Reading the essays on technology and the year 2020 by members of our class seemed to reveal some reoccurring themes. Globalization and multicultural contact and cooperation as well as distance learning are the two most common visions for higher education. This would be fantastic and is a laudable vision of what technology could help education to achieve. The key word here is help. Technology will do very little for us unless we have that vision independently. My concern is that rather than closing the gap between social strata, technology will widen it. As technology becomes more essential to higher education, those students that have already received technological training will have an increasing advantage. Families that can afford the newest computers and training for their children while they are young will be able to secure a better college education for their students than economically disadvantaged students.

As justification for this argument let's look at ten-year-old technology. How many ATs, XTs, 286s through 486s, Apple2s, GSs, Macintoshs, etc. have been trashed, or sent to schools where the are largely unused because they are "ancient" technology. However, this is the technology that is truly available in education (public) because it is affordable. A good question for education is how can we practically use these tools to improve education for more people.

Perhaps a pertinent question for education in technology is how can we use technology to make technology available to more students. It is an under-exaggeration to state that most people on the planet do not have access to computers, nor do they have a dream of using technology. Unfortunately we will not be able to interact with this culture nor to understand them with our new technologies, unless we direct massive efforts to change this situation.

If we believe that technology will be able to provide better education to more people, this is a step in the right direction, but it is only an impulse. A better question is how can we use available technology to provide a better education to more people right now, and turn that initial impulse into a purpose.

A corollary might be: How will the vision of technology in 2020 affect education in the year 2025.

Ken Smith

September 30, 1998