You are greeted at the door by a woman wearing a silly costume using 18th Century tools and pretending that the 19th Century never existed. All sorts of opportunities and challenges arise for distributed learning in the U.S. where computers and Internet access are becoming ubiquitous. Your future technology planning will be complicated further when kids carry their own small computing devices with them and when full-featured PCs cost the same as today's single purpose portables. Low cost, full-featured desktop computers are already for sale. With any luck, notebook computer prices will begin to fall as well.
Parents can lease powerful computers for the price of three pizzas per month.
It is quite possible that computers will be the price of a pair of Air Jordans within two years. When this happens, the single purpose word processing computers will be the cost of a textbook. Gary Stager is a contributing editor to Curriculum Administrator, and a veteran educator and consultant worldwide.