Not long ago, several of my graduate students* and I were
sitting around brainstorming. Our topic: "in the future,
what features would you like to see on instructional web
sites?" I thought several of the ideas we generated
were interesting, so I've described a dozen of them below.
1. Three-dimensional "virtual reality": In a
scene from the movie Disclosure, Michael Douglas
uses a virtual reality workspace. Wearing special goggles
and gloves, and walking on a treadmill, it appears to him
as though he is really "inside" this environment;
he has to "touch" file cabinets to rifle through
them, etc. We want to lose ourselves inside the web site
the same way we do at a good cultural or sporting event
(actually, we yearn for "Star Trek" holodecks,
but for now we'll settle for 3D chat rooms with avatars).
2. Duplex audio voice-over-IP: in plain English, this means
that "chatting" by typing is for the birds. Why
can't we talk to each other just like a conference call?
Actually, this technology already exists but is either expensive,
hard to use, or requires special software plugins or a lot
of bandwidth.
3. While we're wishing for voice chat, why not include webcam
pictures as well? Moreover, the program should be capable
of showing all the participants' video windows on a single
screen. Most people don't have the high-bandwidth Internet
connection necessary for this, but it's coming.
4. Application sharing for collaboration: Instructional
web sites need to go beyond the novelty of a shared whiteboard
into the realm of sharing applications used to perform useful
work. Microsoft's free "NetMeeting" software does
this: it allows people at different locations to simultaneously
collaborate on the same document (provided they're Microsoft
Office documents, naturally!). However, in our experience,
the learning curve for this program is still rather steep.
5. Idea-mapping software that permits students to collaborate
with each other in real time. The "CMap" software
used by NASA and others is a step in the right direction.
6. Access via wireless mobile devices (e.g., web-enabled
cell phones, Personal Digital Assistants). Of course, you
won't be viewing full-motion video on your cell phone for
quite some time. Still, the idea is that we shouldn't have
to be tied to our workplace, school lab, or home computers
in order to participate in an online class. For all the
proliferation of notebooks, PDAs, and cell phones, the fact
remains that most people still cannot access the Internet
from most places outside their offices.
7. Wireless wearable "iglasses": while we're at
it, why limit ourselves to PDAs? Ever since we saw an IBM
commercial featuring a seemingly daft fellow, wearing a
curious glowing monocle, sitting on a European park screaming
"Sell! Sell!" as he traded stocks online, we've
wanted our wireless web access to be like that.
8. Speech recognition with voice commands: Professors are
generally good typists, so we're out of touch with the fact
that the average person on the planet can't type worth a
darn. After years of hype and disappointments, speech recognition
software is finally getting close to being useful (especially
when trained for an individual speaker). While we're at
it, we want online help to be voice-enabled, too: let us
speak our questions, then get videotaped answers pulled
from a database.
9. Speech software should also flow both ways: we'd like
text-to-speech capability that doesn't use artificial "computer-sounding"
voices. For example, read our class discussion board messages
to us while we're commuting, or let us hear our textbook
or our instructor's course notes over an earplug attached
to our cell phone.
10. Interactive tutorials: today's instructional web sites
tout their interactivity. But what, really, do they mean
by "interactivity"? The ability to interact with
other people via the web site using email, chat rooms, discussion
boards, whiteboards, and online testing. We want more. We
want to interact with the web site as well as other students.
We want tutorials that play like video games (heck, that
are video games!). We want to be able to take different
paths through the material, and we want the program to respond
to us as individuals. A long time ago (in computer years),
Artificial Intelligence researcher Joe Weizenbaum's "ELIZA"
program simulated a psychotherapist so convincingly that
many people were willing to interact with it as if it were
a person. Why can't the web site have intelligent "agents"
to greet us, tutor us, help us with research, even crack
an occasional joke based on their constantly-updated knowledge
of us? Mind us, we certainly don't want to reduce interactions
with our professor or fellow students---we just want accessing
the web site when no one else is there to be less lonely.
11. Access to huge interconnected system of libraries online.
Libraries should get together in consortiums and pool their
resources. This has already happened in a few states, but
this needs to be expanded to nationwide (or even worldwide)
status.
12. Finally---ease of use. Instructional web sites are still
way too hard to use. While education may never (and perhaps
should never) be a painless process, the experience of interacting
with the web site should be painless. Here are some ways
to make instructional web sites easier to use:
