Montclair State University - Carnegie Committee

High Tech Solutions

Jack Baldwin LeClair MA, EdS, JD

High tech is the leading edge of technology in teaching. Unlike low tech in which classical classroom teaching is augmented with technology and medium tech in which the technology serves as a medium of negotiated goals, values, and methodology, high tech solutions release students and faculty from the space and time boundaries of the traditional classroom. It is in effect the unbundling of faculty and students from the university (National Research Council, 2002). Rather than a frightening attack on the traditional structure, high tech education represents the evolution of e-education to meet the demands of the e-world.

Researchers point out that the largest share of learning is done not in traditional classrooms but in the "white spaces" between traditional instruction (National Research Council, 2002). The implications of this finding are that although incorporating technology into the traditional classroom is, according to faculty inteviewed, the most important improvement in their pedagogy, only 14% of those faculty believed that technology had improved instruction to date (Carlson, 2000). Clearly, technologically augmented traditional education is not a panacea.

Indeed, in the future, it has been suggested that most work will be "knowledge work". Future development of the global economy will require legions of "knowledge workers" (Drucker, 1999 and 2001) who manipulate information almost exclusively. Although forcasts of the value of distance learning have proven to be overly optimistic at least in the near term (Managan, 2001; Shea, 2001), the modern university much relinquish its monopoly of educational methodology and must expand to meet the expanding technological demands of a future information rich global economy.

High tech practices such as virtual worlds in which students are immersed in worlds of physical metaphor in which they can manipulate objects and experience cause and effect in ways that approximate real world experiences. In release from the confines of tradaitional classroom pedagogy, faculty and students negotiate a learning heuristic environment.

Distance learning, a form of life-long learning, is one of the key applications driving the construction of the information superhighway. Through distance learning, students have the opportunity to attend class even though they cannot be in the classroom. Distance learning offers a school, community, or business a means of extending its educational resources beyond the confines of a limited geographical area, and still allow students to interact, real-time, with the instructor and fellow students. Distance learning is a virtual classroom creating a universal and equitable learning environment.

Not for the faint of heart and not appropriate in all situtaitons, high tech practices require a social and institutional investment of significant proportion. Yet, the infrastructure necessary should become less expensive as the average technological fluency of students and faculty evolves in an expanding technological world.