One of my friends once told me that she couldn't imagine the days that there will be no teacher, no school, but only computer at everyone's home. What she is worried about is that computer will substitute teacher's role, school, as a physical space, will disappear, and all the teachings will be delivered and conducted through network.

Is this a dream or a nightmare? Is this technology called the fourth media going to join the rank of the big three - print, radio and television, as the means of human communication in the second millennium, as envisioned by Paul Bonnington (1995)? It is difficult to create an argument for/against it. Since networking is still in the rudimentary phase, it may be too early to tell how it affects our schooling system. However, we cann't deny that the information age is fast dawning on us. The rapid growth of advance technology has started to affect our working environment and our approach to learning in a fundamental way.

In my vision of education in year 2020, there will be more and more people increasingly incorporating this technology into their curriculum and research, or into the organization of their work, or into educational process. The boundary and/or barrier of communication will become increasingly blurred and a global informational village will gradually be formed.

Here I present several perspectives of what our education may be like under the influence of change of technology in year 2020.

1. More on-line programs offered by universities: For example, Standford university has started a certificate program on-line. It is a blessing for people around the world who would like to take it for the purpose of continuing education or other vocational trainings. And I believe that there will be more schools following her footstep. Education is not restricted to a certain place or a certain time anymore. Students can easily access to any site in the world for different purposes of learning or whatever. Such trend will also squeeze out smaller local colleges that has been serving the same purpose on site.

2. Lifelong learning: In the information age, the computer illiterate may be difficult obtaining or maintaining job. For job security and, learning computer or attending on-line programs become indispensable to everyone.

3. Incooperating technology into curriculum (for information searching, exchanging, and communicating, examining): There are a lot of projects or experiments demonstrating how incooperating technology into curriculum can effectively facilitate students' learning. In the year 2020 or beyond, such practice will not only become usual, it will become necessary!

4. Globalization: Few decades ago, the invention and popularity of airplanes make it possible for every human to reach every corner of the world. However, flying usually takes many hours or even a day to get to the destination. Through the internet, only a couple of seconds are needed to take a visit to Australian government web site to understand her system and people. By the synchronous video conferencing, U.S. students can talk to the students in France for French learning. By IRC (Internet Real-Time Chat system), people from different countries can chat, make friends or learn their cultures. People may start to have deeper appreciation of multiculturalism. However, unfortunately such intense exchanges will also no doubt make the world more uniform.

5. University professor will need to spend less time on classroom teaching and more time on research and communication.

6. Internationally, language is always a barrier in cross-culture communication. Information network is going to speed up the adaptation of a single global language which is most likely English. In the process, some culture which has weaker voice in the internationally technology arena and its language may be facing endangerment. In addition, in education, the second barrier is the government regulation. Academic powerhouse such as Stanford or Princeton is going to use their prestige to make other country's regulation less effective. There is going to be a struggle between the international conglamorate of educational institutions against the local regulating agencies, much like what is happening in the financial sector globally now.