Education and training professionals need to convince the government and the private sector to mount a large-scale Telecommunications Literacy Campaign (TLC). The power of the developing telecommunications revolution needs to be exercised not only by the usual technological sector, but by the entire country. The capabilities and productivity that the revolution will bring can affordably be used by all. The public needs to be educated to be "literate" in the new telecommunications environment.

The campaign can be justified in several areas:

• increased individual productivity
• increased national productivity
• enabling education and training professionals to do more with less
• increased creativity

Gilder said that the connecting of personal computers to broadband networks will be a crucial opportunity for educational materials (Educom Staff, 1994). Students can have increased individual productivity by having access to video materials through telecommunications links. Education and training professionals can use video and motion pictures on the computer because the PC will be able to do anything that a TV can do. Distance learning can use more media and live teleconferencing.

Similarly, people working on their PCs will have greater productivity. Gilder noted that soon one microchip can contain one billion transistors, the equivalent of 16 supercomputers, with a production cost of under $100 (NPQ, 1995). He said that then the PC could be like a powerful TV station with households originating their own programming.

Telecommunications literacy is important to make individuals who are students or workers, or potential students or workers, aware of the details of the potentials for increased individual productivity.

Toffler (1980) enumerated many reasons for having an "electronic cottage industry" where people were more productive by working at home. He found a 29:1 ratio in the amount of energy consumed for commuting versus moving information electronically. He said that if 12-14% of the population telecommuted, the US would not be dependent on any foreign oil.

Telecommuting will be feasible for many with the telecommunications revolution. People can work at home, and conduct long-distance business meetings online instead of by flying to their destination. Education and training professionals can develop programs geared to the communications needs of telecommuters to enable them to have even more productivity.

Education and training professionals will be able to do more with less. There will be dramatically lower costs of production and services. Gilder pointed out that in all industries, "the key impact of the computer-networking revolution is to collapse the costs of distribution and remove the middlemen."(Educom Staff, 1994). He said that the mass-media culture will be replaced by a better multimedia culture that will take away the power from the few and give it "to scores of thousands of people who can manufacture major products on their own desktops at the cost of producing a book, not a battleship" (NPQ, 1995). Education and training designers and producers are among these people. They can deliver, and they can educate and train their students to be their own manufacturer, so they can deliver what their competitors cannot.

There will be unprecedented creativity and fulfillment. Gilder said that in the microprocessor workstation environment an individual "could have as much creative power as a factory tycoon of the industrial age"(Slater, 1996). Then when the Internet has telecommunications connections of the speed of light, the individual can have "the communications power of a broadcast tycoon of the television era." He called creativity "our most crucial power" and said, "Technology is both a manifestation of our creativity and an instrument of it. And so it is exactly the way human beings fulfill their mission on earth." Education and training designers and producers are major users of creative force and can have large benefits in creating and publishing their own products.

Five main concepts for the Telecommunications Literacy Campaign (TLC) are

• awareness of the new cyber environment
• learning at home and individual productivity
• working at home
• high-level competing by education and training professionals
• unprecedented creative powers

Telecommunications literacy starts with people having a basic awareness of the new cyber environment. Gilder’s telecosm concept involves having the speed of data transmission overcoming the microprocessor speed as the critical factor in the new cyber environment. Literacy in the basics of the telecommunications hardware speeds is an essential ingredient of this awareness. This is parallel to knowing which words are verbs being essential to literacy.

Specifically, the awareness can be knowing the data of telecommunications, the speed of different technologies.

In 1996 the standard modem speed was 28.8k.

Today in 1997, regular modems are 57.6k, ISDN is 125k, satellites are 400k, and cable modems are 1Mb plus.

Currently, two-thirds of U.S. homes and 95% of computer households have coaxial cable (NPQ, 1995). Gilder asserts that when fiber optic lines fully arrive with infinite bandwidth, the "effect on every American household will be enormous" with access to all videos and the home being equivalent to a bookstore.

Also, there needs to be awareness of the convergence of the telephone and computer. Presently, desktop and laptop computers can be interfaced to connect with line-based phones, and well as some analog cellular phones and digital PCS phones. With convergence, there will be an integrated data appliance.

The concept of learning at home involves distance education as well as traditional education. Distance learning occurs when the teacher and the student do not always meet face to face. They could be a few miles apart or thousands of miles apart. Distance education now has an international reputation of being viable and cost effective (McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996). With telecommunications, the capabilities of learning at home will be multiplied.

Individual productivity can increase greatly with distance education. With the coming of telecommunications technology, distance education can be more powerful by providing integrated telecommunications systems consisting of audio, video, graphic, and data communication using ordinary phone lines and computer workstations (McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996). The Clinton administration’s National Information Infrastructure (NII) will impact education by greatly increasing access to Internet services. (McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996). The NII’s backbone will be the fiber-optic infrastructure. Fiber-optic technology provides the large bandwidth that enables full-motion video, two-way videoconferencing, and on-line multimedia.

The largest study conducted of distance education was in the TEAMS program in Los Angeles County schools that found many positive results (Far West Labs, 1997). The study used surveys and interviews with over 5,000 students. The research showed positive significant changes directly attributable to the students' participation in the TEAMS Distance Learning program, including:

• "improved content knowledge and skill (math/science)
• improved critical thinking and problem solving
• improved language skills
• improved quality of work
• increased interest in school
• greater confidence as learner"

The research also focused on the impact of the program on the teachers. "Teachers value the TEAMS instructional design because of:

• more cooperative learning experiences . . .
• student centered learning which emphasizes problem solving and critical thinking
• students are exposed to new technology and different teaching styles
• students are exposed to experiences and resources which they would not otherwise be able to access in the conventional classroom"

My experience right now in taking this comprehensive examination is learning at home by researching mostly using the Internet. The research is faster and more precise and I can find more material than by going into the library. Most of what I am finding is textual. (There were some illustrations of Gilder on some of the web sites.) In the telecommunications future, a comps exam could include researching multimedia materials and editing pertinent clips into the exam response. There could be videoconferencing between students and faculty after the exam for feedback. The exam could be a live interview or presentation by videoconferencing.

The concept of working at home can encompass persons partially or totally doing their jobs in their residences, with limited or no use of an external office building or factory. The concept is important because it is related to more freedom and productivity, and often to more income. The campaign should explain how the world of work is different with the computer-telecommunication nexus.

About twenty years ago, Toffler (1980) wrote about the concept of the electronic cottage. He described working at home in terms of economics, energy use, oil independence, individual freedom, and social structure. He called it a move to the cottage industry concept in electronic terms with a home-centered society. He referred to a Hewlett-Packard study that found that up to 50% of work at one location could be done at home with then-existing technology which was a work station with a computer console, fax, and conferencing equipment.

He acknowledged that face-to-face contact was very important but that many tasks did not need it at all, or only intermittently. "Low-abstraction" office workers who did data entry, typing, and worked with figures rarely required face-to-face transaction. "Ultrahigh-abstraction" workers - researchers, policy makers - sometimes required intense face-to-face contact, sometimes required being alone, and sometimes both.

There were difficulties involved in making the transition from working in an office to working at home, including motivation, management, and organization. Dealing with these difficulties should be part of the TLC.

Toffler provided numerical data. A study on telecommuting showed that a company paid downtown workers in Los Angeles $520 more than their counterparts to subsidize transportation costs. The average U.S. commuter used 64.6 kilowatts per day for transportation versus about 120 watts for a computer terminal. He noted that as energy costs rise and computer costs plummet in coming decades, there will be an advantage to not have centralized work places. Other cost factors were real estate, utilities, security, and maintenance.

Several other factors were involved. Environmental factors were automobiles’ damage to the environment and alternative power sources - solar and wind. Family issues included family life advocates and working mothers. There was the economic issue of the worker owning the means of production. Psychological issues involved whether telecommuting was impersonal or more personal.

Essentially, the question was the high cost and personal inconvenience of commuting, versus the low cost and personal convenience of telecommuting.

Telecommunications allows education and training professionals to be highly competitive because it allows them to

• lower the costs of production and services
• deliver what competitors cannot deliver

I have developed two scenarios to illustrate the lowering of costs of production and services for an instructional designer partnership. The scenarios give areas illustrating what telecommunications users can deliver that non-telecommunications cannot.

I had an experience in conducting a needs assessment for a design project for a class that involved very heavy use of email. I collaborated with a partner and we sent drafts back and forth for feedback. On the last few days we were emailing each other more than twenty times per day. Compared to how this would have been done ten years ago, we saved a lot of time and were able to spend time on the writing instead of commuting to meetings and being in meetings. However, we were writing it separately, and it was complex to arrange both of us to edit it after we merged our texts.

With the coming of telecommunications, we can jump bounds ahead of our current setup and use NetMeeting or other technologies to have our own live two-way videoconferences, and share documents and graphic and live motion media. We can edit it together simultaneously.

We conducted a survey on the web. With telecommunications, the results could be shared sooner with the others on the project with multimedia videoconferences.

The time savings by using these technologies can be calculated for real world application.

With telecommunications, photographs for education or training design projects can be created using a digital camera. The usable pictures can be saved, touched up, and then sent by modem to the partners and the clients for feedback. This can be done by email even for very large files when large bandwidths are available. If NetMeeting is functional, it can be used to send the images by videolink.

The savings in material costs and time are significant. With a digital camera, the media costs virtually nothing when the photos are copied to a Zip drive at 15 cents per megabyte. Film and processing are about $12 for a roll of 24. If a production required one roll per day for one work month, that would be about a $250 saving by using digital camera. The savings in time could be calculated with a dollar value for time not having to be spent for going to drop off and pick up film (or processing it in-house), meeting with partners and clients, etc. At a photographer’s rate of $200 per day, these time savings could be significant.

The photographer in the design shop can get better results and make more money. With the media cost of virtually zero, the photographer can shoot more shots to get the best image. It should take less time to do a project. The telecommuting photographer can thereby do more projects than a commuting photographer and/or take more time off for vacations. With telecommuting the photographer might choose to charge by the image and be able to cut the time required to create an image.

The concept of unprecedented creative power includes Gilder’s description of creativity as "our most crucial power" (Slater, 1996) and his concept of the "peer network" where every terminal can be a creator of digital, video, and multimedia material (NPQ, 1995).

Understanding and using these new creative powers is essential to telecommunications literacy because telecommunications focuses on the power of the individual to create its own information for the individual, the family unit, or the peer or community group. The creative powers can mean that each individual or group can be its own creator and publisher of information, whether in the form of creative writing, graphics, databases, audio, video.

I publish a newsletter. I distributed it my print by mail to a small audience. I have put a few issues on the web but have not promoted them. With the coming of telecommunications, I can publish large portfolio pieces such as videos and Director projects. I can teach others how to do this and can operate a server to distribute their video and multimedia projects. I can form a community group either real or virtual. I can manifest my own creativity and stimulate that of others.

Gates said that the "3D Movie Maker" software enables the kind of power that made Jurassic Park on a $50k work station to be used by kids in a $40 program (Sawyer, 1995). The campaign could have a Film Project group for children and adults to make 3d movies. The films can be digitally sent to other groups for feedback during production, and for entertainment after they are finished.

The Telecommunications Literacy Campaign has many compelling reasons to be implemented.

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http://www.educom.edu/web/pubs/review/reviewArticles/29432.html

Far West Labs (1997). Teams information: Evaluation summary. Los Angeles County Office of Education. Available:

http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/overview/evaluation.html

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