The fundamental obstacle preventing the effective integration of new technologies in education lies in the genesis of our current educational system. In that this system was devised to harness the powers of typographical media, it is inherently incompatible with the so-called “new media.” That being said, it may be possible to utilize the strengths of the infotech revolution if we accept that education must adapt to the emerging technologies and not the other way around.
This process of adaptation should not, however, be confused with a wholesale re-imagining. Though “the concepts of ‘ownership and participation’… along with ‘horizontal,’ non-hierarchical communication” are in many ways antithetical to the principals now valued in education, the primacy of face-to-face interactions should not be abandoned in favor of digitally mediated ones.
One way to achieve this balance between traditional community and technology would be to increase interaction in the classroom using computers. Ideally this would mean one computer for every student wirelessly connected to a digital blackboard at the front of the class. This would not only allow the professor’s lecture notes to be saved directly to the student’s hard drives, but also allow those students to contribute directly t the lesson simply by sending information to the board. With this system implemented each computer would contain at the end of a class the work of the entire classroom community thereby turning a vertical learning system into a horizontal one.
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