Tech Scenario 2000 |
Introduction
The EnterTech curriculum is targeted for first delivery in January 2000. Before making any design and delivery recommendations, we must consider what the technology environment will likely be in the potential delivery sites approximately a year and a half from now. It is also important to consider the probably progression of relevant technologies over the first few years of EnterTech's life. Therefore the predictions below deal with the period of time from 18 to 60 months in the future.
Our approach is to start from the student's point of view and examine the technology infrastructure starting from the user interface and proceeding back through the computer, the network, to the web and database server, and finally to the administrators/authors of EnterTech. In this way we can consider technologies in an appropriate context.
This prediction is something of a "straw man" at the detail level. Almost everyone will disagree with some of our predictions. The important issue is whether changes in some details would alter the overall picture.
The Student's Computer
EnterTech's target sites are computer classrooms or learning centers. Students in these locations will sit at their own computer and interact with the curriculum primarily with keyboard and mouse (or trackpad). Alternative input mechanisms like voice recognition or touch screens will not be in widespread use in schools. Voice recognition may be viable at the end of this time period, but this is too far in the future for EnterTech to be concerned with including the possibility in its curriculum design, plus it may be inappropriate for the delivery sites. (Do you really want students all talking at the same time?)
CRT's will still be predominant, with larger screen sizes being the most noticeable difference from today. The recent Asian economic troubles will lengthen the market life of CRT's (versus LCD displays) and continue to drive monitor prices lower. There will be some flat panel displays, but the price differential over CRT's will preclude their use in most classrooms. There will still be some 640 by 480 by 8 bit displays, but the mainstream will be at least 800 by 600 by 16 bit. The introduction of DTV/HDTV for the television consumer market will bring economies of scale to the production of CRT's in the 16 by 10 aspect ratio. Sales of CRT and LCD monitors in the wider aspect ratio will surpass those in the 4 by 3 aspect ratio in the 60 to 72 month time frame. Given sufficient screen size, the wider aspect ratio yields significant advantages for the display of text.
Windows will be almost everywhere with a small percentage of MacOS systems. The MacOS will be enough of a factor that EnterTech should author its CD-ROM as cross platform. One of the ironies of this project is that training on Windows will likely be an important element, and the curriculum design must include delivering Windows training on a Macintosh. (Alternative operating systems like BeOS (http://www.be.com) and Linux (http://www.linux.org/ ) will not be widely used in schools.)
Microsoft Explorer will have won the "browser wars." There will however still be a significant Netscape Navigator presence along with some alternative and special-purpose browsers. The implementation of features between Explorer and Navigator will be more consistent. The need to author separate sets of pages in order to implement features like CSS and D-HTML for both browsers will not be as big a concern as it is today. Netscape's release of its code to the Internet community will tend to bring the Navigator implementation closer to Explorer.
It is important to consider the browser's capabilities in some detail since it is the browser that controls the presentation or layout, not the web server or the author/designer of the content. HTML describes what kind of information it is, the browser decides what to do with that type of information. Because author/designers want more control than this, approaches like cascading style sheets (CSS), which give more control more consistently, and D-HTML that provides for dynamic content will be much more widely used than today. So will interpreted "languages" like Javascript and VBScript. XML will be widely used in conjunction with HTML. 3-D graphics enhancements like Microsoft's Chrome will be useful on new computers (350MHz Pentium II or better with AGP graphics), but not widely used in schools due to the presence of many older computer systems.
Java applets and the various Java virtual machines will continue to be problematic. There will still be plug-ins, but many fewer than today. These will tend to be special purpose plug-ins, and thus not widely/predictably adopted. Browsers will have so much functionality that for most users, plug-ins will seldom be needed.
The streaming-video field will narrow to include Microsoft and one other survivor. There will be a streaming-video interoperability standard. QuickTime, the non-streaming/streaming hybrid will still be a common format for video and audio files. MPEG-2 video with software decode will be common on new systems, and MPEG-4 will begin to offer significant improvements in video quality in any given bandwidth. MPEG-4 will bring new media life even to older computer systems. The viewers’ standard for "good" video will be DVD playback of MPEG-2.
Students will use computers for five types of activities:
Of course, EnterTech's students will not be the typical high school or community college student, but the EnterTech curriculum will probably engage them in all of the above activities.
The computers in the classroom or learning center will be up to five years old, and the systems will often be "low-bid specials" that achieved a low price point by cutting corners on amount of RAM, hard drive capacity, video controller, and display quality/size. Among the least capable computers in these locations 18 months from now will be early Pentiums and 68040 Macs. New machines in schools will typically be 350MHz Pentium II's 18 months from now and 1GHz in 60 months.
The Network
In the typical community college or high school computers in a classroom will be on a LAN. This may not be as common in computer training facilities in career schools or community based organizations. This LAN will be at least 10Mbps Ethernet with most LANs following a predictable upgrade path (10Mbps switches, 100Mbps hubs, 100Mbps switches), with some faster alternatives capable of running on the copper infrastructure (http://www.wband.com – the Itasca ISD is already running this 1Gbps network). At least in schools, fiber will remain a backbone medium for some time to come; fiber’s cost multiple over copper will keep it from being extended to the desktop in this setting.
Classroom computers will be on a LAN primarily because of the desire for students to be on the web. The E-Rate will have survived in some form, as will the momentum for connecting schools to the Internet that it helped build. Most schools will have some form of direct connection to the Internet (fractional T1, T1, ADSL, or cable modem). Cable modems will deliver greater than T1 bandwidth to schools, and many schools will take steps to enhance their Internet capabilities even more by installing caching servers in order to speed student interaction with popular sites.
The regional network infrastructure built by the cable television operators and the telephone companies will be excellent, but cable will be much more aggressive in marketing its services, and in particular will be effective in using its "good citizenship" activities, such as providing cable modems to schools and "cable in the classroom," to further its competitive advantage.
The Server
The web sites students will visit will be less static with much more streaming audio, video, and animation. Because of this, bandwidth will continue to be a problem. Also, the audience will demand increasingly higher quality (and therefore higher bandwidth) streaming media. VRML and other forms of 3D visualization will be common. Web sites will typically be much larger than they are today. For all these reasons, most web sites will be driven by a web server and database combination. Microsoft's Active Server Pages will be the most common way of implementing dynamic web pages. It will be used with all the major SQL relational database management systems including Microsoft's own SQL Server.
There will be alternative approaches that survive, like Allaire's Cold Fusion (http://www.allaire.com), but these will be marginalized because it is very difficult to compete with Microsoft when one's product does not present a significant incremental advantage. Unix/Linux will still be common for web servers, especially very small and very large ones (most of the medium sized ones will be on NT). Unix/Linux will still be more stable than NT and will present significant competition for Microsoft although NT will continue to gain market share. There will be a large selection of tools and enhancements for web servers and web server database links running under Unix/Linux.
The Authoring Environment
Some of the most significant changes in the next 18 to 60 months will take place with web and instructional authoring tools. The current situation, especially concerning instructional authoring, is that the available options are either not very good or not well suited to the web. The traditional leaders in multimedia CD-ROM authoring have not quite made the web transition yet, and the web-integration tools we are beginning to see from the major database vendors are in their earliest versions. Of course it all sounds great in the marketing literature.
This will begin to change in the next 18 months. Both the multimedia authoring companies and the database vendors will deliver usable and effective products. It will become much easier to author instructional material suitable for web delivery. In addition, tools like WebCT (http://www.webct.com) will be used by more and more teachers to enhance their own courses. Textbook publishers will routinely publish web sites in support of their best selling textbooks.
Rapid instructional authoring environments like Vuepoint's Performance Learning System (http://www.vuepoint.com) will become more common as it becomes increasingly obvious that speed and efficiency in authoring are often more important than the number of tools or "power" of the authoring environment. These packages combine the speed of PowerPoint with the branching, testing, and tracking capabilities needed for web based training. Enterprise learning solutions like Asymetrix’s Toolbook II/Librarian combination and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver Attain, Authorware Attain, plus Pathware will be widely used for corporate training.