13.5 FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

The field of distance education is in the midst of dynamic growth and change. The directions that distance education takes will depend on such factors as the development of new media and computing technologies, different methods of group learning and information gathering, and the development of government telecommunications policies.

While the phenomenal growth of electronic networks (exemplified by recent public attention to the Internet) has provided the primary technological thrust, several other emerging technologies also promise to drastically change the landscape of education, in general, and distance education, in particular.

13.5.1 Electronic Networks

The past few years have produced an explosion of electronic information resources available to students, teachers, library patrons, and anyone with a computer. Millions of pages of graphics and text-based information can be accessed directly on-line through hundreds of public, private, and commercial networks, including the biggest network of all: the Internet. The Internet is, in fact, a collection of independent academic, scientific, government, and commercial networks providing electronic mail and access to file servers with free software and millions of pages of text and graphic data that even thousands of elementary and secondary students are now using (McIsaac & Barnard, 1995).

For example, Mosaic and Netscape are two applications that have been made available on the Internet by the World Wide Web project, which enables users to browse around databases and supercomputers on the Internet using a hypermedia format. The World Wide Web project is a distributed hypermedia environment that originated at CERN with the collaboration of a large international design and development team that continues to work informally on the project to bring about new innovations on the Internet. Mosaic and Netscape, World Wide Web applications, are Internet-based global hypermedia browsers that allow you to discover, retrieve, and display documents and data from all over the Internet. For example, using these interfaces, learners can search the databases in museums all over the world that are connected to the Internet by navigating in a hypermedia format. Browsing tools such as these help learners explore a huge and rapidly expanding universe of information and gives them the powerful new capabilities for interacting with information. The Clinton-Gore administration came into office with plans for developing a new U.S. high-speed electronic network that will vastly extend the capabilities of current Internet services to learners through an information superhighway. The plan, The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1993), is ambitious and will have far-reaching effects on education by expanding access to information.

The Clinton administration has proposed a federal assistance program to help schools acquire the hardware necessary to access the Internet. The plan would include providing matching grants to schools through the Commerce Department to buy computers and other telecommunications equipment needed to provide access to the Internet and any new information infrastructure. Plans are to include all levels of education, and to create a federal task force to provide telecommunications standards for education (West, 1993).

The fiber-optic infrastructure in the United States that will provide the backbone of the NII is rapidly expanding through both public and commercial efforts. Fiber optics are capable of carrying much greater bandwidth technologies, such as full-motion video. These lines can provide two-way videoconferencing, on-line multimedia, and video programming on demand. Iowa, for example, has installed nearly 3,000 miles of fiber-optic cable linking 15 community colleges and 3 public universities with a 48-channel interactive video capability (Suwinski, 1993).

The ultimate goal of electronic networks is, as Christopher Dede (Dede, 1991) puts it, to '~widen the bandwidth of communication" between people regardless of their locations. Virtual communities of learners and educators are already sharing information resources, which are growing exponentially over the Internet and will grow even faster with a more extended international information infrastructure. Global "virtual libraries" are now emerging through connections between university research libraries (Rossman, 1992). These shared on-line public databases form the beginning of a comprehensive worldwide knowledge resource that is becoming available to anyone with access to a network gateway.

13.5.2 CD-ROM

CD-ROM is one of the most promising of the rapidly emerging technologies for education. An ever-increasing amount of text, graphic, and even full-motion video data is being recorded and distributed on CD-ROM. There is also a constantly expanding hardware base for CD-ROM as more and more personal computers are being shipped with CD-ROM drives and people are retrofitting PCs with the drives. As digital video compression improves, CD-ROM, or a similar optical-storage format, could replace videotape and laser discs as the most popular medium for distributing full-motion video programming, films, and telecourses.

13.5.3 Personal Digital Assistants

Apple's introduction of personal digital assistants (PDAs) has opened a new realm of freedom and power for computing and telecommunications users that could well have important implications for educational users. PDAs provide a screen that can interpret what is written on it with a stylus and convert that to text. These handheld devices currently are used to send and receive fax messages via cellular telephone technology, store calendars, store telephone numbers, and dial them for voice communications, and the devices can send and receive data with the user's desktop computer.

PDAs offer convenient audio and data storage for the relatively small amounts of information that professionals working in the field need. Although they are used for writing notes and keeping track of schedules, their future value may be more in the order of complete wireless telecommunications devices.

Combined with the rapid proliferation of cellular telephone service in the United States, these technologies can free learners from the need to be tied to a particular hard-wired location to access information. Additionally, a consortium of major telecommunications, electronics, and aerospace firms is currently planning a global satellite network that would offer direct telephone service without the need for satellite dishes to literally any location on Earth. This could provide not only voice but also direct-data and fax access to anyone anywhere utilizing PDA technology. How viable this will be for remote populations depends on the cost for this service, but the technology could soon be in place.

With the profusion of microprocessor technology in offices, homes, cars, and all forms of electronics, PDAs could someday become the ultimate remote control allowing people to access records on home or office computers and control functions of electronics in these locations using cellular-phone technology.

What we see in all of these technologies is that once separate devices are now merging to form information appliances that eventually will allow users to communicate seamlessly with each other, control home and office environments, and, most importantly of all, access most of the world's information, whether in text, audio, or visual form, at any place and any time.

13.5.4 Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) (see 15.3) offers the promise of training future students in ways that currently are far too dangerous or expensive. Virtual reality combines the power of computer-generated graphics with the computer's ability to monitor massive data inflows in real time to create an enclosed man/machine interactive feedback loop. VR participants, wearing visors projecting the computer images, react to what they see, while sensors in the visor and body suit send information on position and the head and eye movement of the wearer. The computer changes the scene to follow the wearer and gives the impression of actually moving within an artificial environment.

Medical students wearing a virtual-reality visor and data suit could perform any operation on a computer-generated patient and actually see the results of what they are doing. Pilots could practice maneuvers as they do now in trainers, but with far more realism. The U.S. Defense Department has already used primitive networked versions in their SIMNET training. This network connects and controls training simulators in the U.S. and Europe, so that hundreds of soldiers can practice armored maneuvers while the computer reacts to their judgments and allows them to see each other's moves as if they were all together (Alluisi, 1991).

Beyond practical training needs, virtual reality could put students on a street in ancient Rome, floating inside of a molecule, or flying the length of our galaxy. Many scientists are now beginning to understand the power of visualization in understanding the raw data they receive. Virtual reality will be used by students and professionals alike to interpret and understand the universe.

Individuals interacting in a virtual world will undoubtedly create unanticipated communities and possibly even new and unique cultures. There are concerns, however. Dede (1992) warns that "the cultural consequences of technology-mediated physical social environments are mixed." While providing a wider range of human experience and knowledge bases, these environments can also be used for manipulation and to create misleading depictions of the world.

13.5.5 Video Servers/Digital Video

The next step in the delivery of full-motion video is the advent of reasonably priced video servers. Video servers are essentially nothing more than a large hard drive fast enough to play back the digitized video signal. With current compression techniques, I minute of full-motion video and audio requires about 6 Mb of storage space.

One impressive example of how video servers are already being used for education is the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Museum visitors have instant random access to 35 hours of documentary film stored on a 60 gigabyte-drive array from any one of 25 touchscreen kiosks (Lauriston_ 1993). With the installation of greater bandwidth telecommunications lines, it is possible that in the near future students and researchers anywhere could have access to this and thousands of other global video servers from their desktops. A local area network within the museum provides a graphical front-end user interface at several kiosks for simultaneous patron access to any of the material.

Such servers could also provide access to filmed or videotaped footage for military trainers, flight simulators, or other industrial types of training needs. It also becomes possible, as video compression becomes more efficient and digital storage capacity becomes larger and less expensive, to place more and more of the historical visual archives of the 20th century in an accessible format on demand.

Indeed, we believe that the trumpeted phenomena of 500and 600-channel cable television will be short lived, if in fact it ever is implemented. Instead, consumers and learners will need only one channel into their homes. They will have access to thousands of video databases to order up telecourses, documentary footage, movies, shows, and news over fiber-optic cable.

Dialing into these resources should be no more difficult than calling a phone number. The main challenge will be how to navigate this sea of visual resources. Artificial intelligence software will be needed that will track all of the databases, their contents, and, most importantly, that will be able to learn what the users needs and interests are.

Current federal programs are providing funds to the National Science Foundation and NASA to develop the technology for turning massive amounts of audio, text, and visual databases into on-line "digital libraries" (Polly, 1993). Setting national standards and formats for these data could open the floodgates to the digitizing and subsequent public access to enormous amounts of information beginning with government agencies such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the collections of the Smithsonian museums.

13.5.6 Personal Computers

Personal computers are not new as technology, but they are rapidly evolving into new areas. During the past decade, PCs have been used in education to run tutorials and teach students to use the big three: word processing, database management, and spreadsheets. Now personal computers are poised to explode into new areas.

PCs will provide the hub for new electronic information appliances. These will control incoming video over cable and fiber-optic lines, handle both incoming and outgoing electronic mail over the Internet and the newer National Information Infrastructure, and even search globally for text, audio, graphic, and video files needed by the user. Children in many schools are already piloting some of these computer-based uses by navigating the Internet to find files, downloading information from the networks, and electronically copying and pasting reference material from network resources to their papers. They are also discovering the ease of communicating with their peers around the world through their computers.

As more people migrate to laptop computers, the additional portability makes it possible to carry all files, papers, financial records, and any other text-based materials. New software is making communication, writing, publishing, and learning easier. Further miniaturization and increased power of microprocessors will help control everything from cooking to telecommunications. As protocols are standardized so that they can work together, one personal network can become seamless as processors control fax, copying, and telecommunications functions, as well as environment and power utilization. Combining them with data storage devices like CD-ROM makes it possible to create more educational support for personal computers.

These new technologies can lead to more empowerment and thus more learner control of instruction for distance education students who have access to them. Access, however, may turn out to be the key problem. The Internet is currently paid for by federal government funds and its constituent members. Students at institutions on the network rarely have to pay for their accounts. Will this change when more and more commercial interests take part?

Students in developing countries with limited assets may have very little access to these technologies and thus fall further behind in terms of information infrastructure. On the other hand, new telecommunications avenues such as satellite telephone service could open channels at reasonable cost to even the remotest areas of the world. One very encouraging sign from the Internet's rapidly developing history is not only the willingness but also the eagerness with which networkers share information and areas of expertise. Networks have the potential of providing a broad knowledge base to citizens around the world, and those networks will offer opportunities for expanded applications of distance education. Research is just beginning to indicate how these newer technologies can benefit learners.