- 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
VIII. THE DIGITAL LIBRARY
Text and hypertext
Today we call objects with multiple readings "hypertexts", that is to say units formed by various levels of connection between texts, images and sound (also known as "multimedia"). A true digital library is essential hypertextual and requires a comparable education. We do not like talking about "hyper-readers for hypertexts" but feel the need for another word to identify users of digital libraries.
We must also accept that new digital technologies demand new ways of expressing thoughts. Unfortunately we tend to repeat in the digital world what we have done before with books, reading and writing. Let us briefly reflect on the history of the written word. In many civilizations the very word for "word" has a sacred meaning, and as such was protected and feared. The ideogram, the hieroglyphic, the drawn or printed word became actual objects of worship, some of which are so beautiful they have transcended time and continue to be a source of admiration.
Soon written text was accompanied by pictorial images. The fascinating history of illustrated texts, from the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages to the engravings of the great publishers of the renaissance, has been well studied. In fact illustrated texts fulfilled a social and religious need for greater comprehension and accessibility for the written word. In this sense current multimedia represents the most advanced level of the illustrated book. It is revealing to go back a bit in history to confirm that the iconoclasts were always the enemy of a hypertextual reading, as we would say today. Strange though it may seem, not so many years ago many learned persons opposed the proliferation of art books with color reproductions, fearing permanent harm to the image of a work of art.
In reality the problem with reproduction did not lie so much in the faithfulness of the color copy on paper but with the forced reduction in size of the original. In the digital world not only is the quality of the reproduction insuperable, but even the original size can be reproduced thanks to the generation of "virtual artworks". One attempt in this regard was recently carried out at the Toshiba Electronic Museum in Tokyo, where visitors can view hundreds of digitized works of art on very high-resolution screens transmitted on request over a digital network from an image base. The dream of André Malraux of an "imaginary museum" has come true at this digital museum, which will one day reach schools via the Internet.
