail unless the learner is encouraged by some larger group that is constructing shared knowledge. In addition, institutional evolution is a communal enterprise; educational innovators need emotional and intellectual support from others who have similar challenges in their lives.
Moreover, formal education comprises only 19 percent of how students spend their time. No matter how well schooling is done, achieving major gains in learning requires that the other 81 percent of pupils' lives be educationally fulfilling as well. This necessitates close cooperation and shared responsibility for distributed learning among society's educational agents (families, social service agencies, workplaces, mass media, schools, higher education, and others), which virtual communities can enhance. For example, involving families more deeply in their childrens' education may be the single most powerful lever for improved learning outcomes. Virtual parent-teacher conferences and informal social interchanges make involvement more likely for the parents who would never come to a PTA meeting or a school-based event. In many regions across the United States, community networks are emerging that, among other missions, enhance education by enabling distributed discourse among all the stakeholders in quality schooling.
Another illustration of a distributed-learning use for virtual communities is peer tutoring. This instructional approach aids all students involved both intellectually and emotionally but is difficult to implement in traditional classroom settings. Outside of school, virtual interactions enhanced by groupware tools readily enable such student-student relationships, as well as preparing their participants for later use of distributed problem-solving techniques in the workplace. Telementoring and teleapprenticeships between students and adults are similar examples of applying virtual-community capabilities to distributed learning.
Creating a sense of communion among a distributed group linked by low- to moderate-bandwidth networking is a complex challenge. Some people favor technology-mediated communication as their most authentic way of sharing ideas and enjoying fellowship. Most people prefer face-to-face interaction but find the convenience of immediate access to others often outweighs the disadvantages of distributed sharing of ideas, experiences, and support. Groupware tools, a capable moderator, and shared interactivity and control are important for sustaining the vitality of virtual communities, as is occasional direct contact among participants.
To succeed, distributed learning must balance virtual and direct interaction to sustain a sense of community among people. A relationship based only on telephone conversations lacks the vibrancy that face-to-face interchange provides. Similarly, while digital video will broaden the bandwidth of virtual interactions on information infrastructures, teleconferencing will never completely substitute for direct personal contact. We can expect a variety of social inventions to emerge that provide the best of both worlds; for example, national professional conferences may sponsor pre- and postconference virtual communities that enable participants to make the most of the limited face-to-face time they have. Through their expertise in encouraging interactivity across disparate geographic locations, distance educators have important insights to contribute in the evolution of virtual communities.
Synthetic Environments. Another emerging capability for enhancing distributed learning is shared synthetic environments that extend our experiences beyond what we can encounter in the real world. Information infrastructures are not only channels for transmitting content but also communal virtual worlds that students can enter and explore. Just as single-user simulations allow an individual to interact with a model of reality (e.g., flying a virtual airplane), distributed simulations enable many people at different locations to inhabit and shape a common synthetic environment. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense uses distributed simulation technology to create virtual battlefields on which learners at remote sites develop collective military skills. The appearance and capabilities of graphically represented military equipment alter second by second as the virtual battle, or "dial-a-war," evolves.
Distributed simulation is a representational container that can empower a broad range of educational uses (e.g., virtual factories, hospitals, or cities). Vignette 1 depicts a hypothetical future application that uses edutainment to promote distributed learning outside the classroom.
The vignette shows how education could be situated in a synthetic universe analogous to an authentic real-world environment, but one that is more intriguing. Moreover, such a distributed learning strategy leverages a huge base of sophisticated information technology--home video game consoles--as well as the substantial motivation inculcated by the entertainment industry.
Even without the added enhancement of visual imagery, the rise on the Internet of text-based shared synthetic environments (e.g., MUDs, MUSEs, and MOOs) illustrates people's fascination with participatory virtual worlds. The continual evolution of distributed simulations based on participants' collaborative interactions keeps these shared virtual environments from becoming boring and stale. In contrast to standard adventure games, in which the player wanders through someone else's fantasy, the ability to personalize an environment and receive recognition from others for adding to the shared context is attractive to many people. Part of why we read fiction or watch dramatic productions is to escape the ordinary in a manner that increases our insights or refreshes us to plunge back into real-world challenges. Shared virtual experiences on the Internet can complement books, plays, television, movies, and concerts by taking us beyond the daily grind--the challenge is to move past escapism into metaphorical comprehension and catharsis.
Sensory Immersion. In addition to distributed simulation, advances in high-performance computing and communications also can enable learners to experience sensory immersion in "artificial realities." Via an immersion interface based on computerized clothing and a head-mounted display, the participant feels that he or she is "inside" an artificial reality rather than viewing a synthetic environment through the screen of a computer monitor. Virtual reality is analogous to diving rather than looking into an aquarium window. Using sensory immersion to present abstract, symbolic data in tangible form is a powerful means of attaining insights into real-world phenomena. For example, "visualization" is an emerging type of rhetoric that enhances learning by using the human visual system to find patterns in large amounts of information. People have very powerful pattern-recognition capabilities for images; much of our brain is "wetware" dedicated to this purpose. As a result, when tabular data of numerical variables such as temperature, pressure, and velocity are transfigured into graphical objects whose shifts in shape, texture, size, color, and motion convey the changing values of each variable, increased insights are often attained. For example, graphical data visualizations that model thunderstorm-related phenomena (e.g., down bursts, air flows, and cloud movements) are valuable in helping meteorologists and students understand the dynamics of these weather systems.
As information infrastructures increasingly enable people to access large databases across distance, visualization tools can expand human perceptions so that we recognize underlying relationships that would otherwise be swamped in a sea of numbers. One good way to enhance creativity is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Adding sonification and even tactile sensations to visual imagery can make abstract things tangible, and vice versa. For example, expanding human perceptions (e.g., allowing a medical student to see the human body through X-ray vision like Superman's) is a powerful method for deepening learners' motivation and their intuitions about physical phenomena. My current research centers on assessing the potential value of sensory immersion and synthetic environments for learning material as disparate as electromagnetic fields and intercultural sensitivities.
Vignette 2 illustrates how sensory immersion might someday be combined with knowledge webs, virtual collaboration, and synthetic environments to enable powerful forms of distributed learning.
Young people like magical alternate realities, and the entertainment industry profits by providing amusement parks, video games, movies, and television programs that build on this fascination. Distance educators, too, can profit, in a different way, by building eerily beautiful environments for sensory immersion that arouse curiosity and empower shared fantasy, leading to guided inquiry. If we forswear distributed learning based on mystery, intrigue, and edutainment, we risk losing the generation growing up with high-performance computing and communications to the mindless mercies of video games.
Distributed Learning and Conventional Schooling
The distributed-learning vignettes may seem financially implausible; where will schools, colleges, and universities find the resources to implement these alternative pedagogical models? An analogy can be drawn to the competition among cable television vendors to receive exclusive franchises from communities in the early 1980s. Those educators smart enough to participate in that bargaining process received substantial resources--buildings wired for free, dedicated channels, and sophisticated production equipment--because the vendors knew public service applications would help determine who won. Similarly, during today's much larger war in the information services industry, distance educators who have innovative alternatives to "talking heads" instruction can find vendors happy to share the costs in exchange for help with the regulators, legislators, and judges who are determining which coalitions will manage the nation's information infrastructures.
However, as with business, the evolution of technology creates new markets and expanded competition forschools and colleges. As one illustration, prestigious universities may develop nationwide offerings of standard courses (e.g., Psychology 101) taught by telegenic, internationally recognized authorities. In such a strategy, high-production-value presentations would be coupled with frequent, interactive teleconferences; mentoring via electronic mail; and occasional face-to-face meetings of locally enrolled students led by a practitioner. This approach would not intrigue learners interested in a residential college experience but could be very attractive to students at commuter campuses. With sufficient economies of scale, this delivery method would have lower costs than our present system of similar standard courses duplicated at every institution. While many faculty would disparage this type of instruction, state legislatures could easily see such a model as an attractive way to cut their expenditures for higher education--a method applicable to every course for which a substantial textbook market exists.
If distance education evolves in this direction, colleges and universities will be reshaped as profoundly as American business has been altered by the technologies that enabled the global marketplace. Given their responsibilities for socialization and custodial protection, public schools would be less affected by the erosion of geographic monopolies through distributed-learning technologies. However, the home schooling and educational voucher movements see information infrastructures as an attractive alternative means of instructional delivery. If distributed learning is not incorporated into public school classrooms, teachers may find a decade from now that they have a smaller fraction of students enrolled and fewer taxpayers willing to provide funding.
Making the Transformation
Today, distance education is primarily used in selective situations to overcome problems of scale (not enough students in a single location) and rarity (a specialized subject not locally available). Such instruction is often seen as "half a loaf" pedagogy--it is better than nothing but not as good as face-to-face teaching. However, the global marketplace and emerging information infrastructures are changing this situation. Educators must help all students become adept at distance interaction because skills involving information-gathering from remote sources and collaborating with dispersed team members are as central to the future workplace as learning to perform structured tasks quickly was to the industrial revolution. Also, by increasing the diversity of human resources available to students, distributed learning can enhance equity and pluralism to prepare them for competition in the world marketplace. Virtual classrooms have a wider spectrum of peers with whom learners can collaborate than any local region can offer and a broader range of teachers and mentors than any single educational institution can afford. In a few years, high-performance computing and communications will make knowledge utilities, virtual communities, shared synthetic environments, and sensory immersion as routine a part of everyday existence as the telephone, television, radio, and newspaper are today. Distributed learning experiences will be seen as vital for all learners even when the same content could be taught face-to-face, and all teaching will have some attributes of distance education. Keeping a balance between virtual interaction and direct interchange will be important, however. Technology-mediated communication and experience supplement, but do not replace, immediate involvement in real settings.
High-performance computing and communications won't be a silver bullet that magically solves all problems of education; thoughtful and caring participation is vital for making these new capabilities truly valuable. Even then, a sloppily handwritten note delivered through surface mail may mean more to the recipient than an instantly transmitted, elegantly formatted electronic message. New media complement existing approaches to widen our repertoire of communication; properly designed, they need not eliminate choices or force us into high-tech, low-touch situations.
How a medium shapes its users, as well as its message, is a central issue in understanding the transformation of distance education into distributed learning. The telephone creates conversationalists, and the book develops imaginers who can conjure a rich mental image from sparse symbols on a printed page. Much of television programming induces passive observers; other shows, such as Sesame Street and public affairs programs, can spark users' enthusiasm and enrich their perspectives. As we move beyond naive "superhighway" concepts to see the true potential impact of information infrastructures, society will face powerful new interactive media capable of great good or ill. Today's "couch potatoes," vicariously living in the fantasy world of television, could become tomorrow's "couch fungi," immersed as protagonists in 3-D soap operas while the real world deteriorates. The most significant influence on the evolution of distance education will not be the technical development of more powerful devices but the professional development of wise designers, educators, and learners.
Chris Dede (cdede@gmu.edu) is currently on leave from the Graduate School of Education, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA and serving as senior program director at NSF on a new funding program titled Research on Education Policy and Practice.
Reprinted with permission from Learning & Leading with Technology, vol. 23 no. 7, pp. 25-30, copyright (c) 1996, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 541.302.3777 (Int'l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org. All rights reserved.