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The eyes of the school children glisten with anticipation. Their fingers arch lightly over their computer terminals, waiting to tap out solutions to ever more difficult problems appearing on the screens before them. Any school teacher would be thrilled by such concentration and receptiveness. But these children are not in school; they're playing games in a video arcade.
Today's schoolchildren have grown up immersed in a world of computers and other information technologies. They play video games; they listen to music on digital compact disks; they help their families program the computerized controls of videocassette players. These experiences have given children a different way of interacting with information compared with previous generations. Many familiar communications media-including television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, and books-are essentially linear. The users of those media have little if any control over the information they receive. They follow the flow of information from beginning to end along a path determined in advance by the providers of the information.
With today's technologies, the consumers of information can engage in dialogues instead of simply absorbing monologues. They can interrupt and redirect the flow of information. They can modify the complexity of information, the speed at which it is communicated, and its manner of presentation. They can control the elements of sophisticated multisensory experiences, combining audio, video, text, and graphics into a single immersive reality.
Information technologies are making it possible to create realistic new worlds filled with previously impossible experiences. In the virtual physics laboratory being developed by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Houston, students don a head-mounted display, headphones, and a data glove to enter an artificial reality where the laws of physics are under human-not nature's-control. Using the data glove, students move a disembodied hand through a room filled with simple physics experiments. They can turn gravity off or create antigravity and watch the effects on their surroundings. They can eliminate friction or slow the passage of time. With further development of the lab, students will be able to ride a light ray to experience relativity or participate as a molecule in a chemical reaction.
This kind of experience can be one of the best possible forms of education. Cognitive research has confirmed a commonsensical conclusion: students learn best when they are engaged with what they are studying, when they are making decisions, when they are thinking critically. In the Virtual Physics Laboratory, for example, students are constantly choosing how they want to interact with the computer-generated reality. By experiencing how the laboratory responds to their actions, they can gain an understanding of physical phenomena that is difficult to convey through traditional physics textbooks and laboratories.
Today there is a large and growing gap between the scant technology available in most schools and the rich technological environments students experience away from schools-and the gap is growing as societal change accelerates. Seventy-five percent of Americans now work in service and information jobs, with nearly half of all Americans involved in the generation, dissemination, and use of information. New technologies are creating workplaces where creativity, cooperation, and critical thinking are valued at all levels of an organization. If American education cannot equip young people with the skills they will need in an information-based world, they will not be able to play a productive role in society.
What can fill the technology gap between the in-school and out-of-school environments? It would be far too expensive to outfit every classroom with the most advanced technology. Instead, schools need to take advantage of the technology that increasingly permeates society. Doing so calls for rethinking many of the basic ideas behind education.
The technology to meet this challenge already exists and is in use outside of schools. This report is not about putting more computers into schools. It is dedicated to the idea that schools have to be reinvented to take advantage of the technology that is already ubiquitous in our everyday lives.
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Children have always been explorers, born with the ability to interact and learn about the world. But children today are growing up in a different world. Those between the ages of 3 and 18-and especially children entering school today-are being hailed as the "Nintendo Generation." They live in a world that is increasingly interactive, communications intensive, and knowledge based. They are standard bearers in the technological revolution, having never known anything else. Because of their ease in and with the information age, society needs their active involvement and interaction.
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