Today, there is an unimaginable increase in the amount of information which continues to expand at an explosive rate. In the midst of an information driven society, tomorrow's educational system must provide an environment where students are actively involved in learning and have access to the world's information sources. Working with information must become second nature. As new technologies become available for learning, a different kind of classroom develops. Technology serves as the backbone for these new learning environments. Through the use of technology, students experience greater access to information and resources. Technology allows for a new vision of what is possible.
In order for our educational system to offer this new vision, teachers must continue their education. Teachers are dedicated to their subject matter but our changing times demand an expanding of those content areas to relate to the world, job market, and personal benefits. As our students are changing their learning processes to compete in the global marketplace, teachers are also changing their teaching methods. This environment has lead our children to learn differently than we did years ago. Today's children grow up in a multi-media environment of hi-tech computer games, TVs VCR's, laser disks, karoke, video-telephones, FAX machines, and the information superhighway.
Teachers need to help students acquire a personal commitment to learning and gradually develop a self-guided interest and discipline to continue to learn. This sense of a personal learning responsibility will serve students in whatever work they choose to do beyond school and provides the basis for a lifetime of satisfying learning.
Empowering students to accept responsibility for their own learning is a critical factor in the student's intellectual development. Learners must be media literate, possessing a basic knowledge of how and why media images are chosen and the ability to apply critical analysis to them. Students encouraged to develop critical thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving approaches and cooperation are actively engaged in their own learning. They can discriminate appropriateness of material, level of difficulty, credibility, authority, relevant information; differentiating fact from opinion, propaganda and bias; recognizing errors and omissions, points of agreement and disagreement, and distinguish between cause and effect. Developing the ability to think clearly, critically, and creatively depends on a steady flow of information using voice, images, and print. The self-directed learning process allows the student to be an effective information user and to apply that knowledge in diverse situations. Students must know how to discriminate fact from fiction, how to decide what facts are relevant, and why one technique works above another. Students should learn how to pose questions, how to construct their own interpretations and ideas, and how to clarify and elaborate upon the ideas of others to acquire the understanding that can serve as the foundation for a lifetime of learning.
INTERNET is tomorrow's library with a massive amounts of information. The Internet allows students to become self-directed, knowledge navigators. Student explorers reach out and touch experts in the community, in the state, and around the world, as pioneers in the search for knowledge and as hands-on practitioners. For example, newsgroups help inform readers of subject areas. Students have the opportunity to comment on topics and pose questions. In a sense, when a question is posted the student is exposed to thousands of people who have an interest in the subject area and could be considered teachers. Wilson H. Craig Jr. stated that the front edge of the Information Age is rushing upon us with the speed of a cascading avalanche. And it is picking up momentum both in the number of new users joining Internet and also the increased speed and scope of the technical equipment to furnish data and graphics.
Mosaic is a tool which facilitates our children's new style of learning to easily access global information. At the dawn of our information era, information is relatively free or low cost. At this juncture, businesses and other organizations are looking for innovative ways to share information with educators and students. Several companies offer special instructional content such as Assignment Discovery, CNN Newsroom, and Art & Entertainment Classroom. The Learning Channel and The Weather Channel, offer educational programming 24 hours daily. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration makes available to schools, through NSFNET, the weather satellite pictures taken for use in space missions. ABC News uses archival news footage to produce educational, interactive videodiscs through ABC News Interactive, including videodiscs on the 1988 national elections, AIDs, and Martin Luther King. The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library, housed at Michigan State University, maintains recordings of persons and events of historical importance. The library, started in 1962, now contains over 50,000 recordings and is one of the largest collections in the world. Information from all levels of government are available. The Smithsonian Institute is in the early phases of electronically recording their graphics and photographs. Contacts with Scientists and Explorers of the Oceans, Antarctic, NASA in Space, photographs and other graphics about the US Civil War will soon be available from the Smithsonian Institute. Available via satellite from Spain are electronic copies of both data and graphics of thousands of original documents dating to the early European exploration of the Western Hemisphere. IBM has received a contract to process the content of the Vatican Library so that it may be available over Internet.
The retrieval of information is just the beginning of innovative classroom assignments which will allow our students to intellectually develop and grow. As teachers capitalize on the differences in students' abilities, interests, and learning styles through grouping of students, peer tutoring, mastery learning, or being self-oriented learners, involved learning takes place. Projects must be authentic problems or produce a worthwhile product or services with real audiences, not just the class. As Scott Willis states real anthropologists use gather information from reference books, questionnaires, interviews, original documents, and other specialists to publish their findings--all techniques students can use, too. Students will learn to effectively communicate the results of their research whether through writing a report or presenting a speech. A geography exploration may result in a multimedia report. Student's findings may be presented in a video presentation with computer generated animation. Research may result in a science experiment. Points of view may be used in a debate.
As education becomes more individualized, learners will be allowed to choose those experiences which fit their own learning styles. According to Dr. Shoshana Zuboff in In the Age of the Smart Machine, "... education means using information systems to encourage learning while someone is actually engaged in a task. The learning is embedded in the task." If students are to be prepared for a future characterized by change, they must learn to think rationally and creatively, to solve problems, to manage and retrieve information, and to communicate effectively. We are now Citizens of the Global Village. No longer confined by the four walls of the classroom.