Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Instructional Computing in 2001: A Scenario.

1982; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 63; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-6487

William H. Pritchard,

Open Education and E-Learning

Jim yawned and stretched as he pushed himself away from the comsole.* He glanced at the clock and exclaimed, Good grief, it's already seven! He was always amazed at how quickly time flew when he worked with his computer sys tem. He was aware, too, of the quick passage of time since his graduate student days in 1981. That was 20 years ago. So much has happened since, he thought. Working at the comsole, Jim often felt as though the world were at his fingertips ? and, of course, it really was. Simple in structions made any piece of information instantly his. It was addictive; the greater his capacity to receive information, the greater his potential for discovering new relationships, new concepts, and new frontiers of information. Jim was oblivi ous of time when he was working at the comsole. It's lucky, he thought, I have a model that's programmed for automatic rest periods! The comsole didn't need the rest, but he did. Thus his comsole featured factory-installed auto matic shut-off points. These intervals vir tually forced the purchaser to eat, to exer cise, to interact with others, and to take care of those functions essential to human life. Jim often cursed his comsole when it imposed a rest period; privately, however, he blessed the interruption. Rest periods gave him time to think independently, without the pressure of constant pushing by the machine. He did not care what others believed; he knew there was quali tative difference between human thought and machine thought. It was during rest periods that Jim pondered the relativity of time and its relationship to information flow. He thought it puzzling that, the more time he spent at the comsole, the less aware he was of the passage of time. It was as if time stopped when he sat down at the comsole; only the flow of information was im portant. He was amused by the deception that time and his brain tried to play on him. After almost 50 years, his body knew ? and frequently reminded him ? that he was not young anymore. Ah, to be young again, he sighed, thinking back to graduate school in 1981. That was about the time he first became aware of the revolution already under way in information processing. In retrospect, it seemed a simple, naive time. Few people had sensed in 1981 the changes that were taking place. Jim had suspected that change was coming, but he could not predict its direction or magni tude. What prescience he had in those days came from a course in curriculum and instruction that had introduced him ?| to microcomputers and their capabilities. Jim recognized that these machines and * their progeny were going to change the world, the ways people thought about the world, and even the ways that people related to one another. He sensed, too, that education would be radically altered, l '4&**?*