FUTURE LIVING

Seriously questioning the curriculum’s suitability in a fast-changing world of Web-based knowledge, parents rightly fret about their kids’ career success. About 8 million American and Canadian kids already do their learning at home. Almost 3 million people are taking online university degrees. These numbers will increase as more parents become telecommuters.

The problem with “factory” schools is that they force everyone to learn at the same speed, virtually killing most learning before it even happens.

The Web also makes homework fun. In many homes, the Web long ago displaced encyclopedias, dictionaries, and textbooks as the best learning tool. Most kids are online anyway. Children use the Web for homework and 85% of them complete assignments with information found online.

The Web is fantastic for letting people explore things on their own. It can turn every home into a living classroom. With PCs, homework is not “work” but fun! In Web Life households, the amount of time spent on homework increases by more than 2 hours a week. And the majority of students who use the Web for online research feel more confident about their assignments. Not surprisingly, surveys show that students with Web access also get better grades.

In contrast to mass education, PCs also offer a chance to move to a model of individualized learning. The Web offers a new form of interactive learning that allows almost anyone to learn virtually anything, anywhere, at any time – and at their own pace.

The Web creates just-in-time learning where students can “dial a tutor” – a life mentor – anywhere in cyberspace. ass education can never compete with that, and it inevitably will be replaced by individualized, lifelong e-learning via the Web.

We must take learning to the learner, at home. Rather than putting schools online, we should let the Web replace schools with “Webucation.”  As “webucation” catches on, school district by school district, it will re-invent learning.

You can also continue your adult webucation online, studying for diplomas and university degrees. Back in the 1920s, there still were four times as many people taking correspondence courses with private firms as were attending colleges and universities.

The Web thus also returns adult learning to the learner, at home. College students anyway take course notes on laptops, their keyboard clicks a constant companion to the lecture. Indeed, some websites hire university students to take lecture notes, and then put them online within 24 hours for free download!

Ultimately, the only people there will be
the Professor and one note taker!

True learning is independent of time and place, and is individual; it occurs not on a campus but in a student’s mind, through neural interaction.

• Online students can learn just as well if not better than those forced to sit in banked lecture halls.
• Online students cannot sit passively in the back row twiddling their thumbs.

A virtual Prof who can pose a question at any moment and, within seconds, get responses from every student – and know immediately who has (or who has not) replied.

This creates an interactive learning experience where everyone is in the virtual front row – and paying attention!