It has been fashionable to assume that any version of distance education where the teacher and the students are not in the same classroom at the same time has just got to be inferior to the old situation that used to prevail. I have had 10 years of experience that shows to me that this idea is quite wrong.
One time, I read that American fighter pilots kept defeating some enemy planes mostly because of their communication equipment and their use of it, enabling the fighters to talk to each other while fighting. This communication changed the nature of their cooperation.
Similarly, in the electronic classrooms, where time is arrested and students talk to each other by computers, they can and do communicate in amounts and in types of expression that are not even possible in the traditional classroom. Everyone can speak at the same time and everyone can be heard.
This post on the Oreilly Radar blog expresses visions of something like the same effect in government and in the interaction between government and citizens. In the old days, one citizen got to talk to one official. Consider what happens when virtually immediate communication takes place between very high numbers of citizens and very high numbers of government employees. Not only that, but suppose they all have the full resources of the web and high-level access to experts, thinkers, financiers, inventors, marketers, etc., etc. In some political riots recently, in the US as well as Iran and Cambodia, there have been reports of coordination between people and groups by cell phone and Twitter. It seems possible that as technical capabilities expand, and as people everywhere learn to make use of technology better, faster and more cheaply, truly new stages of human experience and development will be reached. I hope they are mostly positive.
