- Preface
- I. A new era
- • Globalization, the first sign of change
- • English - the new planetary language
- • A change in the scale of education
- II. Education and its context
- • Education and business
- • Education and the state
- III. The digital habit
- • The new digital culture
- • Digital projects
- • Time for assimilation
- IV. The extended school
- • Education at a critical moment
- • A definition of the extended school
- • Yesterday: concentrated knowledge
- • Today: knowledge disseminated
- • Tomorrow: knowledge connected
- V. New tools and old
- • Chalk and blackboard
- • The spinning globe
- • Microscopic life
- • Desk and work
- • The computer garden
- • Slides and liquid Crystal
- • Projectors and projections
- • Dry and digital copies
- VI. Digital transition
- • Continuing education
- • Cultural exchange
- • The mental switch
- • Critical thought
- • Internal communication
- • Educational frontier posts
- • Technological updating
- • Creativity and deregulation
- VII. Means and ends
- • Values for today and for always
- • Technocentrality and consumerism
- • Software in the public domain
- VIII. The digital library
- • Atoms versus bits
- • The dual book
- • Digital quality
- • Reading and writing
- • Text and hypertext
- • Consult and navigate
- IX. The home computer
- • A new piece of furniture or a new instrument?
- • Playthings and electronic toys
- • Robots for assembly
- • The silent printer
- • The community network
- X. New instruments of thought
- • Word processors, a new way of writing
- • A friendly mouse
- • More portable learning
- • Designing with computers
- • The golden link in communications: the modem
- • Electronic mail always arrives at its destination
- • Fax, a threatened species
- • WWW: three magic letters
- • Reliable and accessible data bases
- • Tables, abacus and spreadsheet
- • The Scanner, a bridge between two worlds
- • New interfaces and old keyboards
- • Presentation aids
- • So-called multimedia
- • Digital cameras without film
- • Digital videos in schools
- • Music for all
- XI. Presence and remote presence
- • Features of distance education
- • The three generations
- • Synchronous and asynchronous moments
- • Spaces for meeting
- • Classrooms open to the world
- • The advantages
- • New educational niches
- • A new type of teacher and student
- XII. Talents and handicaps
- • The right to communication
- • The obstacle of the keyboard
- • The obstacle of the screen
- • The expression of individual talent
- Conclusions
XI. PRESENCE AND REMOTE PRESENCE
The advantages
Videoconferencing is interactive. Participants talk through television screens laid out to facilitate distance conversation. People may be separated by thousands of kilometers but the "switching" from one room to another facilitates true dialog between the participants. A person in another room can be sought out through remote manipulation of the camera, individuals can be identified, brought closer, enlarged to be able to talk looking directly into their eyes. If the "window" between two or more institutions is permanently open, as we propose, in a short time students and teachers will have grown accustomed to this remote presence as a new form of dialog. At the same time we will have incorporated new virtual spaces, belonging to others, without having invested in more square meters of building. Videoconferencing is flexible. Videoconference rooms can easily be enlarged or reduced. Video screens can vary in number or size according to the number of participants. For some major events giant screens can be installed in suitable auditoria within the institution or outside in the playgrounds.
Videoconferences for educational purposes must have a great freedom of use. No-one learns from "packages", children learn to speak because they are constantly immersed in a linguistic environment with total freedom. The videoconference room is at the same time a video recording room, equipped with video recorders, so that students and teachers may automatically record their live classes while they are in communication, so that at the end of a school year the installations involved will have a video library of great educational value, with a new audio-visual memory.
