Fall 1998
Vol 7 Issue 1
IN THIS ISSUE...
Peeking Around the TechnoCorner
Getting Rid of (Visible) Instructional Technology
A Philosopher's View of the Net and the Future
Demo of a Real Time Remote Experiment
What the Future Holds for Learning Languages
SEE ALSO...
The Forum
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction
Peeking Around the TechnoCorner...
Alan Levine, MCLI
Are you ready for the big odometer flip on next year's calendar? We're not too worried about the technical Year 2000 (Y2K) issues since Jim Devere and his group are pretty much ahead of the game in ensuring the stability of our information systems. Some fear power outages from utilities that are run by old systems, ultimately triggering panic-stricken mobs. They have begun stockpiling canned food in their cabins "off the grid."
What we explore in this issue of the Labyrinth, less catastrophic and more speculative, is where technology might take us around that millennium corner -- say three years from now. For perspective, you only have to look backwards three years to see where we were (before the web was everywhere, when the fastest desktop computers were slower than today's bottom of the line), to consider how much might change by looking forward.
Future predictions about technology are often too general to hold meaning. As both of our interview subjects point out: anything you predict for 50 years down the line is likely to come true.
However, being more definitive is risky. In December 1995, Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe (certainly no technology slouch) boldly wrote in InfoWorld that the Internet: "will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." In a later mea culpa presentation, Metcalfe shredded his article in a blender and literally "ate his words." The April 1996 Wired magazine projected the "Great Web Wipe Out" as all of the money and energy dumped into web development panned out. C|net's Keith Ferrel described the coming of "the Four Horsemen of the Net Apocalypse."
Has the web crashed? Is the Internet a ghost town? No! It seems to be growing even more pervasive in the world of telecommunications. Not only might ultra high speed bandwidth to our homes soon be common, it's conceivable we'll be getting phone calls and operating our appliances via the same TCP/IP protocols that Metcalfe and others declared would "choke."
Yet simply having more net "bandwidth" is no guarantee that we will be able to do anything better with it than what's currently found on the web. Watch out for low flying jargon--"Just 'Push' me through that web 'portal' so I can grab an 'XML' cup of 'Java'!"
So, keep an eye on that future. It matters less who's right and wrong in the prediction game. What matters more is the way we adjust to the inevitable sweeping changes which are coming -- just around that corner.