From: <KWB107@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Subject: DE meets "Smart TV"
Originator: banres-m@udevdiv.unibase.sk.ca
Reply-To: <banres-m@udevdiv.unibase.sk.ca>
Organization: Unibase Telecom Ltd.
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 15:58:46 GMT


  - - The original note follows - -

Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 12:26:15 -0700
From: jdmcguir@triton.unm.edu (Jeff McGuire)
Subject: DE meets "Smart TV"

            Welcome to DE Today, and now a word from our sponsor...

--"...I would learn everything I could about this medium[television]
because some of the greatest problems facing higher education can't be
solved by any other way than by the creative use of technology."  (DE
expert interview response, Gunawardena, 1990)

        Several people have raised the question about what the future holds for
DE. (DEOS-L #3, #11 etc.)  In the article, "In the near future your TV,
computer and phone will merge,"  Joseph B. Verrengia, news reporter writes:

Some experts refer to it as "Smart TV," others as the "telecomputer."
Whatever its label, within a few years it will dominate home entertainment
and communication, offering in a single contraption a vast library of
electronic game and movies, computer tie-ins to far-flung data bases,
advanced home security; automatic banking, bill-paying and investing;
interactive television shows, and the mundane telephone perhaps
reincarnated as a picture phone.
        Within a decade or so, experts agree, a new wave of television is likely
to bring changes that will rival those the medium has wrought over the past
40 years.  Futurists already are coining buzzwords that forewarn of the
broad social reshuffling to come:  "The Third Wave," the "Information
Society,"  "Consciousness III."

After a couple of months of hearing and reading about "Smart TV," which is
advertised to reach the consumer within the next three years I began to
wonder if DE would also be available or desirable on such a medium.  I
believe DE would fall somewhere between computer tie-ins to far-flung data
bases, which raises my questions:

--Can "Smart TV," in the future be considered a prestigious source of
education or will it fall into the cast of vicarious dreg as most
programming offered on TV?

--Will "Smart TV" technology become the ends instead of the means as
Olu Jegede warns?(DEOS-L #26)

--Would such a delivery system, if carefully administered, be embraced or
shunned?

Do not get me wrong, I believe such a delivery system has unimaginable
potential as Verrengia claims,  "[e]xactly what emerges still is being
envisioned and invented in laboratories from Boston to Tokyo."  However,
we, the most closely associated with DE must pursue effective conceptual
instruction for the technology prior to its production rather than creating
instruction that "works" on the medium or face Jeopardy.

Jeff McGuire,
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