Introduction

Computers today represent a powerful tool for education. The computer of the year 2000 will be an even more powerful tool. But it is not the tool that gets the job done, the person using it does. This essay discusses the task of education from the vantage point of Tablet, our vision of computing in the year 2000. While we are very optimistic about the potential of Tablet, it is not by itself a solution to the problems of education. No tool can be unless applied by proper craftsmen.

Any reasonable vision of the future must be bound by two distinct constraints. The first constraint is technological---what will we know, and what will we be able to build at that particular moment? For computers, how powerful will they be, and how much will they cost? Will they be bigger than a bread box? Can they be made portable? How can such a machine communicate with its world---both with its immediate environment as well as the global community? It is this aspect of our design which won us the Apple competition. The second and more fundamental constraint is how this technology can be used meaningfully by people. A person's density does not double each year, the way VLSI circuitry does. There are only twelve years remaining before the year 2000, and for massive changes to happen in education in this time more people must get involved in an exciting way with the creation of this technology. We mean the educators, scholars, and administrators---the people who are running the classrooms of today. Without significant and enlightened participation from this community, the computer of the year 2000 will be doing the same thing in the classroom that the computer of 1988 is doing: sitting there, running a few games, tabulating grades, and filling out reports inspiring only to a stray hacker wandering into the vicinity.

However, there is reason to hope that technical progress by the year 2000 will animate the human side of education. As computers become more powerful, it becomes reasonable to mold them in the image of people. The computer as a tool will fit naturally into the lives of the masses instead of being shoehorned in under the oxymoron of ''computer literacy.'' Only when educators need not strain to realize the potential of their classroom machines will computers revolutionize the way things are done. This will happen by the year 2000. Hypertext systems are already beginning to allow the structuring of knowledge with a flexibility that makes it accessible to both student and teacher.

In this essay, we give our vision of Tablet, a machine unquestionably feasible for twelve years from now. We present a brief look at how Tablet will change the life of both the professor and the student. Finally, we elaborate on the challenges education will have to meet for our vision to become reality.

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