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The target of true 21st century education should be the advanced knowledge processes that scientists, scholars, and employees of highly innovative companies engage in daily. These processes must be built into the social fabric of communities, and into the technologies that support their work, so that creative knowledge work is as integral to schooling as it is to our most high-powered knowledge-creating organizations. Compared to the rapidly changing face of information technology, the rate of change in schools appears several orders of magnitude slower. This evident gap has caused anxiety among school people and impatience in the surrounding society. The result has been great pressure to wire the schools, train the teachers, and raise standarts. But what is taking shape today as a result of the "get wired" and the "raise test scores" movements, is not education addressing the needs of the 21st century. It is 20th century, industrial age education supercharged by high-stakes testing and high-tech tools.
New knowledge media provide new opportunities and means for addressing fundamental problems in education. But there are now so many designs for educational environments that choosing between them is difficult. Advancing the state of the art will require greater clarity regarding different possibilities and the ways in which designs reflect different underlying theoretical frameworks and research bases. This article highlights a particular form of online environment, a knowledge building environment (KBE), and contrasts it with online environments designed more specifically for course delivery, computer-mediated projects, and distance learning. Although a KBE can be used for these purposes, its distinctive strengths emerge in contexts¿educational and other¿where the emphasis is on knowledge creation and sustained idea improvement.
