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by Ken
Freed Developing
the interactive educational media market may be
accelerated with high quality 'edutainment. Opening
before our eyes is a new vision of educational
content on the TV and PC screen. In our imaginations, no
longer do we lean back on our sofa to absorb
learning like a mindless sponge, helplessly hoping
for mindfulness. Instead, we see ourselves actively
engaging in the learning process. We see ourselves
interacting with lessons, learning with each of our
five senses and beyond. The media is our portal to
worlds we enter in wonder. We can imagine new media
showing us whatever we want to learn, whenever we
want to learn it. We can picture tossing aside the
remote and actually talking to the TV, saying,
"Show me the documentary that won all the major
awards last year, you know, the one about global
warming, the loss of rain forests and sea
plankton." The machine understands our speech,
references indexes, and moments later the content
we want springs to life on a wide-screen,
flat-panel display in breathtaking digital
color. In our imaginations, we
enjoy and value all the benefits of education
on-demand. We wish the future was here already
because deep down inside, we all are lifelong
learners. We just want learning to be easy,
personalized. This vision is inviting, yet we must
live and work in present time. And today, the
reality stays apart from the dream. What blocks fulfillment?
Not the technology alone. Apart from voice
recognition, still perhaps a decade away from the
intelligence described above, all the key
technologies needed for interactive educational
media are now available or coming on the
market. The global infrastructure
of interactive digital media is being constructed
now. Many years of visionary thinking finally is
starting to pay off. Today's long-awaited arrival
of interactive TV can help make the case:
The PC and TV are
converging. On the TV
screen itself, electronic program guides are tested
and ready to help us find and select any kind of
content a system operator cares to provide, from
junk to quality. Attached to a bundle of fibers,
the next generation of digital file servers stands
able and ready to handle the traffic volumes for
services like video-on-demand. When educational
programs aren't free, backend conditional access
systems have proven their capacity for managing
dynamic pay-per-use billing. A penny for your
thoughts. The technologies critical
for interactive educational media are ready and
waiting. What's missing is not the means but the
willingness to use those means. Education does not appear
likely to be a tremendous moneymaker at first,
based on our past experiences. That's why the
network operators are consecrating digital
interactivity to delivering entertainment. Yet the
masses do want knowledge served with their pabulum.
Light "edutainment," sadly, may be the best a
network will carry. The TV programmers keep us
interested, yes, but why stop there? Be glad the TV
teacher is funny, but why play to the lowest common
denominator? When WB's Histeria lets their
satire get sublime, a thing too rare, a bulb lights
above our heads, our eyes sparkle. We learn
something useful to our lives. Recall the 1961 speech by
Newton Minnow about television becoming a "vast
wasteland," a cultural desert where public service
is neglected for profits and popularity by an
industry held in thrall to the "Dictatorship of
Numbers." Will interactive media suffer the same
sorry fate? If we build the education market in
each generation, the demand for quality educational
content will yield a thriving industry. We now live in a
frightened world struggling to cope with the
"future shock" caused by so much innovation
happening so fast. Interactive media may be the
most powerful tool for our enlightenment since
Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, so we owe it
to ourselves and to our children to consider the
social effects of what we do now. Will our decisions be
guided by visions of hope? Will interactive media
fulfill its highest and best potential? Will we
stay true to our souls? Our choices today make a
difference tomorrow. (c)
1998-99
by
Ken
Freed.
From a 'TechBytes' ..
New
in the CASTING
THE NET OVER GLOBAL
LEARNING An
comprehensive overview of critical advances in k-12
and higher education along with corporate training
and lifelong learning.
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