t is coming - and as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are nontechnical, nonspecialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists.

It is coming because something like it effectively became inevitable, the moment each of the tools, products and services we're interested started communicating in ones and zeroes.

ubiquitous computing is; establish that it is a very real concern for all of us,

In summary, up to this point, education has been based on a model of scarcity because it was very hard to get good academic material. It was hard to get the right kinds of books. It was hard to get access to the teachers. So naturally, school formed a solution, an economical way of delivering information, using the classroom model, using the teacher model. What you basically got is a really constrained environment. Today, it’s about abundance: what do the models for learning look like now?

But it’s not about the technology. It’s about the way that your culture is organized.

College is becoming, for many undergraduates, a social experience.

But absent a one-on-one tutorial, it’s very difficult to do that. You get into small groups, and you have active discussions, but once you scale the group up, it becomes very difficult because you can’t push sixty people individually to the limits of their knowledge.

you can create an online environment where those sixty people can push against the limits of their knowledge. And that becomes something different and very important. That’s what simulations are good for.

© 2004

Because one of the most effective uses of simulation is as a mechanism to surface assumptions. You put the simulation up there, and people play it out, and in the course of playing it out, they question the underlying rules of the game.

One of the hallmarks of a good game is that it creates a game community. In order to play this game, players have to get information from other sources. They have to explore. They have to communicate. They have to post.

They are handing off and reinforcing each other’s learning. You don’t get that in a classroom. Not often.

You really have to think in terms of how to bring learning to networks of people, to groups of people.

We also have alcohol references and violence. It turns out that still falls under E10+."

So you can steal, cheat, just no shooting... we're still Disney; we wanted this to be a mass property."

"Instead of reading about it in a textbook," Chang said, "they're immersed in the environment."

Health students create public service announcements on addiction, English classes create visual poetry, and history students interview their parents about their own high school years.

As important as, or more important than, the technical infrastructure is the community infrastructure.