By Dick Pelletier
By as early as 2010, Microsoft, IBM and others will introduce software enabling students to communicate with computers similar to how we communicate with each other – using words, body language, and gestures.
These sophisticated new computers will understand ordinary everyday spoken words in English, Spanish, Chinese, or any major language, and will use avatars – on-screen images that could appear as Einstein, Columbus, or even a local classroom teacher – to communicate on a personal level with each student.
These future teaching machines will bring education to life. Utilizing virtual reality, they will take students on virtual trips to interesting places and events in the world, fly into space, or wander inside a human cell.
Interactive computers will gather and process video, graphics, and information from anywhere on Earth via the Internet, and reformat this data into words and images that will be clearly understood by each student, regardless of their comprehension level.
These education machines will also become the home of future artificial intelligence that will complement the teacher’s ability, guiding students through course work, supplementing the teacher’s knowledge and answering simple queries to liberate teachers to concentrate on individuals without the rest of the class sitting idle.
To a larger degree than ever before, students will explore information and educate themselves, calling on teachers when they need extra help or special insight. Computers have infinite patience and time and can easily adapt to the skill and knowledge level of individual children without making them feel backward. Children will fearlessly ask questions of a computer that they wouldn’t dare ask in front of their classmates.
Large video projection systems will soon be inexpensive and available to use extensively in education. A picture of the Grand Canyon may look impressive on paper or on a small computer screen, but blown up to the size of a video wall and guided by a friendly avatar, will have a far greater impact.
And as technology develops – expected sometime between 2015 and 2020 – schools may opt for immersive systems that achieve levels of reality similar to those portrayed in TV’s Star Trek Holodeck.
Connected to the Internet, these interactive systems will allow children from different countries to meet as if in the same room, mixing cultures together and teaching international collaboration so important for many areas of life and work.
And personal creativity will be expanded too. A child may have ideas of a tune long before they have the skills to write music or play it on a piano. But with a computer filling in skill gaps, they can simply hum the tune, and the computer will help explore its potential by mixing, rearranging, or adding other instruments.
Sadly, not all children have access to the Internet today. UN statistics show that Africa has only 1% of the world’s net users and 95% of those are in South Africa. But with expected band-width growth and lower connection costs, most experts predict Internet access will soon be available and affordable for nearly all of Earth’s inhabitants, including 3rd world countries.
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