Educational Futurists and the Communication Revolution 2

Welcome to our eighth podcast of the school year. We hope to inspire, instruct and challenge you this year as educators whether you are teaching from home or a campus. Our goal is to equip anyone devoted to discipleship-based-Christian education. I also want to remind you that while supplies last we will send you a free copies of my book, Disciplining this Generation for a Digital World, to anyone that sends us an email. We can also send you a link to the audio version of the book in an MP3 format. I will have the details at the end of the podcast.

We have been speaking about the concept that every educator is a futurist and in last week’s podcast we introduced the idea that we are in a communication revolution. I have said, over and over, that this will change everything about our culture. This is why last week’s history lesson in the podcast is so important to understand. In the last 2000 years our world has gone through two significant technological changes that changed the transmission of communication but more importantly the very nature of how we communicate. The Codex made it possible to transport large amounts of written text but it also changed the way the western mind thought about text. It categorized and constructed language into chapters and sections. The written language was no longer a continuous scroll it became a  segmented page by page experience. Interestingly, the new communication of the web combines both the page and the scroll. Of course the biggest thing the Codex did was make the written word available in ways that never existed before its time. Fourteen hundred years later the printing press gave us the ability to mass produce the written word at a cost that any common man could, with some effort, publish his writings. What is truly remarkable about these technologies was how they unleashed forces of change that altered our societies and cultures at the most fundamental levels. In both cases the Christian’s of their day were some of the first to take advantage of these changes.  Rome went from a pantheistic pagan culture to an empire that required every citizen to profess some sort of faith in Christ. Today we still identify the largest and oldest Christian denomination with Rome, the Roman Catholic Church. Europe went from medieval fiefdoms to modern democracies with the flag of the Protestant Reformation leading the way. The very authority structures were altered because they couldn’t control the flow and content of communication and that is at the heart of why everything changed.

It is almost always about who will control our thoughts and ideas. Isn’t that really what spiritual warfare is all about, who will control the hearts and minds of the masses? Let me quote this idea from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s famous cliché as it was first written in his play Richelieu, Or the Conspiracy:  

True, This! —
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! — itself a nothing! —
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! — Take away the sword —
States can be saved without it!

The written word has indeed paralyzed the Caesars in times past by the Codex and the printing press. I would suggest a mightier invention than these has been released been released upon the earth. I am going to take an expert from the audio version of my book to tell the story of how this invention has come to be:

The Modern Gutenberg-ian Invention

“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it,” Edmund Burke.

I have taken us back into the past so that we might peer into the future. The recent advent of the internet and all of the amazing innovations of communication technology in the last fifteen years will prove to surpass Gutenberg’s scope of change. If the movable type press released a reformation of change, the internet will unleash a full out revolution. The printing press was accessible only to specific skilled workers; the internet is open to any who can read and write. The printing press was limited to those who could afford to pay to publish; the internet can be accessed for free in most cities around the world. The printing press was only found in the major metropolises of Europe; the internet is now touching every inch of the globe. Hold on mom and dad, we are in for a wild ride!

I heard a student say once, “The internet must have started in outer space.” They were partly right. In 1957 the USSR launched “Sputnik” and the world watched as the “evil empire” flew overhead. The U.S. was stunned. How did the Russians beat us to outer-space? It was time to wake up. The U.S. formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) the following year. This well funded, and at the time secret, agency was given the mandate to establish the U.S. as the world leader in every science and technology field applicable to the military.

In order to take the lead, the U.S. saw its opportunity through the advanced computer systems they had started to use in the Department of Defense. But these large mainframe systems lacked the ability to effectively speak to each other. They were hindered by long distances and different computer protocol languages in the various systems. By working together with specific universities, notably MIT, Stanford and UCLA, the network for these computers, ARPANET, was launched at almost the same time as Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon.

Because ARPA worked extensively with universities, both the Department of Defense and multiple academic institutions began to take advantage of this nation-wide network. By 1971, twenty-three hosts were using the ARPANET. During the next ten years the standard protocols were worked out so that the network could grow. The main network language TCP/IP was decided upon which is the language of the internet today. Programmers using this protocol could now develop applications that would use the network for specific tasks. The first dynamic application to be developed was email. More and more the ARPANET found civilian uses through the connection of universities. Professors in any of the linked institutions now had a way to share data. In 1982, the Norwegians left the European network initiative to adopt the TCP/IP protocol so that they could communicate with American Universities - hinting to the global possibilities of the network. By 1984 there were over 1000 hosts and the network took on a life of its own. The U.S. National Science Foundation began independent research on how to make the ARPANET more stable after the first virus brought the entire network to a halt. When these two projects finally merged, the new name of the network became “the Internet.”

The developing European network, called CERNET, started converting their systems to the TCP/IP protocol. By the end of the decade these networks were all linked and the number of hosts jumped to 100,000.

1989 was a crucial turning point for the Internet. Commercial interest was growing and the first non-government, non-academic ISP (Internet Service Provider) was allowed in by the U.S. Government. The universities protested this inclusion but the cost of the infrastructure was becoming a factor in creating more providers. This change in policy also facilitated the creation of several new agencies to manage the Internet. By 1990, ARPANET ceased to exist and the world came online through world.std.com.

At this time users of the internet were struggling to find user-friendly ways to organize and distribute the data. Computer programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, had been working on the concept of hypertext to facilitate sharing and updating of data. By creating a protocol for pages to reveal data rather than just complex directories, Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW). By making this language available to everyone he created the standard HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) for web page development.

The internet still lacked one crucial application: a way to effectively view this new HTTP format. The application known as Gopher could read hypertext but was unable to organize it into anything except a menu. The High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative introduced by Senator Al Gore provided research money to develop a graphical browser for the WWW. Marc Andreessen, a junior engineer working for the agency, was responsible to develop this project called Mosaic. This new piece of technology gave the user the ability to view text and graphics in the same format as a printed page. After graduating from university, Andreessen helped form Netscape Communications and named their new invention, Netscape Navigator. In 1994, they posted a beta version of the browser on the web as a free download and the World Wide Web was transformed.

Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, in an interview with author and journalist Tom Friedman, commented about the launch of Netscape.

“We put up the Netscape browser,… and people were downloading it for three-month trials. I’ve never seen volume like this. For big businesses and government it was allowing them to connect and unlock all their information, and the point-and-click system that Marc Andreessen invented allowed mere mortals to use it, not just scientists. And that made it a true revolution. And we said, ‘This thing will just grow and grow and grow.’”

When Netscape went public the next year, they leapt onto the scene as the first viable internet company. This started a five year trend of enormous investment in internet technology. All you had to say in an investors meeting was, “I have a dot.com business,” and they would literally throw money at you. Barksdale continues:

“We were profitable almost from the start… Netscape was not a dot-com. We did not participate in the dot-com bubble. We started the dot-com bubble.”

This period of unprecedented investment in such a new technology caused the internet to explode beyond anyone’s wildest predictions. At the beginning of the new millennium, the dot-com bubble began to deflate because of over-investment and, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bubble burst. But what this period of investment did accomplish was a truly global network: the seamless infrastructure of servers and fiber optics that have given us the internet we use today in virtually every corner of the globe. The internet is here and the world has changed.

So what does this mean for us as educators? First let’s consider that most experience educators come from and were trained in a pre internet world. Our understanding of education didn’t take into account the instant knowledge network or the social interconnections that the world wide web has given us. I remember watching Bill Gates get blindsided by the internet in the mid 90’s as even he did not see what the internet would become. In 1993 he said “The Internet? We are not interested in it.” In 1994 he said, “I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.” Four years later Microsoft went into catch up mode with its first attempt to integrate the internet into its operating system Windows 98. This inability to see the future kept Microsoft out of the race for several crucial years of the internet’s initial development. Today we are dealing more with Larry Page and Serge Brin, the young founders of Google than we are with Bill and the old boys club at Microsoft. Most of us educators, like Bill, didn’t see this train coming and we have been catching up ever since.

Let’s not forget that this is a communication revolution and most of what we do as educators is teach communication. The first six years of our task is almost exclusively teaching and developing the skills of language acquisition and numeracy. We have codified our world in these strange abstract symbols of text and numbers and it is our job to pass these codes on to our children. Yet the very means of communication has change and it is altering how we use these symbols. The tools and the medium for these symbols are changing. This is not to say that teaching our children the necessary communication skills is not important. The problem is we are in unsure territory as to how we can prepare our kids for these changes. English, the most flexible language in human history, is bending and altering in ways no-one could predict. Consider that the largest population of English speaking people in four years will be in China. Hypertext and instant messaging is having its day with English as well. It won’t be long before we integrate the hieroglyphics of emoticons into our English language dictionaries. How do we prepare our kids for this and how much of the old world language skills do we cling too? These are all language questions but more importantly what are the social implications.

As our children grow and develop we begin to introduce them to the social structures and networks of our culture but these have all change. Culture is changed, the boarders have changed, how we connect to our neighbours, friends, employers, governments and the world has all changed and will keep changing into something very different than we ever expected. How do we teach citizenship in a global world? How do we prepare them for careers that don’t even exist yet? How do we help them see their role as Christians in a post modern world that thinks differently about the very foundations of truth?

I don’t know the answers but at least I am beginning to know the questions. I believe it is time that we begin to work on a manifesto of Christian education for the 21st Century. It is time to call upon the collective vision of both our experienced educators and our young and upcoming educators to give us real solutions to these problems. We must wake up and embrace these changes like the Christians in the first century did with the Codex and took the Roman world with the Gospel. We must find the Martin Luther’s to this digital generation train them in the arts and psychology of digital communication. Let me invite the staff of our Heritage Christian Schools, our home education families, our campus school families and our students to begin this process of writing a manifesto of Christian education for the 21st Century. I will be posting a Wiki next month that will give us a collaborative tool to start this process. If you want to be a part of this just email me.

Next week we will continue to consider the implications this Communication Revolution. We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.