Students and educators are able to access more information, and at a faster rate, than ever before. In a world that is increasingly interdependent, economically and otherwise, students must learn more about the rest of the world, and new technologies enable them to do so more than ever before. In a world that increasingly relies on technology, students are becoming familiar with new technologies at an early age. The Internet gives people of all ages -- no matter where they attend school or even if they do not attend a formal school, direct access to a vast number of informational sources around the world. The rapid pace of technological change and the sheer volume of information available present new challenges to educators, students and others involved in learning.

Dr. Barbara Means and Dr. Seymour Papert have been perceptive observers of the expanding relationship between technology and education. Recently, they reflected on this phenomenon.

Question: Many children in the U.S. already have experience with computers (either through games or through "serious" learning programs) long before they enter school. How will this familiarity with technology affect the students and adults of the future?

Dr. Means: Students' increasing familiarity with technology use offers a great opportunity for schools, if schools and teachers have the wisdom and self-confidence to take advantage of it. Rather than trying to learn how to use every new piece of software and Internet tool themselves and how to do all of their own systems administration and troubleshooting, teachers can start to think of themselves as instructional designers and managers, with interested students contributing needed technology skills. Teachers who are confident enough to focus on the content, student diagnosis and assessment aspects of classroom activities while letting students who happen to have needed technical expertise help their peers master the technical aspects of using software or the Internet, have many more options for technology use in their classrooms. In addition, this kind of collaboration, with different individuals contributing different kinds of expertise, is a good model for the kind of "learning community" that many education reformers advocate.

An interesting example is Generation WHY, a Technology Innovation Challenge Grant project. This project is training high school students in how to work with teachers in helping to implement technology-supported instruction in their classrooms. The students receive training, not only in technical skills, but also in consulting skills to prepare them for working with their teacher clients.

There's a tremendous opportunity here as long as current school staff are not so anxious about "losing control" or "not knowing everything about class content" that they fail to take advantage of the burgeoning student skills. At the same time, there is a serious equity issue. Not all students have home access to computer technology and even with prices coming down the disparity is likely to continue. It is precisely because of this disparity that school access to using technology tools is an important public policy issue.

Dr. Papert: It is quite obvious that in the long run the lives of children will be radically changed as a result of the presence of computers or digital media or whatever the descendants of our computers will be called in the next generation. The most promising direction of change is acquiring greater independence as learners. Children will grow up knowing that they can learn what they need to know when they need to know it.

Q: Some educators feel that the presence of technology in society is a major factor in changing the entire learning environment. How can schools keep pace with technological changes, and what are the implications if they do or do not? Are they lagging behind? How important are questions of physical access to technology and the ability of educators to understand and convey understanding of the technology?

Dr. Papert: It is obvious that schools are lagging behind deep changes in our society. They are still organized on the model of production line factories. The deepest reason for the lag is neither the lack of physical technology nor the ability of educators to understand its meaning. The biggest reason is the built-in self-preservationist conservatism of the education system. To my mind the best analogy is the way the Soviet bureaucracy held on to power even though it could see that its economy was going downhill fast. It gave up only when it was in total collapse. I hope the education system is able to change before it collapses.

Dr. Means: Many have argued that schools lag way behind the business and government sectors in the effective use of technology. Certainly the average classroom today is not very different from the average classroom of 40 years ago and we would not say that about very many businesses. Nevertheless, if we take the age of the staff into account, I do think that many teachers are ahead of their peers in the general public when it comes to the use of technology. The main concern is not one of physical execution of the steps in using technology but rather a matter of seeing technology's potential to serve specific educational goals and having the time, creativity and courage to try to capitalize on that potential.

Many of us are calling on teachers to move away from cookbook approaches of lectures and totally scripted student activities toward teaching styles where students have much more latitude in exploring questions they care about, conducting research and creating presentations using technology tools where appropriate. Such approaches call upon teachers to be activity designers, consultants and coaches as well as skilled diagnosticians and evaluators of student work. It is the preparation for these roles that requires so much time and effort.

Q: How will technology change the nature of teaching, including what is taught, where it is taught and who does the teaching? For example, Arthur Levine of Columbia University asked, in a recent article, whether the ability to teach electronically means the end of the need for the physical plant called the campus. He suggested that the best instructors could teach across state boundaries and across large distances.

Dr. Means: As I've argued, if students use technology as tools and communications devices to engage in complex projects and investigations, teachers take on a role quite different from that which dominates today. Teachers will spend less time lecturing and doing rote grading and more time designing, facilitating and coaching.

The World Wide Web is opening up possibilities for new kinds of learning at a distance but I, for one, am not predicting that physical plants and face-to-face contact will wither away. Studies of groups of people collaborating through telecommunications have found repeatedly that an electronic group is more likely to maintain itself members they have had some face-to-face contact. Although we can now have synchronous communication through video conferencing and multi-user virtual environments, most of us still crave the nuances and subtleties of face-to-face contact.

Technology is a wonderful complement when such face-to-face contact is inconvenient, expensive, or impossible, but I believe that given a choice, people will continue to opt for opportunities to learn in a face-to-face (as opposed to virtual) social setting. I do think, however, that we will see exciting and engaging teaching (with course credit and degree granting) through the World Wide Web and other new technologies; this will put pressure on those providing in-person education and training services to do a much better job.

Dr. Papert: The best teacher is someone who brings personal knowledge, warmth and empathy to a relationship with a learner. The effect of the new technologies is to provide better conditions for such teachers to work directly with their students. Of course tele-teaching has a role, but I hope it will never be the primary form.

Q: Will advances in technology affect the involvement of the private sector in education, both in terms of support and expectations of the qualifications students should have when they graduate? Do you see more of an emphasis on technical, rather than liberal arts education, even before the university level?

Dr. Papert: I believe that the development of the knowledge-based economy will bring recognition that the most important qualification is not technical knowledge but the ability to learn and to work independently. To foster this we need to replace lock-step curriculum-driven schools with the kind of flexible learning environment made possible by the new technologies.

Dr. Means: We are seeing increased private sector involvement in education, particularly in major initiatives involving technology. In my experience, however, the private sector is not asking schools to turn out students with greater technical proficiency. They believe students can get those skills in post-secondary training or within industry itself. What they want are students with strong basic skills and with the "new basics" of learning to learn, collaboration and effective resource utilization.

Q: So far, we have only talked about access to the Internet. Would you speculate on how other technologies could affect American education?

Dr. Papert: I was not talking about access to the Internet. I was talking about something much deeper in which computers serve as materials for construction as well as providing access to knowledge. For example, in collaboration with the Lego company [a toy manufacturer], I and my colleagues at MIT have developed little computers that can be incorporated in the models that small children build. Thus they make behaviors as well as physical structures. When, as will soon happen, such devices become widely available, they will enormously increase every child's opportunity to know what it is like to carry out a complex project using very advanced ideas from engineering and from psychology.

Dr. Means: Computer modeling makes it possible for us to represent abstract concepts through concrete visual images that can be manipulated. We are only beginning to explore the tremendous potential of such technologies to make what we have regarded as difficult subject matters much more accessible; for example, teaching calculus to middle school students. There is tremendous potential here, if we invest in solid research and development, to understand how best to support learning with the new technologies available to us.

Q: How will the technologies we have been discussing affect other countries, especially underdeveloped countries which do not have the economic resources of the United States, Japan and Europe? Is the technological revolution, the information highway, something that will benefit primarily the more developed countries of the world?

Dr. Means: Many developing countries are starting to look at educational uses of technology as an important strategy for economic development. Learning from the lessons of more developed countries that invested in technologies and approaches that are now considered out of date, they are hoping to "leap frog" into advanced technology uses in ways that pay off for economic competitiveness. Also, you could argue that information technologies may have a greater effect in countries with limited resources. Consider the potential value of an Internet connection in a country that cannot afford to buy textbooks, let alone stock libraries for their secondary schools. Suddenly their students have access to a world of information resources!

Dr. Papert: This is not a matter for speculation about what will or will not happen. It is a matter for decision. I think it would be very foolish of the developed world to lose the chance to help the developing world acquire the benefits of the new kinds of learning environments. I myself have joined with Nicholas Negroponte and a few others to create an organization called the 2B1 Foundation to serve this purpose.

Q: Universities are already interactive in many ways, but do you think that education can be globalized, or will we continue to stay in our linguistic and cultural boxes?

Dr. Papert: It will eventually be globalized but the conservatism inherent in universities as organizations will probably result in wasteful delays.

Dr. Means: My experience in studying projects involving participants from multiple countries suggests that even given all the options afforded by the Internet, you need to give teachers a very compelling reason to want to collaborate with teachers from other countries and language groups to get any kind of sustained participation. There is great interest in international collaboration in concept, but a limited number of teachers that really follow through unless you find the right hook. But such hooks can be found, for example, in tracking the effects of El Nino across countries.

Q: We've talked about how technology is shaping education. Is education also shaping technology?

Dr. Papert: Unfortunately not. I think that it is shameful that the education world has allowed the computer industry to impose its idea of what a computer should be and how it should be used.

Dr. Means: Unfortunately, the education market is so dwarfed by the business and home technology markets that it has had a relatively small impact on the design of technology. The technologies we are using in schools today were designed primarily for offices. Experts in educational content and in how children learn are rarely involved in technology development. Improving upon this situation is one of the goals for the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies, a new research consortium consisting of SRI International, the University of California at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University and the Concord Consortium (with funding from the National Science Foundation). Through an Industry Partners Program, researchers in this center will be bringing their research on the most effective uses of technology and on student and teacher technology needs to the corporations that develop new technologies and software.

Q: Dr. Papert, you stated (in testimony before the United States Congress) that the cost of technology is exaggerated in the minds of education policy makers. Could you please elaborate?

Dr. Papert: The cost is a matter of simple arithmetic. The cost of giving every child a $750 computer with a five-year life would add only 2 percent to the average cost of educating a child in the United States. With a little R&D [research and development], the computer industry could easily halve or quarter that number.

Q: Dr. Means, one of your books is entitled Technology and Education Reform: The Reality Behind the Promise. Do you think there's any danger that expectations for results are too high, or, conversely, too low?

Dr. Means: John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has underwritten many of the most successful new technology start-ups over the last 15 years, argues that the Internet is seriously under-hyped. We do not yet have a full appreciation of how this system of communication will change our homes, offices and schools. He may be right. The problem is that technology-driven change often is not linear. It is very difficult to foresee on the basis of extrapolating present trends. I don't claim any great accuracy as a visionary, so I'll give you an extrapolation of what I see now.

Many members of the general public have a strong belief in technology's power to transform education either because of technology's "mystique" or because they have experienced technology's power in other settings. There are problems when technology is brought into school systems with high expectations but no clear thinking about how or why it is to be used. The power is not in the technology per se but rather in the social and instructional context it can support. The opportunity to infuse technology into a school can become a catalyst for rethinking how the school should structure its use of time and personnel, what it's trying to teach students, and how its staff believes students learn and can demonstrate their understanding.

Q: Finally, perhaps you could summarize your thoughts on technology and education -- where we were, where we are, and where we are likely to go in the future.

Dr. Means: Taken together, the continued exponential advances in information technology, the huge interest in network technologies, our increasing understanding of human cognition, and the widespread concern for educational quality provide the elements for what could be a decade of educational revolution led by technology.

New network technologies could foster collaborative learning between peers anywhere, involve new players in the support of student learning (e.g., scientists, retirees, experts), and end the isolation of classrooms from real-world concerns and resources. It should be possible to offer a rich selection of world-class courses and learning activities to anyone, anywhere. Informal learning through collaboration with people who have important kinds of expertise should be a major facet of learning in schools, on the job, and at home.

All of this should be possible, but we are not yet there either on the technology or the organizational infrastructure front. Electronic conferencing software has been awkward and largely restricted to text. Threaded discussion groups have proven difficult for novice learners to understand and use. We are just beginning to see applications that combine synchronous and asynchronous communication in ways that support learning and professional development (see for example, SRI's TAPPED IN, a virtual teacher professional development institute, which can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.tappedin.sri.com/info/about.html). The next decade is sure to be an exciting one both in terms of technological advances and in terms of increased knowledge gained from early efforts to harness these capabilities in the service of education.

Dr. Papert: Let us make a comparison with some other technologies. When the movie camera was invented, its first use was pretty close to putting the camera in front of a stage on which actors performed as they always had. It took a long time for camera-aided theaters to turn into what we now know as cinema and television. The use of technology in education is mostly at the first stage, in which technology is used to enhance what people did before without it. In the next two decades, we will begin to see change in how people think about learning as deep as the changes technology has brought to how we see entertainment. This will be much, much more than putting a lot of computers in otherwise unchanged schools teaching an otherwise unchanged curriculum.

It is impossible to predict what the school of the future will be. History always outsmarts the futurists. But it is easy to predict what it will NOT look like. I am sure that the practice of segregating children by age into "grades" will be seen as an old-fashioned, and inhumane, method of the "assembly line" epoch. I am sure that the content of what they learn will have very little in common with the present day curriculum.

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Dr. Barbara Means is Vice President of the Policy Division of SRI International, a California-based research, technology development and consulting firm that recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a Center for Innovative Learning Technologies. Dr. Means is co-author of Technology's Role in Education Reform (1995), and editor of Using Technologies to Support Education Reform (1993) and Technology and Education Reform: The Reality Behind the Promise (1994), among other works.

Dr. Seymour Papert is a researcher at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Papert headed the Media Lab's "School of the Future" project, which included studies on "Children's Learning of Computational Ideas in a Multicultural School" and "Technological Fluency," the latter focusing on the study and development of technological fluency in pre-college students. An early pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Papert co-founded MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1960s. He is creator of the LOGO programming language and author of several books and articles, the most recent being "The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap" (1996).