The Learning Revolution - Chapter 1


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Book Summary
Contents Page
Learning Revolution Library
Skim-read the book
Remember the Main Points
Check your Thinking Style
Count to 10 in Japanese
Think up Great New Ideas
Personal Learning Styles
Check your Fog Index

Preview the CD-ROM

The Future	41

UNLIMITED Learning - the new learning revolution and the seven keys to unlock it.

one of those 10 million messages that we will soon be able to transmit at the same time on one fiber optic "cable" at almost no cost? And what if you could reproduce that information at home in any form: on computer, videotape, compact disc or on your home printer? The technology is operating. And more and more you won't even need the fiber optics.
  By early 1999 at least 250 million computers were in use. At least 100 million people had direct access to the Internet. Each one could directly contact 150 million others. Millions more had Internet access through their company or school. Between 2000 and 2005, many forecast that 500 million5 to 1 billion individuals will be on the Net.
  CD-ROMs and electronic games provide striking early examples of the shape of things to come.
  When an earlier version of this book appeared in 1993 the electronic games business was already very big but CD-ROMs were mere infants. By 1995 more than 10,000 CD-ROM titles were on the market. Most were, in some form, educational. And since then the total has soared.
  Several breakthroughs form typical success models:
   In 1979, Californian school teacher Jan Davidson set up a small teaching centre in Rancho Palos Verdes, overlooking southern Los Angeles. She soon bought a $3,000 Apple II computer, and with a friend began writing programs to drill students in vocabulary and mathematics. Her company grew modestly until 1991, when "edutainment put it into overdrive".6 Three years later she and her husband Bob floated Davidson & Associates as a public company, and in 1996 they sold it for almost $1 billion.
  Now you'll find the Davidson label, with that of toy giant Fisher-Price, on a major range of high-quality, well-researched interactive CD-ROM programs. They're turning millions of homes into preschool, elementary and high-school learning centers: Kid Phonics, Kid Works, Kid Keys, Kid Kad, and the Math Blaster and Reading Blaster series among the leaders from Davidsons, for youngsters from four to 12 years; and from Fisher-Price a series starting even younger.
   In 1981 a 25-year-old American bought Q-DOS - the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" - for $75,000,7 developed it, and turned it into the standard for the personal-computing world.
  Today Microsoft head Bill Gates is the world's richest businessman. Gates' teenage dream was "a computer on every desk and in every home".8 Now he plans, too, for


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Contents Page Preface Introduction