At last, the intersection of education and technology is about to jump beyond the film-strip projector. Already, almost all U.S. public schools and just more than half of all public school classrooms have Internet access. In the next 10 years, concepts like virtual reality and distance learning will have a broad impact.

Students at high schools and universities already use the Internet as a reference tool. The more adventurous are now taking distance education courses using the Web.

Jack Wilson, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, says that traditional students, corporate trainees, and other learners will benefit in coming years from Internet classes and from meeting with far-away students in real time.

While "18- to 21-year-old college students will probably still want to have the university experience," he says, live online classes will allow those students to learn and collaborate with others in different countries and take advantage of resources not available on campus. "Live online learning lets students in Hong Kong work with those in the United States on a routine basis," he says. As chairman of software developer LearnLinc (now part of a company called Mentergy), Wilson is putting his ideas into practice and helping others use live Internet learning.

Virtual environments have become the norm in networked entertainment, but they haven't found widespread use in education. Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999), says that will change in the next 10 years. He says virtual environments will be ubiquitous by 2010, being used in many contexts, including secondary schools. Says Bruce Campbell of the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, "I think it might be another 15 years or so," noting that while the technology may be ready much sooner, it may not be accepted by educators.

Certain disciplines will benefit from virtual environments sooner than others will. Campbell says that fields such as chemistry, astronomy, physics, and meteorology "are the natural ones" for teaching through virtual environments. "They let you interact with things at a scale you can't easily interact with in the real world," he says.

John Sutherland of the University of Abertay in Dundee, Scotland, says other fields are appropriate for this technology as well. "Surgery is already a strong virtual learning environment," he says, "but primarily for very high-end operations that are rare, costly, and risky." Sutherland says virtual environments will probably not aid the teaching of abstract topics, such as computer programming.

Though virtual reality has yet to live up to the expectations that arose out of the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and '90s, an even more outlandish notion advanced by cyberpunksâ€"downloading knowledge directly into the brainâ€"is increasingly discussed with a straight face.

"In order to download knowledge, we will need the ability to directly access and augment the neural networks in which memory and knowledge are stored," Kurzweil says. To do this, he says we would use "massively distributed nanobot-based neural implants," tiny networked robots that will meld directly to our neurons to offer enhanced senses and improved cognitive capabilities. The implants could also provide a truly immersive virtual environment experience, or allow us to experience our usual senses. While Kurzweil asserts that the technology is about three decades away, he points out that 5mm-wide robots, called "smart dust," are already being developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

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