Three special events in the history of technology for creating,  (Page 11/12)

Connexions can make high quality material available to all students and all educational activities all overthe world with fairly inexpensive equipment. If developed properly, it can significantly reduce the “digital divide” that separates theinformation “haves” from the “have nots.” Because it is platform or hardware independent, it can be used with many new projects toprovide internet access more broadly.

The third transition that we are in the middle of just now will probably have two phases, much as most disruptivetechnologies. As we move from the traditional printed book, lecture, laboratory, and library paradigm to an electronic anddigital system using the web, internet, and modern magnetic and optical storage devices, the first phase will do the old jobbetter. We will put our courses on the web. We will put our books on the web. We will scan books and build digital libraries. But,most of this material was written for traditional publication and use. It was written by authors with traditional skills andtraditional mind-sets but using modern tools and media.

The second phase of this transition will use the full power of semantic tagging, metadata, and XML together witha better understanding of how humans process information in their brains and how we all learn. In the first phase we take materialthat was created to be used in traditional media and put it “on the web”. We put the book that we were writing into Connexions. We scanbooks and put the digital information into the digital library. In the second phase we will create information packets specificallyfor Connexions, XML, or the Semantic Web. We will have a mixture of text, virtual labs, demonstrations, etc. that cause us to teach andour students to learn in a different way. That will, in turn, cause us to create material in a different fashion.

In the transition from an oral tradition to literacy and a written tradition, the first phase was just a betterversion of the old. Authors wrote down the stories that they earlier told. Readers read aloud to “hear” the stories as they hadbefore. As the technology of writing developed, people learned to read silently and authors wrote to be read, not heard.

We currently seem to be in the middle of the first phase of our modern transition, but are beginning to see animage of the second. Although there is a great temptation to jump to the end, we will probably need the experiences and experimentsof the first phase to best develop the second phase and minimize the negative “unintended consequences”. We will need to put ourbooks and articles into Connexions and scan our traditional library books to create our digital library before we will know how tocreate material specifically for digital use.

Conclusions

Daniel Headrick argues “that the information revolution in which we live is the result of a cultural change thatbegan roughly three centuries ago, a change as important as the political and industrial revolutions for which the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are so well known.” We are now seeingthis revolution reach a climax.