- 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
IX. THE HOME COMPUTER
Robots for assembly
Robots created by adults for sale to children run the risk of becoming the train sets of the turn of the century. Shortly the market will be saturated by these toys that have little impact on the learning processes of the young. Quite the opposite happens with those interesting modular objects for assembly with electric motors, sensors, etc., which, linked to a computer enable the building of true automata by children themselves (the Lego-Logo being one of the most suitable platforms for the creation of robots). The building task thus becomes fertile ground for learning processes, integrating various mechanical, electronic and computer disciplines.
The main problem is the time and space taken up by these computer games. It obviously takes a long time to build a machine controlled by programs. In addition these undertakings require a designated space. There is nothing more frustrating than having to disassemble a construction that has taken hours of work just so the room can be cleaned. Schools also lack space for robot workshops, severely limiting the development of these construction experiments. At home space limitations are even more acute. One day we will no doubt see these assembly activities being carried out in the open spaces and gardens of the city when the modules and processors are priced so that they are accessible to all. Many consider that schools of the future will be a space made available for the sharing of such experiences. In addition, every day there are more building games that are shared over networks, and automata of "virtual agents" in the cyberspace of Internet. This is a new frontier open to education, announcing new forms of group construction of interesting items in virtual digital space by remote teams. This new field has still to be explored.
