1.1 Background
During the late 1980s, personal desktop computers with powerful applications became prevalent in almost every
sector of society, and computing played integral roles in many people's lives. Yet the infusion and impact of
computers in education were amazingly small when compared to business and government. Many industries began
to experience the effects of this disparity, and spoke out in both public and political arenas. Industry leaders
and government officials produced distinctly practical rationales for the integration of computers into educational
settings. They suggested that technically sophisticated employees were becoming critical to compete successfully
in the emerging global information economy, and the United States was in trouble with respect to the competitiveness
of its products and services. The slow rate of technology transfer to education was often identified as part of
the problem (King, 1989).
The pressures resulted in organized efforts to determine how computers could be introduced into education.
The studies focused on what had gone wrong in the past, and what could be done to insure that future efforts
would be more successful. One highly publicized attempt to address these questions across all levels was
described in a report called POWER ON: New Tools for Teaching and Learning (OTA, 1988).
The report found that the number of computers in education
had been steadily increasing, but their numbers and quality were still too low for them to have a large
impact across the curriculum. The authors of that report relied upon beliefs about the problems in past
initiatives to support the following recommendations for future efforts:
- expanding the amount and capability of technology in schools to increase student access;
- providing training and support for teachers;
- encouraging innovation and improvement in educational software; and
- supporting research, development, demonstration, and evaluation, with emphasis on ties between
research and the classroom.
(OTA, 1988, p. 4)
Broad suggestions like these are based upon extensive analysis of reports from older projects and highlight
problems that have thwarted previous efforts. Addressing these issues are prerequisites for insuring the
success of advanced educational computing initiatives in the future. The power of publicity and changes
in the political arena may allow these suggestions to be implemented in the near future. Unprecedented
degrees of funding and support are now being appropriated by the United States Government to insure that
advanced distributed computing environments become widely available during the mid to late 1990s
(Gore, 1992). This national initiative is called the National Education and
Research Network (NREN). The goal of this effort is to enhance national competitiveness and productivity
through a high-speed, high-quality network infrastructure that supports a broad set of applications and network
services. As the name indicates, educational institutions are to be major benefactors of this effort.
The following are two of the goals of the network that could lead to direct benefits for education:
- create and facilitate educational and research collaboration and increase technology transfer among government, industry, and education, regardless of the participating institution's size or location;
- provide standardized access to and stimulate development of information sources, instruments, and computing resources whose characteristics make them national assets worth sharing. (King, 1989, p. 63)
The NREN and related projects should allow educational institutions at all levels to test the value of
computers through large scale implementation of today's most advanced computing technology. These environments
will include networked computing systems that support two or more types of workstations or personal computers,
and software with highly integrated functions capable of accessing and manipulating many widely distributed
databases of linked text, graphics, sound and video. The telecommunications implicit in these conceptions of
computer use, such as hypermedia, also carry with them a revolution in the computing paradigm like that which
occurred in the shift from mainframe computers to microcomputers in the 1970s and 1980s.