Yet the opportunities for improving education remain a powerful incentive for developing a new paradigm for school networking. In spite of widespread publicity for telecomputing, communication technology of any sort is almost entirely absent from our schools. Even schools that have invested heavily in computers have surprisingly little in the way of telephones or computer networks available for instructional uses. A set of textbooks for a classroom can effectively encode the required instructional content. Computer technologies can deliver effective exercises.
Interactive multimedia can even engage students in motivating stories and visual presentations.
The answer to the instructional delivery paradigm can be stated quite simply. Information required for productive citizenship is changing rapidly. It is now essential to present instructional content that is live, that comes from active information sources such as weather satellites, data collected by students in other locations, and responses from working scientists. School work must include primary information sources so that students are simultaneously learning the critical content while gaining first-hand experience with information sources themselves. At the same time, information access technology is evolving rapidly and dropping in cost.