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The 90s has actually been kind of a decade of the gadget. The invention of digital everything and the proliferation of media, including satellites and all those kinds of things, really came into their own only at the end of the 20th Century. We're right in the sweet spot at the moment where the audio-visualization of media, both in and out of the classroom, is accepted. The obstacles are pretty much diminished. Almost every college and university in the United States today is offering online courses using some level of media. It's becoming more personal rather than less personal. Both mass media and individualized use of communication is booming on all sides. In the Georgia Medical College, for example, they have an experiment going on whereby patients are being treated by physicians in central locations who are using their computers with cameras. This kind of thing is spreading in all forms of distributed learning. Online is a term that is fading and the notion of learning is really more of being distributed. I mean, knowledge is portable, it's pliable, it can fly through the air.

At USC, they've had big projects going now in visual learning. And one of the arguments is that if we hadn't developed alpha-numeric processing, the use of alphabet and numbers, we would be much more sophisticated in audio and visual communications today than we are.

IMS Global: Back in the 70s and early 80s, everybody was talking about distance learning and how technology was going to revolutionize the way in which we teach and learn. It seems like that prediction sort of fizzled initially, and that it's only within the last decade that we've seen some of those visions come to fruition. Did higher education initially go down the wrong path or was technology simply not advanced enough to meet the expectation?

BL: I don't think we stumbled at all. I think it's been a process of evolution, competition, invention and it just takes time. Pick any device. Pick the airplane. The first airplane flew 5,000 yards, then it was a fixed-wing plane that barely flew. Then they added a second engine. How many years does it take to do those things? It takes generations, and I think the cycle is pretty consistent. In my experience, as I look back from the evolution of the book and all of the things that we know about, they continue to get better, they continue to be used more effectively and we continue to improve their applications in the learning environment. For example, if we go back to the 50s, we cut our teeth on programmed instruction and people learned to write around the use of objectives and put materials together. In the 80s, I was part of Philips Interactive Media, which was, at that time, the largest interactive media company in the world. We made a lot of breakthroughs. The interesting thing is there were a lot of formats out there at that time, as there always are, CDI, CD-ROM, CD-TV, the whole alphabet soup. They were all trying to do the same thing. Capitalism was at work, people were trying to get proprietary ownership of certain things they could invest in. Little by little, the dominant technologies in media prevailed whether they were the best or not. It's still argued in computer circles whether MS-DOS was the best operating system at the time or not. It just became the standard and Microsoft became what it did because of what they did. History is littered with the carcasses of formats that were really quite good but were part of the convergence. So going back to your question, I really don't think it has been a false start. It's just a process of research and development and I think we've just barely scratched the surface yet in the use of media and learning.