Beginning of Preface

“Fortune favors the prepared mind.” (Louis Pasteur)

This book is for students currently enrolled in a college or university and students thinking of enrolling. It is designed to be read online, although if you want to take the environmentally unsound approach of printing out a copy, I guess I cannot stop you. Many of us find it hard to break old habits, or to replace old habits with new habits.

Over the long run, you will likely gain considerable benefit by learning to be a fluent, online reader. Hardcopy books are not going to disappear during your lifetime or the lifetimes of your children and grandchildren. However, a rapidly increasing amount of the material being published throughout the world will mainly be available online.

Prerequisites for the Reader

The prerequisite computer knowledge assumed in this book includes some experience in using a word processor, email, a browser, and a Web search engine. The book is not specifically designed to increase your computer-based skills. Rather, it is designed to help you make decisions throughout your educational experiences—decisions that will help you to get a better education.

There is another prerequisite. It is that you have the mental maturity (a level of cognitive development and self-responsibility) to take a high level of responsibility for your own education. Important question: did you stop and reflect on what the term cognitive development means and whether you have a level of mental maturity that is up to the task of reading and learning from this book? If the expression cognitive development is not part of your working vocabulary, look it up on the Web. Take responsibility for your own education!

This Book Tells a Story About Change

Many years ago, you began the long process of becoming a fluent reader. If you are like most students, this was a rather difficult task, taking a number of years before you had a reasonable level of fluency at decoding squiggly marks on a page into meaningful patterns in your brain.

Eventually you began to read chapter books (books made up of a sequence of chapters) and you began to learn through the process of reading. The expectation is that typical students can begin to learn by reading by the end of 3rd grade and will be relatively good at it by the end of 6th or 7th grade.

Perhaps during this same time, you began to differentiate in your mind between storybooks and textbooks. A storybook tells a story and is fun to read. A textbook does not seem to tell a story, and most people don’t find textbooks particularly enjoyable to read. Not many people select a college textbook for their bedtime reading enjoyment!

During my professional career, I have written many scholarly, academic books. Although each tells a story, I am sure that most of my readers have considered the stories to be “dullsville,” and certainly not competitive with a well-written, exciting novel.

The book you are now reading tells a story about the rapidly changing world you live in, and the pursuit of a good education for responsible and successful life in this world.

This story is important to you and your future. As you read this book, think of yourself as the protagonist. Your decision to obtain a higher education is a decision to take charge of inventing your future. This future can take many paths.

Regardless of the paths you pursue in higher education, the world is going to change substantially during your lifetime. Much of this change will be due to changes in science, technology, medicine, environment, population, and other factors that you personally, all by yourself, have little control over.

What you can do is improve your levels of expertise:

In learning to learn in various disciplines and across disciplines.
In useable, applicable, knowledge and skills in areas deemed important by you and/or by others.
In being a responsible adult and lifelong learner.
In dealing with change and helping others deal with change.

Increasing Your Levels of Expertise

Higher education provides you an opportunity to increase your level of expertise in a variety of different areas. You probably have some goals in mind of what you will do with these increased levels of expertise. Thus, for example, you may be interested in gaining a level of expertise that will help you get a good job, to help you go on to further education, to become a better parent, or to be a leader in helping to solve a variety of global problems. You might want to gain an education that helps prepare you to be a more responsible, contributing adult citizen of your rapidly changing community, state, nation, and world.

Computer technology is affecting every academic discipline in a typical institution of higher education. Computer technology is being:

Integrated in as part of the content of each discipline, and thus is being a change agent in the content to be learned. Because computer technology is part of the content of each discipline, it is a potential component of one’s level of expertise in each discipline.
Used as an aid to learning and making effective use of the content of a discipline. Expertise in learning a discipline and expertise in using one’s knowledge and skills are both affected by computer technology.
Used to augment the capabilities of people’s brains.

The book includes a chapter on Human and Artificial Intelligence. Surely, you want to know more about your brain and what recent research is telling us about how the human brain functions. Surely, you want to know what your brain can do better than a computer’s “brain,” and vice versa. A theme running throughout the book is that of a team consisting of people and their machines (including computers) working together to solve problems and accomplish tasks. A modern education helps to prepare a person to be a productive and valuable member of such a team.

Most of the topics in this book are treated in a relatively easy to read, but scholarly, academic manner. Thus, for example, you will find a large number of items in the References section. Most of the items include links to Websites. The idea is to encourage you to take an increasing level of responsibility for your own education, to develop areas of interest that motivate you, and to get you into a habit of browsing and reading information sources in these areas.

Reader's Comments and Suggestions

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Links to the chapters of the book. You are currently reading the Preface.

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Inventing Your Future

Chapter 3: Expertise and Problem Solving

Chapter 4: Human and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 5: Computer-Assisted and Distance Learning

Chapter 6: Learning and Learning Theory

Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT

Chapter 8: Brief Introductions to A number of Key Ideas