Thomas Edison, the father of electricity and inventor of the motion picture, predicted in 1922 that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and...in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

Since then high levels of excitement and expectation have been generated by every new generation of information and communication technologies (ICTs): compact discs and CD-ROMs, videodiscs, microcomputer-based laboratories, the Internet, virtual reality, local and wide area networks, instructional software, Macs, PCs, laptops, notebooks, educational television, voice mail, e-mail, satellite communication, VCRs, cable TV, interactive radio, etc. The list of “hot” technologies available for education goes on and on.

In 1984, Seymour Papert, when he was at the MIT Technology Lab, predicted that, “there won’t be schools in the future…. I think the Computer will blow up the school, that is, the school as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, [who] follows a curriculum—all of that” (“Trying to Predict the Future,” Popular Computing 3(13), pp. 30-44.).

Where are we today?