[referring to Alessi's paper] Very interesting, very true, very good!
BUT...
Allow my raising an issue which thus far has not been mentioned often, if at all: The uneducated or semi-educated masses in Third World and so-called Developing countries, like my own (South Africa), i.e., probably the largest part of humanity.
For the life of me, I cannot see such people running around with hand-held communication machines in 5-20 years' time, perhaps not even in 30. It is fine to speculate about the effects of technological change "on the world," if we conveniently regard "the world" as consisting of human beings whose basic survival needs (food, shelter, clothing, physical safety) have long since been satisfied. Unfortunately we are living in a fool's paradise if we reason like that.
South Africa is supposed to be the most technologically-advanced country on this continent, but even so a majority of South Africans have probably never even seen a computer. E-mail and the Net are concepts known to perhaps 10 per cent (if that many) of our population of 40 million. In some African countries, I believe, these technologies do not even exist. In Europe and the USA you have been using satellite technology in education for years--here it has been introduced so recently that most higher education institutions do not even have it yet (except for the odd Electrical Engineering department).
I have many first-year tertiary (i.e., post-school) students in my classes who meet computers for the first time when they enroll with us. There are millions of people who don't have the foggiest idea of how to use automatic teller machines.
And I can continue in that vein.
"Educating the masses" may not be a priority in the USA or Germany or Canada or Australia any more, but it is THE most important issue in education in scores of countries like mine. Therefore the points made by Steve Alessi raise some crucial questions for me:
(1) Should we continue our efforts in South Africa (and similar countries) to teach literacy? (Is literacy really necessary for survival?)
(2) If we do, what would be the implications regarding the most sensible use of IT in a country where relatively few people are familiar with it, either as producers or as consumers?
(3) If we don't teach conventional literacy, how should we go about "educating the masses" who have no access to relevant electronic technology (and probably won't have for years to come)?
(4) Should we bother about "educating the masses" at all??
Isn't communication technology simply creating a new form of global apartheid, with us "electronically literates" becoming the privileged elite? (A question that has been asked frequently, but not yet answered satisfactorily.)
Fascinating and exciting as the developing technologies and their applications are to me, I am brought down to earth with a solid thud every morning when I walk into my computerless classroom and see my computerless students looking at me with computerless eyes. In a country where there are only a handful of formally trained CBI/CBT/CAE/CAI developers one is considered by many people to be a computer genius if one owns a fairly decent computer and has read a few articles in SA Computer Buyer magazine!
I think Steve Alessi's fears might even be more well-founded than he thought them to be, if one considers the billions of left-behinds and about-to-be-left-behinds in the world. Instead of being broken down, our cushy hi-tech ivory towers are seemingly becoming more solid than ever.
If I consider the sophistication of some of the contributions to ITForum, I feel like a Left-behind myself!