- 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
The silent printer
Printers at home present chronic problems (as they do at school). They usually run out of toner and paper. The same cultural inertia that is transmitted from a school where information habitually circulates on paper is unavoidably transmitted to the home. This is because of contamination of the new culture of bits by the "culture of lead", or text printed on paper. If at school the heads, administrators and teachers are all swamped by paper, memos, copybooks, it is logical that the entire educational system will suffer the consequences. For example, in most schools homework must still be turned in on paper.
It will be necessary to change school culture to be able to resolve the problem at home, stimulating the use of diskettes and networks and retaining the use of paper for hand-crafted production of clear graphic design. This will eliminate the pressure to print, reducing household consumption of paper and ink. The family will however also invent new modes of production when it can count on an electronic print-shop in the home: designing and publishing one's own book is the renaissance humanist's dream. The enormous educational value of the production of such new handicraft objects with the help of computers is worthy of note. The same can be said of the electronic editing of Internet pages. This is the new craft of digital artistry, and it will grow considerably in future.
