(c) Copyright 1980 National Research Council of Canada
It is difficult to predict the consequences of widespread use of videotex (it may cause substantial reductions in travel and the consumption of energy), but many futurists think that the telecommunications revolution will have social impact equal to that of the agrarian revolution or the industrial revolution...
A WEB OF LEARNING
The version of [videotex] that is likely to become widely distributed initially will impose some constraints on computer-aided learning applications. The use of copper wire telephone lines restricts the rate of information flow, and the keypad permits only limited responses. But when full keyboards and high-capacity telecommunications channels are in place, the possibilities for computer-aided learning on videotex are virtually unlimited.
A videotex system could be a tremendous shot-in-the-arm for computer-aided learning, as it will provide a huge potential market for anyone who wishes to put courseware up on the system. Economies of scale are extremely important in computer-aided learning. "Networking on a national scale allows you to pool your resources and create critical masses of personnel, resource, and facilities" (Seidel, 1973, p. 245); "the intellectual effort required to prepare and evaluate adequate course content is so large that the effort must be shared as widely as possible" ...(Haney, Brown, & Brahan, 1973, p. 274); "sharing programs developed elsewhere is ... truly necessary for the growth and sustenance of computer-aided learning" (Leiblum, 1977, p.247). The shortage of large-scale coordination to date is one of the major reasons that computer-aided learning is not more widespread.
Children who grow up in a world in which they can access virtually any extant courseware from their living room, and in which a much greater proportion of learning is self-motivated, will end up with their cognitive processes organized differently from people of previous generations, whose learning environments have been far from optimal. They will be smarter, more knowledgeable, more skilful. They will be better equipped to solve problems in many areas of human endeavour. H.G. Wells thought that the fate of the human species would be determined by the outcome of a race between education and catastrophe. Developments in the past few years suggest that catastrophe is winning, but videotex-aided learning has the potential to tip the odds in favour of education.
Ivan Illich (1971) has argued that "learning webs" should replace schools, and that a person need access to four things to enable her to learn: educational objects, such as books and laboratories; masters of particular skills; educators-at-large; and a peer-matching service. A videotex system could perform a vital role with respect to not only the first but also the fourth requirement: introducing learners to other people with similar interests at similar stages of learning. In pre-videotex society, for each person in a city of substantial size there are many people with similar interests, but these kindred spirits rarely meet. With videotex-aided learning, it would be possible to have software that could characterize a person, with her permission, in terms of her interests, tastes, abilities, and cognitive style, and provide her with a list of names of similar people. Gordon Thompson has called such a network a "serendipity machine," a machine to "assist in discovering resonating human beings" (1979, p. 45). A further service such a network could provide would be to suggest what courseware or other material a particular user might like to explore next. These suggestions would be based on what material other similar users found to be satisfying.
Thompson has suggested that a consequence of widespread use of computer-aided learning on videotex might be the replacement of phonetic writing, in which symbols represent sounds, by ideographic writing, in which symbols represent visual images. The argument here is that in pre-videotex times, ideographic languages had two problems: They were extremely difficult to learn, and they changed over the centuries. Phonetic alphabets arose as an economical means for people to learn to read by mastering relatively few rules of symbol-sound correspondence. Nevertheless, reading phonetic writing remains a difficult and unnatural activity, in the sense that a substantial proportion of people never master it (unlike speech understanding). Videotex-aided learning could overcome the two problems that have inhibited the growth of ideographic language: Machine storage, transmission, and display would ensure stability of the characters; and computer-aided learning could facilitate the mastery of the characters. Important questions about the psychology of processing visual symbols have not yet been answered (Kolers, 1969), but the possibility of a universal ideographic language is worth entertaining. (To help answer such questions regarding the psychological processes underlying reading and learning, widespread use of videotex-aided learning could provide a huge database for cognitive psychologists to work with.)
POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
Virtually all technologies are double-edged, and videotex is no exception. Some potential problems relate to privacy, information pollution, and alienation.
People will be concerned that information regarding their videotex behaviour will fall into the wrong hands. This is an important issue that must be dealt with, but Herbert Simon has pointed out that there is no reason to suppose that invasion of privacy problems with videotex technology will necessarily be more serious than with earlier technologies (Simon, 1977). New sophisticated techniques can make it prohibitively expensive for unauthorized people to access databases.
There already exists a large amount of printed material of low quality, but information pollution could become even worse when it becomes relatively inexpensive and easy for anyone to be her own "publisher" and courseware producer. One approach is to let the free market of information prevail and leave the users to separate the wheat from the chaff, with assistance from word of mouth. A better alternative would be to have a body or bodies, analogous to Consumers Union, that would systematically provide evaluations of available courseware and other material. In a videotex Utopia, a user could input the name of a subject she wanted to learn, and receive a list of available courseware on that subject along with a description, and evaluations, by experts and by users, of each course.
Finally, some people fear that alienation, or isolation from other people, will be increased with the widespread use of videotex. This is a possibility that we should be on guard against. However, it is at least as likely that videotex will decrease alienation, for reasons alluded to earlier. The serendipity machine may make it possible for individuals to discover congenial people and communities that they would have otherwise never encountered. We may see a further evolution of Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere," or world mind, that produces a greater feeling of unity among people than we have seen to date. With respect to alienation, videotex may repair the damage done by the powerful, passive medium of television...
REFERENCES
Haney, W.L., Brown, W.C., & Brahan, J.W. (1973). The Computer-aided learning program at the National Research Council of Canada. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 5, 271-287.
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row.
Kolers, P.A. (1969). Some formal characteristics of pictograms. American Scientist, 57, 348-363.
Leiblum, M.D. (1977). A pragmatic approach to initiating a computer assisted instruction service and some problems involved. Programmed Learning and Educational Technology 14, 243-249.
Seidel, R.J. (1973). Hardware from a user's point of view. The Physiologist, 16, 4-.
Simon, H.A. (1977) What computers mean for man and society. Science, 195, 1166-1191.
Thompson, G.B. (1979). Memo from Mercury: Information technology is different. Occasional Paper No. 10, Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Eric Lee and Thom Whalen for helpful comments.