What Has Not Changed
It is hard to believe that we are coming up on the ten year
anniversary of the Online Chronicle of Distance Education and
Communication. When I started the Online Chronicle (then the Online
Journal), it seemed like an obvious thing to do. There were no online
publications about online learning and such a new field needed to
develop an online voice. It is reassuring to know that, ten years
later, the main areas the Chronicle was created to address are just
as relevant today as they were then. Briefly, they are:
Area #1: Distance Education- reaching geographically disadvantaged
learners, whether K-12, post secondary, or general enrichment
students.
Area #2: Distance Communications- distance education that falls
outside the domain of formal learning, such as public TV and radio,
private business use of satellite delivery, or government information
programs.
Area #3: - Telecommunications in Education- Using distance education
to expand the learning opportunities and resources of local learners.
Area #4: Cross Cultural Communication Efforts , Particularly Between
the US and the USSR.
It is particularly interesting to reflect on Area #4. When the Chronicle was created, there was tremendous excitement about the changes occurring in the U.S.S.R., as it was known at the time, and about the role that simple email and fax machines could play in helping people communicate across the Iron Curtain. In describing the effect of distance technologies on this endeavor, one reporter put it so well that I wish I had saved it verbatim. A very loose paraphrase of his statement goes something like this: the attempted coop on Boris Yeltsin's government was a case of the tank vs. the fax machine and the fax machine won.
As I look at those four goals, there is no question that some could be consolidated and perhaps expanded. But the basic intellectual infrastructure is there to deal with the phenomenon of distance education, which the Chronicle described at the beginning of each issue in the following manner: In the industrial age we go to school. In the information age, school can come to use. This is the message implicit in the media and movement of distance education.
What Has changed? We Now Have a 4th R: Art
So, what has changed? As I look over some of the original issues of the Chronicle I am impressed with almost everything: the writing, the bulletins, the guest editorials, the creativity and activity in the field. But there is one part of the Chronicle I am definitely not impressed with: the logo. This leads to the most dramatic change in the way we do business online that has developed over the past ten years: the use of graphics.
I will be the first to admit that the various unsuccessful attempts at developing a logo for the Online Chronicle using ASCII characters were as much due to my lack of artistry as they were to any other cause. But the fact of the matter was that ten years ago, with very few exceptions, online systems simply did support graphics of any kind. It was a text world. Ten years later, anyone who has cruised the Internet knows how much that has changed. The palette of communication tools open to us much richer than they were ten years ago. Now we live in the multimedia world of the World Wide Web. We speak now in pictures and words, and, to the extent that our bandwidth allows, music, sound, video, and animations. The kinds of information we will put on the Web only promises to grow, to encompass virtual reality, holography, and technologies we can not even conceive of at present.
This leads to a second very important change that has occurred, and that is the fact that the Web requires publishers, readers, participants in the online world to communicate as designers and artists, not just as text processors. We are in the middle of a literacy revolution and what needs to happen is obvious. Because of the emergence of multimedia, we are being forced to expand one of the corner stones of our academic culture: the 3 Rs are becoming the 4Rs: Readin, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic, and aRt. While we have had varying success selling art to the public on the basis of the personal fulfillment it brings, being able to communicate using the tools and perspective of the art world will become a staple literacy and job skill. Thanks to the Web, multimedia is the new international lingua franca.
So, enter the next decade of the Online Chronicle. It is on the Web. It is graphic. And it is uniquely positioned as the longest running online distance education journal to serve the online audience into the next millennium. I look as forward to watching it evolve over the next 10 years as I have over the last ten.