More Than Screen Deep Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1997) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
On Application Areas
On Application Areas
Pages 375-394
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From page 375... ...
The 1993 position paper urged the adoption of several policy and design guidelines that CPSR believes would serve the public interest in the development of a new national information infrastructure. The policy guidelines are as follows: 375
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In addition, CPSR also strongly endorses the principles set forth by the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable in Washington, D.C., of which CPSR is a member. The principles are as follows: · Universal access: All people should have affordable access to the information infrastructure.
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These developments, combined with CPSR's experiences and observations with community technology projects, such as the Seattle Community Network and Virtually Wired, have given us additional insights into what "public interest" really means. EVERY-CITIZEN'S ACCESS "INFOUTOPIA" VERSUS REALITY Since Vice President Al Gore's introduction of the term information highway into our vocabulary during the 1992 campaign, private, public, and commercial organizations have been speculating about what the infoway might look like and how it will be used.
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, former chair of CPSR, in his new book, New Community Networks: Wired for Change, discusses two forms of access to community computing resources: community networks and community computing centers. In 1992, CPSR/Seattle started a community network for the Seattle area.
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Like other on-line services, SCN provides popular services like e-mail, forum newsgroups, and Web access through Lynx. Because SCN tries to be sensitive to the lowest common denominator with respect to Web access, all information providers are strongly encouraged to design their pages for a graphics or a character-based browser.
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From page 380... ...
; public access centers (e.g., Washington Information Network kiosks located in public spaces throughout Washington State) containing on-line government information (including committee reports and campaign finances)
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1993. Serving the Community: A Public Interest Vision of the National Information Infrastructure.
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From page 382... ...
Professional work cannot simply proceed from a fixed educational background; rather, education must be smoothly incorporated as part of work activities. Similarly, children require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not simply to communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.
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Central to this vision in our own research is the notion of design activities, a model of work that is open-ended and long term in nature, incorporates personalized and collaborative aspects, and combines technical and aesthetic elements. Design (as practiced by engineers and architects designing infrastructure and buildings, lawyers designing briefs and cases, politicians designing policies and programs, educators designing curricula and courses, and software engineers designing computer programs)
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We claim that a similar argument can be made for current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century. As an example, the "innovation" of making transparencies available on the World Wide Web rather than distributing paper copies of them in class takes advantage of the Web as an electronic information medium, but contributes little in the way of introducing new epistemologies.
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Rather than assuming that people should and will be able to do everything without a substantial learning effort, we should design computational environments that offer a low threshold for beginners to get started and a high ceiling for skilled users to do the things they want. · The myth of the Nobel Prize winner one of the earlier arguments in support of the information superhighway was that every school child would have access to a Nobel Prize winner.
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From page 386... ...
Rather than serving as the "reproductive organ of a consumer society" (Ivan Illich) , educational institutions must fight this trend by cultivating "designers," that is, by creating mind-sets and habits that help people become empowered and willing to contribute actively to the design of their lives and communities.
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But the future is not out there to be discovered: it has to be invented and designed. Making learning a part of life and the implications this has for how, under the influence of new media, human beings will think, create, work, learn, and collaborate in the future are major considerations for the design of every-citizen interfaces to the national information infrastructure (NII)
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About the Agentsheets Remote Explorium, an environment to turn the Web from an information dissemination medium into a collaboration medium: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~13d/ systems/remote-explorium/ 5. AboutWebquest, a system that exploits the Web with interactive learning games: · About the system itself: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~corrina /mud/ · A paper describing the system: http: / /www.cs.colorado.edu/ ~corrina/WebQuest/ 6.
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This position paper addresses the question: How can we apply the NII to foster lifelong learning? COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AS COMMUNITIES OF LEARNING To support learning we must begin by considering how people learn most effectively.
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Such a group can help with motivation. A college student who thinks he may want to dedicate his career to increasing literacy levels can sit in on a few events that the literacy group sponsors to make sure that the field matches his expectations before he commits to it.
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Given that communities of practice provide an effective and relatively widespread mechanism for supporting lifelong learning, it is not surprising that the NIIAC links them together in its report (NIIAC, 1995~: By providing people of all ages with opportunities for lifelong learning and workplace skills development, the NII should enhance each indi vidual's ability to create and share knowledge and to participate in elec tronic communities of learning. Still, the question remains: How can we apply the NII to support commu nities of practice?
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First, groups require performance support tools that help users perform tasks effectively. For instance, the consultant could make good use of a performance support tool that leads him through the process of making an effective diagnosis, feeding him appropriate advice or factual content from the group's organizational memory as it becomes relevant.
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However, it is not always possible to access the right expert at the right time. Accordingly, we require performance support tools that help members tap into a community's organizational memory.
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From page 394... ...
First Report of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. March.
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