Conferencing and multimedia standards are being developed today. Examples of this include SMIL (Standardized Multimedia Integration Language, pronounced 'smile’) and the H.323 voice-over-IP standard for video conferencing. These standards will allow developers to introduce components of online conferencing systems, such as clients, which can work with any conferencing server.

Good examples of this already exist. Terminal emulation (or telnet) was developed in order to enable remote access to mainframe computers. Telnet standards, such as VT100, were developed. This enabled the development of a wide range of telnet clients which now allow any user on any system to access any remote mainframe.

Another good example is the world wide web. The web is based on a set of communications standards, called HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). This allowed the development of independent clients, called browsers, to access any web server from any other system. Indeed, it is the very existence of HTTP standards that allows us to turn televisions, airport kiosks, or any other device we can name, into a web browser.

The same will happen with online communications. When a student wishes to post a message to a discussion board, for example, a standardized multimedia messaging client will launch and connect with the discussion board. The student will create the message, then sign off. When other students wish to view the message, they will use a standardized viewing tool (formerly called a browser).

Personalized Education

Imagine the best desktop computer you can imagine, slung over your shoulder like a slim handbag, connected to the billions of resources available on the internet, supporting instant multimedia communications anywhere on the planet, and you have a picture of the tool available for education within the next decade. The development of such a tool makes it not just possible, but inevitable, that education of the future will become deeply personalized.

Education today, from the kindergarten level to PhD seminars, is based on the model of the class. At the early levels especially, classes are organized not by the learning needed by the student so much as that student's age. In post-secondary education, age becomes less of a factor but education is still fundamentally time-based and depends on standard curricula for groups of students. The model is that of a group of people starting at the same time, studying the same materials at the same pace, and ending at the same time.

This model of education was adopted because it was the most efficient. It is heavily dependent on the teacher, and the teacher in turn is responsible for assembling, and often presenting, the materials to be learned. For the most part, customization and personalization are not practical, because personalized teacher-led instruction is not practical. It is much more efficient to deliver the same content once to a group of students than it is to deliver the same content thirty times to individual students. Given the technology that we had, the class was the only practical solution.