In working with institutions and companies on new uses of computing, I have encouraged the view that the future is more often invented than discovered. To help invent the future, we envision ways of integrating people, processes and technology. This vision - called the system-after-next - serves as a guidepost to draw organizational development. The result is a kind of planning from the future back to the present, which I believe can be helpful in the integration of technology, teaching and learning.
We are strongly inclined to use new technology for old purposes. For example, the first cameras were used to emulate painting. A photograph was a still life, a landscape or a portrait - standards from the painter's repertoire. Only when photographers exploited aspects of camera technology that are fundamentally different from paints, brushes and canvas, did they create photographic art. Current uses of computers in the classroom generally reflect earlier times and technologies. With the system-after-next, we try to imagine expressive uses of the technology - truly new behaviors that computing permits.
With technology that is in hand or simulations of technology that will be available in the immediate future, we can create a prototype of the system-after-next. We often create a short video showing the new way of working the prototype allows. The video, along with the prototype itself, stimulates more thinking about the interplay of people and processes with the new technology. This thinking, in turn, can lead to the refinement of the prototype and further elaboration of the system-after-next.
As it emerges, the envisioned system-after-next may challenge our notions of quality, tradition and even knowledge. For example, we might be planning a new electronic classroom. But as we envision the new facility, its interconnection through networking to a world beyond the school raises questions about the way we teach. Prototypes and videos deepen our understanding and broaden our purpose. We move from the electronic classroom to a reinvention of the education process through shifts in the location, pace, timing and style of teaching and learning.
The Knowledge Machine
Papert's idea of the Knowledge Machine is a system-after-next - a conception of the use of media technology in learning that upsets conventional wisdom about the foundation of education.
"The role of the Rs in elementary education used to be beyond question. How effectively could one teach geography, history and science to students who could not read? Looking back, we cannot seriously fault these arguments within their historical context. But looking forward, we can formulate new arguments beyond the imagination of 19th century thinkers, who could hardly have conjured images of media that would provide modes of accessing and manipulating knowledge radically different than those offered by the Rs. Nor could they have formulated what I see as the deep difference between education past and future: In the past, education adapted the mind to a very restricted set of available media; in the future, it will adapt media to serve the needs and tastes of each individual mind. . . . It will take time for the vast quantities of information available in print to be recast for such a machine. But it will happen; and when it does, the Knowledge Machine (a metaphor for much more varied forms of media) will provide easier access to richer and fuller bodies of knowledge than can be offered by any printed encyclopedia. Admitting the prospect of Knowledge Machines does not imply that people will no longer need to read. But reading will no longer be the unique primary access road to knowledge and learning, and it should therefore no longer be the dominant consideration in the design of School. Demoting reading from its privileged position in the school curriculum is only one of many consequences of Knowledge Machines."
Papert's Knowledge Machine is a conception that involves an expressive use of technology in education that would induce fundamental changes in the ways in which people work and learn.
At Rice University, our conception of the system-after-next emphasizes collaborative knowledge management. We envision an Electronic Studio which - like more traditional, physical environments - would foster collaboration on ideas, designs and productions. The stage of the Electronic Studio would be a shared electronic environment; its props and sets, collections of multimedia objects; and its productions, collaborative constructions for teaching and learning which transform written theories into demonstrations and models into simulations.
A teacher could "carry" class notes and multimedia projects into the Studio to share with students. Students (or other teachers) could put multimedia sticky notes on the walls of the Studio to describe ideas and works in progress, or could build discussion rooms dedicated to particular problems or topics. One person could guide others from across the network on a "tour" through the Studio, highlighting places and objects of interest. Tours could complement video, audio and textual conferencing in consultation and distance learning.
We can build first instances of the Knowledge Machine and the Electronic Studio today with confidence in stronger technological underpinnings in the near future. In the face of organizational, financial, cultural and even technological barriers, prototypes of the Knowledge Machine or the Electronic Studio can inform much of our planning as we move toward the future.
Creating the System-After-Next
Having worked with the concept of the system-after-next in a number of different settings, I can suggest several behavioral aspects of technology that are particularly relevant to teaching and learning. These generally focus on changes in community and changes in knowledge.
Printed books dramatically expanded the intellectual community of Western Europe from the 1500s on. Through the heightened interchange of information and ideas that mass-produced books permitted, virtually all aspects of organizational and social life were affected. The more recent development and global proliferation of radio, television and movies has fundamentally altered cultures and nations through the mixing of ideas, mores and reflected experiences. Now with the rapid expansion of telecommunications, opportunities are emerging for the development of new forms of virtual communities.
Although the impact of information technology on the functioning of individual teachers and students is more clearly evident, group activities may also change dramatically under its influence. Information technology can make schools more permeable to the flow of information and to the exchange of knowledge. Tools for information sharing and integration - the foundation of virtual communities - can foster cooperation and innovation within and across schools, and encourage greater autonomy in teaching and learning, substituting communications for transportation, and giving teachers and students interactive access to remote centers of expertise. In the system-after-next, networking will cross, and even destroy traditional school boundaries.
For example, virtual communities could give teachers what they most want from computers - access to other staff, to outside experts and to curriculum. Interested teachers already seek out informal learning experiences to complement other, more "official" offerings by the school or district. They share stories, ideas, suggestions and problems in the "teachers' lounge" - or any setting in which they have time for informal, social interaction. The knowledge they share about teaching and learning in informal settings complements - and may even contradict - the formal statements of the mandated curriculum. This pattern concurs with studies of other work settings that show that people develop their own ways of learning that augment the more formal methods of the organization.
New teachers learn much of what they need to know from this communal interaction. As newcomers, they may start on the periphery of the group, but as they begin to understand the stories and contribute their own, they move into fuller participation. Brown and Duguid have captured the close interconnection of working, learning and innovating in their notion of community-of-practice. A shared space is generally important for communities-of-practice: a blackboard, a napkin, a rehearsal room or a laboratory. We can create electronic analogues of these spaces to support new, distributed communities-of-practice.
Finding New Answers
As we elaborate an idea such as this for the system-after-next, current technical capabilities will determine our answers to important questions. For example, how can the envisioned system give community members different ways to acquire, manage, share and utilize information? How can it support the complex social webs within which work takes place? Can it accommodate the paradigms, procedures, customs, methods, languages and attitudes of human interaction? Can it represent the relationships of community members to specific events and bodies of information? Can it help users explore past experiences and distill important similarities?
The consideration of such questions in the context of the system-after-next will sharpen our appreciation of the interplay of people, processes and technology in teaching and learning.
Virtual community is an important starting point, but we need to trace out the design process in each educational setting to understand important details. Cycles of iterative prototyping generally expand the thinking about communities and their work. (For example, "If we have the technology to do things in this new way, then we can really change the process. But that may mean we could use different people, etc.") As this creative spiral proceeds, we may frame important questions about knowledge itself in the system-after-next. As our conception of the system-after-next evolves from an electronic classroom to a virtual community, we will face important questions about what exactly is being taught and what is being learned. Our envisioned uses of computing may undermine traditional conceptions of the organization and nature of knowledge.
For example, educational life now depends on a flow of paper documents, but computing and networking show promise of matching some of the current advantages of paper. In an envisioned system-after-next, multimedia can engage more of our senses, will challenge paper as the preferred medium for documents. Just as virtual communities break the bounds of space and time in the system-after-next, documents will break constraints of linearity. New webs of textual, graphical, video and audio elements could emerge to support the new educational communities.
Powerful computer graphics bring imagery to the fore in a system-after-next. The extensive use of visualization induces a shift toward more metaphorical, image-based knowledge. Such a shift would be in keeping with the history of this century, which has shown that painting, sculpture, and even architecture have proved more malleable than language. And with modern graphics, even text itself with its changeable fonts, is a form of visualization. So in a system-after-next, knowledge flowing through an intricate electronic web of computers and networks becomes increasingly image-based. New ideas about knowledge itself will be needed.
Schools and universities need to view information technology both as an aid to current practice and as a new conception of the world - to balance concern for today's business with invention of the future. In its expressive use of technology, the system-after-next complements planning with envisioning - trying to see, not from the present to the future, but from the future to the present. Without this envisioning, information technology in schools and universities will only rigidify the past.
G. Anthony Gorry is director of the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning at Rice University. [email protected]