http://threewordchant.com/2010/02/24/why-the-internet-will-fail-from-1995/

Quote :

"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Quote :

"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

Quote :

"Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

Quote :

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? "

3/8/2010 9:12:41 AM

Time for a:
Why This Article Failed

3/8/2010 9:14:33 AM

I absolutely love reading predictions from the past of today's "future." There's a great blog that I follow that is basically a repository of these:

http://www.paleofuture.com/

3/8/2010 9:19:28 AM

Quote :

"no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Seems dead on to me

3/8/2010 9:53:08 AM

^
How could you possibly not see how the internet will change (or has already changed,) the way government works? Are you interpreting that in some particular way?


-------------------

Quote :

"predictions from the past of today's "future."

Here's one I liked from February 2001


http://discovermagazine.com/2001/feb/featnapster

Quote :

"A Love Song for Napster Imagine what could happen to democracy if the courts kill off this popular software by Jaron Lanier I'm in the unusual position of being both a computer scientist and a professional musician. On the computer side, I'm best known for my work in virtual reality, a term I coined in the early 1980s. As a musician I write, perform, and record my own work. Canons for Wroclaw, a concerto I created for virtual instruments, was performed last December by the Chamber Orchestra of Wroclaw, Poland. All of this means that I have a few deeply felt ideas about Napster, the free software millions of people use to share their music collections over the Internet. Big media companies see Napster as theft because they can't collect royalties when people use it. So they have asked the courts to kill it. As I write this, a settlement seems to be emerging. Napster will probably begin to charge for its services and pay royalties to at least some record companies. Whatever happens, the legal decisions surrounding Napster are important for reasons that transcend the music business and extend to our basic concepts of what it means to be free in a democracy. I believe the anti-Napster forces have failed to foresee dangerous implications of their course of action. They aren't thinking about the harsh logic at the core of this technology. They do not understand what I call the Law of the Excluded Digital Middle: Digital tools can be either open or closed but resist being anything in between. An open digital tool is one that can be used in unforeseen ways. A tool like e-mail, meant to send text, might also— surprisingly— be used to send music. A closed tool is one in which there are technical restrictions that prevent unforeseen uses. Cell phones are currently closed; no 19-year-old kid can reconfigure them. The advantage of open tools is that more people can create new things with them; consequently, they tend to be more innovative. Closed tools are usually created because it is thought they will be more profitable: An owner can control them well enough to enforce bill collection. (Of course, the open software movement energetically promotes the idea that innovation ends up generating more money than control does.) At any rate, closed tools are almost always packaged as pieces of hardware— with some powerful exceptions, such as Microsoft Windows, software that is turned into a closed system by tying it to a hardware transaction— the purchase of a computer. If Windows had to be bought separately, some people would share it for free over the Internet instead of paying for it, just as if it were a song on Napster. The alternative to allowing free file sharing à la Napster is to enforce a frightening level of control of information movement. It might not seem obvious why this would be true, so I'd like to offer a thought experiment to show you the future I fear. First, let's suppose that the supreme Court declares Napster-like software illegal this year. Then jump ahead with me to the year 2015 for a look back at how things went: After the court's decision, Napster was no longer available for free, but literally dozens of new, free Napster-like systems sprang up within months. At first, people hesitated to use this free software because they wanted to obey the law. Then a fresh generation of teen programmers came along and decided to give away the software anonymously. At the same time, music lovers felt that record companies were overcharging for CDs and underpaying musicians. By 2002, tens of millions of people were embracing this new software, whose use had been designed to be hard to detect. Without a central company like Napster to sue, it became expensive to track down and prosecute individuals who shared music files. So more and more people quietly violated the law. Children, in particular, grew up as perpetual lawbreakers. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already. CD sales started to increase because technology made it easier for people to discover new music that spoke to them. The Internet proved itself a better means than radio for getting people excited enough about new music to go out and spend money on it. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already. But CD sales plummeted when the wireless Internet began to work really well. By 2003, every car radio, pair of headphones, and alarm clock was hooked up to the wireless Internet, and any piece of music could be coaxed out of any gadget anyone owned. The record companies tried to guard their copyrights by putting copy protection codes on music files. But there was always someone who could figure out how to break the code. In fact, if somebody couldn't break the code, he or she could simply rerecord the song through a speaker and microphone, then play it on any music software; the next day thousands of free copies could be flying around the globe. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already. In desperation, record companies worked with electronics concerns to create what's known as an end-to-end solution so that they could enforce copy protection all the way to the end of the chain of delivery, which in the case of music meant the audio speaker. By 2004, it was illegal to build speakers that could respond to old-fashioned analog inputs. Instead, manufacturers made speakers that responded to digital inputs so they could play only music authorized to be heard at a given time and place. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already. (The music industry is about to unveil an attempt at a complete end-to-end plan for audio called the Secure Digital Music Initiative. The system isn't implemented in speakers but in the next-to-last stage of the chain, just before a musical signal goes out on a cable to a speaker. The makings of true end-to-end copyright protection technology have already appeared in the visual domain, riding on the coattails of the new flat screens that everyone will soon want. When equipped with encryption technology, the emerging standard for hooking up flat screens, called Digital Visual Interface, could be used to block image streams selectively.) End-to-end strategies for protecting copyright bothered some people because, in a democracy, citizens are supposed to act as partners in enforcing laws. They argued that those forced to follow rules without being trusted even for a moment are, in fact, slaves. Even after people adjusted to them, end-to-end schemes caused problems. Lots of folks still made their own recordings and wanted to send them to friends. As microphones and editing software got very good and very cheap, amateur musicians bought and used them. What the media companies decided they needed was an audio speaker that could distinguish a homemade song from a pirated dub of valuable copyrighted material. In lieu of that, they asked for, and got, legislation that forced everyone to copyright, or at least register, every work of art, even those made by amateurs at home. By 2005, every stream of sound had to present the right documentation to a pair of headphones or speakers— or the music couldn't be played. Before long people were hoarding old analog speakers. In 2006, the recording industry persuaded eBay to refuse to list them. The same story played out visually. By 2007, computer screens had finally gotten both good and cheap. By 2008, people who wanted to e-mail a video of their baby's first birthday— to doting relatives— so they could watch the infant's antics on those excellent screens— were forced to register homemade videos before transmitting them. By 2009, monitoring visual communications became hopelessly complicated because a new generation of Net-videophones, which offered a just-like-being-there experience, spread like wildfire. (In fact, a guy named Jaron Lanier had been pushing an early, primitive form of this technology, calling it "tele-immersion," back in the year 2000, but no one remembered.) Then the real trouble started. In 2010, rebellious college students began throwing copyright-breaking "projector parties," in which one kid would pay to see a movie in a theater while he then broadcast it live to a whole gang of revelers, in some cases thousands of them. Instead of paying for a movie, kids just searched the Net for a party showing that movie and watched it for free. This shouldn't sound far-fetched. It is happening already with low-quality video-chat technologies. The movie studios complained, and the courts quickly ruled against projector parties. The FBI staged some highly publicized busts. After 2012 things deteriorated to the point where people had to register not only works of art but also each video or audio conversation they had over the Internet. Unregistered material simply wouldn't play on any video screen or speaker in the land. A snooping system checked to make sure that the person whose ears and eyes were about to be stimulated had to pay for the privilege. Now you're probably wondering: Who ran the snooping system? There were various proposals. In 2012, legislation to create a major new branch of government for performing such monitoring was proposed, but, after a bitter battle in 2013, Congress refused to fund it. For a while, thousands of mom-and-pop businesses, owned by the same people who used to run video rental shops, offered local copyright authorizing services. This proved inefficient, unreliable, and rife with opportunities for corruption. "

[Edited on March 8, 2010 at 10:28 AM. Reason : ]

3/8/2010 10:14:49 AM

...cont'

Quote :

"The only way to keep digital file transfers under control was to have a handful of strong, centralized authorizing businesses, rather like the three big credit-rating agencies that emerged in the late 20th century. Soon people were paying per item of media, resulting in a truly vast number of transactions that had to be kept track of. You might wonder why people didn't receive just one simple monthly bill. They did, in 2013. The problem was that the bill covered telephone and videophone calls, e-mail, movie viewing, even moviemaking— every activity involving the movement of information. Constant and titanic legal battles developed over who would get what portion of the enormous sums collected. Industries with divergent business models simply couldn't find common ground. Every time a case was resolved, the billing structure became more fractured and complicated. By 2015 the system had reverted to per-item billing. Some people complained that the government had handed out a small number of multibillion-dollar gift certificates to this new breed of copyright authorizing mogul. While many agreed, there was no turning back. The logic of the situation compelled authorizers to intervene in private as well as commercial communications. These new middlemen became arbiters of how much citizens should pay when they shared information with one another. There was no rational means of setting such prices, because the scarcity of the product was artificially created and government-imposed. Fifteen years later, we can now see that when the courts killed Napster, they unwittingly set us on a road that ended in a massive government-sponsored protection racket. So that's my thought experiment— bleak and alarmist, perhaps, but one that follows directly from the logic of this situation. If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy. You can't have both. And the issues raised by Napster aren't going away. They are going to rise up again and again until our society makes some difficult decisions and adjustments. As a computer scientist, I see only too clearly that no matter how much money litigants spend in attempts to stop file sharing, the practice will go on anyway. As a citizen, I fear the threat to democracy implicit in my thought experiment, particularly because I suspect people might allow this threat to come to fruition before they understand the circumstances and long-term effects. The sane solution is not to waste all our energies fighting pointless battles in court but to seek out creative means of compensating musicians— and the technicians and businesspeople who make it possible for them to create their songs. As a musician, I have come to believe that free file sharing is good for the soul. In the short run, we may lose money. But we are a tenacious lot, and we will figure out new ways to make money in cyberspace. If we believe in the future of music— and I don't mean remarketing rock 'n' roll to each new generation but rather encouraging unbounded creative exploration— then we should celebrate the open Internet."

3/8/2010 10:15:29 AM

^^

what, are you trolling or really that stupid?

---


HAHA, that article was written by Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg. It's pretty hilarious that someone who's pretty well regarded in tech circles could have been so wrong.

Two possibilities
1) He was ordered by his editor to write a piece from this perspective
2) He was trolling the fuck out of the future.

[Edited on March 8, 2010 at 10:29 AM. Reason : .]

3/8/2010 10:23:28 AM

I suppose it has changed the way it works.

I was more thinking about how it is still bloated, inefficient, redundant, etc when, given current technology, there is no excuse to continue to exist that way.

3/8/2010 10:38:43 AM

haha, well nothing will ever change that particular aspect of government.

3/8/2010 10:42:42 AM

Quote :

"^^ what, are you trolling or really that stupid?"

I think his point about a CD-ROM not being able to replace a competent teacher is a fair one.

3/8/2010 10:45:38 AM

Quote :

"I absolutely love reading predictions from the past of today's "future." There's a great blog that I follow that is basically a repository of these: http://www.paleofuture.com/"

Jesus, that's a productivity-killer if I've ever seen one.

3/8/2010 11:08:16 AM

I stopped reading the Napster article at:

Quote :

"Cell phones are currently closed; no 19-year-old kid can reconfigure them."

3/8/2010 11:10:57 AM

^^^

looking at it as an absolute of "CD-ROM" is a bit pedantic. That was the best form of content delivery back in 1995. In 2010, an enormous amount of coursework, training, and learning are done electronically via the web. Electronic learning HAS replaced instructor led learning in a significant way. I'll agree that it will never be a 100% replacement, but it's extremely commonplace and just as effective for most applications.

3/8/2010 11:30:45 AM

^

3/8/2010 11:51:52 AM

Quote :

"The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK"

Source:
http://www.pro-linux.de/NB3/artikel/2/image/241/1522,cliff_interview-clifford-stoll.html

3/8/2010 12:03:59 PM

Quote :

"looking at it as an absolute of "CD-ROM" is a bit pedantic. That was the best form of content delivery back in 1995. In 2010, an enormous amount of coursework, training, and learning are done electronically via the web. Electronic learning HAS replaced instructor led learning in a significant way. I'll agree that it will never be a 100% replacement, but it's extremely commonplace and just as effective for most applications."

Oh, I agree. I'm just of the opinion that having an good teacher in the room who can cater to a student directly is generally better than just a video. Though, granted, I'd imagine videos and the like get more effective as the student gets older.

3/8/2010 12:15:50 PM

I don't disagree there either. You certainly don't want to rely on rich media as the main vehicle for primary or secondary education (as an easy example).

Even at the college level and beyond, with rich media education, you definitely lose a valuable teaching tool in classroom interaction, and for certain types of learning the interaction is far more important than the content, and live learning will always be critical in those cases. Not having been in that type of environment, I would assume that courses where the Socratic method is employed is an example of this.

But, going back to the original point, electronic learning HAS replaced instructor led training enough to where education delivery has evolved from what it was 15 years ago as a direct result of computing technology and the Internet.

3/8/2010 12:31:17 PM

I heard a fairly compelling argument from one individual who said technology may change fast, but human culture / behavior does not.

I think the article was a bit biased, but had some (a little...) merit to its arguments.

3/8/2010 6:38:42 PM

people always predict the future to be "Now - But MORE!" He probably also thought that pants would parachute to unfathomable sizes.

3/8/2010 8:08:35 PM

Quote :

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

I literally laughed at this one and now my coworker is giving me the look.

3/8/2010 8:50:32 PM

^^ lol

3/8/2010 9:22:21 PM

Quote :

"I think his point about a CD-ROM not being able to replace a competent teacher is a fair one."

Yeah, but teacher competency has been in massive decline since the mid-80's.

3/8/2010 9:52:30 PM

Quote :

"The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. "

sounds like TWW to me.

3/8/2010 10:05:55 PM

Quote :

"Yeah, but teacher competency has been in massive decline since the mid-80's."

would you like to cite a source for this or just admit you pulled it out of your ass...



[Edited on March 8, 2010 at 10:57 PM. Reason : asdf]

3/8/2010 10:56:40 PM

Quote :

"Jesus, that's a productivity-killer if I've ever seen one."

I'll say.

Good find.

3/8/2010 11:20:37 PM

Quote :

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

lololol

3/8/2010 11:22:40 PM

Quote :

"EightyFour: would you like to cite a source for this or just admit you pulled it out of your ass..."

I'll play DA with something I've thought a few times.

Back in the day, there weren't many jobs available to women. It was nurse, teacher, or secretary. (I'm excluding all the especially invisible jobs like seamstress, laundress, nanny, cook, maid, mill worker, etc..)

Anyway, now that there are so many jobs available to women (jobs that pay a whole lot more than teaching), I think you could argue that the competitiveness/talentedness/smarts of the largely female teacher pool has shrunk as a lot of the top performing women are pursuing careers in medicine, law, finance, engineering, etc...

I dunno.

3/8/2010 11:37:15 PM

Quote :

"EightyFour: would you like to cite a source for this or just admit you pulled it out of your ass..."

Option 3: mambagrl and a conversation with the average American voter. Also, http://www.realonlinedegrees.com/education-rankings-by-country/


This can be most likely attributed to what BridgetSPK said. Also, to BridgetSPK.

I think future school models will likely focus more on independent study, at least for the faster learners, while the slower learners could get the focus they need. When I was in school, my teachers moved far too slow for me and several other students and we were taking Algebra in the 6th grade.

Anyway, rawr rawr rawr, people made bad predictions about technology. Bill Gates once said that "640k ought to be enough for anybody," referring to hard drive space.

3/9/2010 12:21:24 AM

^ I've always wondered how they get those test scores because I can tell you right now, most of my students in Japan are just as dumb in math and science as American students.

3/9/2010 12:54:32 AM

Reminds me of:

Quote :

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

3/9/2010 3:12:14 AM

^^that's good to know

3/9/2010 7:07:18 AM

On the other hand, check out these AT&T ads from 1993.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA

3/9/2010 7:54:23 AM

Quote :

"I dunno."

Teacher quality has more to do with economic cycles than anything else. When the economy is great and jobs are plentiful, the best and brightest find better careers than teaching. When the economy is down and the job market compresses, teacher quality increases as many highly educated and highly experienced folks take jobs teaching due to the lack of better employment opportunities out there.

There have been a lot of studies done on this. don't have time to google for a source, but one (source, not study) I can name off the top of my head is Gladwell's Outliers

3/9/2010 7:58:03 AM

^ I read that, but I remember his argument had to do more with black women unable to find work anywhere due to racism, back in the day.

3/9/2010 11:20:17 AM

sounds like you didn't read it then.

3/9/2010 11:39:51 AM

I'd just like to know exactly where this dramatic drop off in teacher competence took place during the mid eighties. Was it at the peak of trapper keepers or had slap bracelets just started becoming popular? I'm dying to know when!

3/9/2010 12:34:35 PM

^^^ I'm reading Outliers now. I'm about half way through it and haven't seen anything about black women, racism, and teaching jobs that i recall. And I just started reading it a few days ago, so I don't think I've simply forgotten the section.

BobbyDigital is correct in regard to what Gladwell suggests at times (at least through the first half of the book). But I'll add 2 things to what he said: Gladwell was referring to primary and secondary education, not higher ed. And it also has to do with market saturation. The more educated people you have, the more likely you are to have a highly/better educated person in a position you wouldn't typically find them in. And unfortunately... teaching is more than often one of those positions.

Quote :

"looking at it as an absolute of "CD-ROM" is a bit pedantic. That was the best form of content delivery back in 1995. In 2010, an enormous amount of coursework, training, and learning are done electronically via the web. Electronic learning HAS replaced instructor led learning in a significant way. I'll agree that it will never be a 100% replacement, but it's extremely commonplace and just as effective for most applications."

and regarding all other commentary on e-learning...


All of that material was created by someone; namely Instructional Designers and E-Learning Developers. Someone had to learn the material, develop the course, decide on and develop the instructional strategies/methods (it's not as simple as "online" or "electronic" vs "classroom"), figure out how to provide feedback and improve understanding/application/etc. from there. There are definitely teachers behind electronic education. Look up salary ranges for Instructional designers (who develop both in-person training/education as well as e-learning), they're compensated fairly well, much higher than a primary or secondary teacher. And a masters degree is all but required for entry level instructional designer positions.

So there's still a professional educator driving the course. I realize that wasn't exactly the point. But my point is that there is a fundamental misconception in the original claim. What the author didn't consider is that while the instructor may not be physically present, the final course and experience is all a result of an instructor -- not something which is replacing an instructor. And it has as much potential to utilize all of their understanding of education and the learning processes as a class which takes place in person.


A creative instructional designer could certainly incorporate socratic approach to e-learning, at least to a certain extent. It would be dependent on the complexity of the software, but it could be done. You do lose some aspects of the classroom experience, I'm not denying that. But there are pros and cons to both. And I believe that in the end a well developed electronic course can address most learning goals, styles, etc. Not all, but most. And it has an upper-hand on classroom instruction in the sense that it's possible to tailor e-learning to specific learning styles or levels of comprehension where as in a typical primary or secondary classroom you have to teach to the middle. Which even with things like ability grouping and tracking can really thwart the development of students at the ends of the scale.

[Edited on March 9, 2010 at 12:42 PM. Reason : ^]

3/9/2010 12:41:55 PM

Quote :

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

He was half right. Nobody BUYS a newspaper online, we read them for free

3/9/2010 1:01:49 PM

I pay to read the Journal and the Times archives, but for the most part, the precedent for free online newspaper has been set, and it will be very hard to engineer an industry-wide shift to a pay model

3/9/2010 1:41:00 PM