- 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
Consult and navigate
We note that school libraries have begun to store other "species" in addition to paper books and magazines, items stored on external memories such as recorded tapes, cassettes, videos, videodiscs, and stacks of CD-ROMS. There are CD-ROMS that store entire libraries of newspaper archives. These intruders are ubiquitous, as they are either digital or digitizable and can spread through computer networks for remote consultation. Digital libraries are from all points of view far more practical than any traditional library. They also encourage participation and are more democratic.
This does not however mean that libraries will disappear from schools. Quite the opposite. To our mind the library should be the principal meeting-place for the entire educational community, the place of highest quality and greatest movement in the whole school. Its role will be quite different from that of a traditional library, as they will not only gather information but broadcast it on a permanent basis.
For those adults who still wrongly consider that computers create small autistic persons there is nothing better than a short visit to the digital library of a modern school. We have seen this on a daily basis at the San Martín de Tours School. The students of the new digital generation do everything at once, copying interesting text and images, paying attention to sound and voice as they take notes and exchange ideas in front of a powerful computer on which they store their discoveries. In addition, they transmit their results via the network to their friends. For a teacher the most novel aspect is the horizontal learning that takes place spontaneously between users of any age in a digital library where the interaction between people and machines is intense and intimate.
As an example, we once received an invitation to participate in a literary competition via the school bulletin board. We downloaded the message, opened it, read the conditions of the competition, the names of the jurors, and - quite amazingly - heard the voice of a small girl inviting us to take part. All this in our own home. Those who say that children no longer read have certainly not seen a digital library. It is just that children are now reading in a different way.
The truly decisive phenomenon is that this new "hyper-literary" space transcends the physical, architectural and geographical limits of a single library thanks to Internet and the World Wide Web, www. Hypertext consultations can instantly appeal to the thousands of local computer networks or Webs. Instead of consulting with the school librarian we simply request a search engine on Internet to hunt for the required information. We then begin to navigate through Internet and jump from one library to another with the greatest of ease, traveling from a library in the USA to one in Europe, from a research lab to an art museum. After navigating the Internet for a while users can establish a very extensive group of world-wide contacts. There is nothing that impresses a reader more than to enter the great libraries of the world from a PC, running through electronic catalogs listing millions of books, as if using a terminal in the consulting room of a library located in the antipodes.
Internet provides readers with very powerful tools. In some cases it is not only possible to consult the complete catalogs of libraries and publishers but also to read complete digitized issues (text and illustrations) of hundreds of science, business and arts magazines on data bases accessible through the network. However, in general most libraries and publishers zealously guard their treasures in the form of atoms, when they could well be in bits, distributable around the world.
This is paradoxical as most current publications were created in digital form on a computer. Many wonder if it still makes sense to build massive libraries to store such information when networks would be the most suitable places to store and spread it. However, it will be necessary to carry out a profound review of intellectual property and authors' rights to be able to pour this information onto information highways. Nobody however questions that this is an inescapable step in the expanding of knowledge, to cross the threshold of the new society of learning, which is to be a digital society.
