Shifting ideology in art education has often resulted from external forces. Today, the phenomena bringing new and pervasive change can be described by the wave analogy of the futurist, Alvin Toffler. In his book, The Third Wave, he delineated a hunting and gathering way of life supplanted by agriculture, replaced by a wave of industry and then one of information and technology (Toffler, 1980, p.1-6 ). Industry wrapped our planet in a web of postal and freight systems to carry the lifeblood of growing world economies. Today, Internet technology, the global merger of computers with communications systems, are the veins and arteries of our new information life way. As the new wave of change comes surging over our planet, an understanding of our educational past and of shifting contemporary events will afford insight as we strive to develop credible prophecy identifying major implications for the future of art education in Texas and the world.

        American art education was born in our industrial past where its first lessons provided eye, hand and perceptual aptitude for labor and it continued to be driven by the demands of factories through mechanical teaching and tedious drawings in support of commercial art and design interests. (Dorn, 1994, p.2). Relics of our industrial past remain entrenched throughout our schools and those vestiges are not indigenous to the art classroom alone. Dr. Nancy Sulla has suggested that teaching procedures and learning frameworks of industrial society continue to be evident in schools today. (Sulla, 1997). She has written that we can think of our classrooms as part of a factory for learning where teaching has been separated into components, the disciplines. Sulla has described our present schools as places where learners are moved in groups from place to place, and we teachers "work" on them by stuffing them with information. Dr. Sulla characterizes the traditional process as one which disjoins the big picture into factored bits of know-how, and which attempts to expound fragmented skills in isolation, hoping at the end of the learning assembly line the finished products, our next generation of productive citizens, will emerge (Sulla, 1997).

        For the majority of public schools in America, the prevailing public attitude in our industrial past promoted reading, writing, math, science and social studies while learning in the arts was elective, somewhat detached from the educational core. As art education moved away from its early intent as a servant to industry, public education had a hard time trying to arrive at an acceptable role for art teaching in the industrial age. The factory driven economy needed workers who could conform and who valued standardization. In turn, art class nurtured the individual. Art instruction placed value on unique thinking in the contemplation of art and in the creative processes of studio production. When the educational system in the industrial age was supposed to deliver focus and specialization, art class nourished creativity and cultural diversity. The art discipline was an anomaly, affirming a rebellious spirit while expounding the value of personal feelings, intuition, metaphorical expression and lateral thinking. In reality, art education did not appear to be synchronized with the intended function of public education in an industrial age.

       In the effort to present a convincing case for the legitimacy of the arts curriculum, educators have worked to develop a foundation of knowledge upon which to assemble a unified scope and sequenced curriculum in the school arts program. The efforts have accelerated in recent times while many in the field feel they need a rationale that gives their academic discipline equivalence with the other traditional core courses of public education.. Fueled by support from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Discipline Based Art Education has become a major force in contemporary art education for a growing number of public schools, striving to shift learning away from predominate studio assignments to a balanced regime of art history, art criticism, aesthetics with art production. In recent years the D.B.A.E. movement has been quick to enlist the communicative power of the Internet with educator Listserv support and extensive teaching resources on the World Wide Web (The Getty Education Institute for the Arts , 1998).

       Other indications of the changes sweeping over art teaching were included in the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education, which stated:

       "That the transforming power of technology is a force not only in the economy but in the arts as well. The arts teach relationships between the use of essential technical means and the achievement of desired ends. "The intellectual methods of arts are precisely those used to transform scientific discovery into technology " (National Standards for Arts Education, 1994).

        Outside the classroom, our information economy has painted a rosy picture for job seekers who are self-motivated, creative and possess specialized skills in design, digital imaging, multimedia and animation. Employment in visual art and design occupations is expected to increase 21 to 35 percent above the average for all occupations through the year 2005. (Abraham, K., 1997)

Today's students will work at future jobs that do not currently exist.

       Perhaps the most perplexing of technology's implications for education is that we are expected to prepare our students for many jobs which are not yet conceived. Steve O'Connor has used information, collected from the US Department of Labor, to suggest that sixty percent of today's high school students will work at jobs that do not currently exist, ninety percent of all occupations after the year 2000 will demand knowledge of computers, and four out of five jobs will dispense services, meaning laborers will be "doing" something other than manufacturing products. (O'Connor, S.,1998) Art educators are very aware that the majority of their students will enter jobs other then the specialized areas of the visual arts. Therefore the dual objectives for art learning must be directed to cultural and creative learning for citizens who will be working in a myriad of lay professions, as well as, visual arts positions which may not yet exist.

The nature of work and working is being redefined.

       Another of technology's implications involves a reversal in the nature of future work and working. If we are to discover some indication of the foundational changes which computers, the Internet and their information epoch will bring, we can look at current and forecasted shifts in business - the new way that work is being accomplished.

       "The most valued attributes of the industrial era become handicaps. The technology of tomorrow requires not millions of lightly lettered men, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitious jobs, it requires not men who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but men who can make critical judgments, who can weave their way through novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality" (Toffler 1970, p.402-403).

        Writing of the industrial age, Alvin Toffler alluded to standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization and centralization as the hidden code upon which that epoch was assembled. (Toffler 1980, p. 46 - 60) According to Toffler, these were the principles which shaped and sustained factories, workers, and schools in our industrial past. Nevertheless, those tenets suggest the antithesis of the principles which appear to be structuring our future culture, just as they appear to contradict most of the learning objectives which have found traditional value in our art classrooms.

Students and teachers must learn to work and thrive with hectic innovation and change.

        For a glance at changes on the horizon for art education, one can look at characteristics needed by students preparing for work in a newer world born of shrinking natural resources and technology's cultural sweep. Students must learn to thrive in an environment of hectic innovation and adjustment beyond anything we have known in our past or present . The objective for education is clearly one of increasing the individual's ability to quickly accept, adapt and then thrive in the midst of continual change.

        "It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish. "Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change. "He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasingly long-range assumptions about the future. "And so must Johnny's teachers" (Toffler 1970, p. 403).

        Art teachers, their colleagues and their administrators must realize that they, like their students, are caught in a lifelong pursuit of learning in the face of change. They must make the effort to keep up with changing technologies, changing curricula, changing teaching methods and change in the real world outside their classrooms. Teachers who are presently using technology in the art classroom have already experienced the frequency with which hardware, operating systems and the assorted imaging and animation applications must be upgraded to insure that course content remains current. The ongoing attempts of today's instructors to read, understand and apply a steady flow of new digital tools and techniques is slight indication of the steady diet of change and adjustment which are ahead for all of us in the age of technology. Such in the future for which we must prepare ourselves and our students.

Society will gain new appreciation for creativity, creative problem solving and visualization skills.

        According to Robert Theobald, all of us must learn to accept our increased potential for choice as we face accelerated future change.

        "Today's rate of change requires that both individuals and organizations concentrate their efforts in particular areas. "This statement may, at first sight, sound like past calls to specialize. "Our current needs are, however, quite different. "Previously we learned more and more about less and less. In the future, people will need to know, in a very real sense, less and less about more and more. "The basic required skills will be to understand patterns quickly and to make sense of their meaning in specific times and places, rather than to solve problems within previously understood approaches. "The aim is to set inspiring and worthwhile goals; to develop directions which will make a difference. "The feasibility of the goals is not yet the issue -- it is their desirability which should be our concern at this point" (Theobald, R., 1997).

        Art teachers will be quick to realize that a critical ingredient of the educational objectives which Toffler, Theobald and other futurists describe has been common in art classrooms and studios for decades. Yes, they are talking about the creative process. In other words, futurists see the coming decades demanding self motivated individuals who, working on the slippery ascent of the Information Age, can acquire and understand a profusion of information and then use creativity and creative problem solving techniques to visualize and thrive.

        In tomorrow's world, art teachers will not find themselves laboring alone in their efforts to cajole their learners to develop flexibility, visualization, imagination and the confidence to work from intuition, as well as, from data and facts. Certainly art education will have a body of valuable experience to share with other disciplines when students need help considering alternatives and building faith in their creative freedom to work beyond that which is known, in search of solutions and significant contributions in their future world work.

Our concept of learning will change.

        The most glaring change resulting from the Internet and its Age of Information is the need to re-define the concept of learning. Teaching and learning is becoming an involved and adaptive operation where the functions of student, teacher, and course content are open, flexible and endlessly changing. Learning will no longer be simply that which happens when a student confronts information. In our new age, learning will become the information gathering process fused to the outcome of using logic and intuition to filter and act on that information. If teachers are going to prepare their students for the world that lies ahead, they must design learning environments that build the skills of research, evaluation, visualization and the solution of real and potential problems. These are skills which are not acquired by students when a teacher assigns the project, sets a deadline, demonstrates how to do it, and then grades the project. With the new definition of learning, enlightenment is not complete until the student understands that we are all constantly learning and changing to confront the urgencies of an ever-adjusting universe in an ongoing journey through change.

Concepts of school, learning environment, and classroom will be divorced from the idea of physical place and the limitations of time.

        Educational institutions have traditionally been conceived as locations, physical places, where students mingle in time limited, social interaction while learning. With the age of information, the challenge for every discipline now involves reconciliation of the Internet as a global community where time, place, and diversity are not very important. The public school classroom, once the students' immediate world for the duration of the class time, now has become the access point to the learning universe without the traditional concepts of time and place. The physical and virtual limits of responsibility for parents, teachers, administrators and school districts have already come into question because of criminal and civil offenses committed by students and other individuals in the anonymity of cyberspace. The realm of school responsibility involving students, administrators and faculty no longer ends when the child gets off the bus or the staff member drives out of the school parking lot. Educators must now be mindful of a virtual dimension for one's school, complete with new responsibilities for teaching, learning and student security in technology's extended learning universe.

Visual arts media are changing.

       Technology's tenor suggests that viable media in visual arts education are changing. The shift suggests that classroom projects using traditional art media will diminish with the rise of technology and as we continue to face issues of global ecology and shrinking natural resources. Future oil, gas and mineral reserves will be shrinking while freight and production costs for art materials will increase, yet computers and digital art applications will become cheaper and more plentiful in the learning environment at school and at home. Traditional studio projects in painting, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, weaving and drawing materials will be replaced by digital projects using scanners, cameras, and computers. Diversions within our contemporary culture include the proliferation of special effects, multimedia and computer art surrounding the lives of our students and these environmental changes have sparked student interest in digital imaging and animation. In turn, artists, teachers, and students who gain experience with the new imaging and multimedia tools soon discover an exciting and creative working environment which is unlike any visual communication medium in the history of humanity. The versatility of digital media will also foster preference over traditional materials. Images and multimedia creations are best suited for distribution and reproduction in our age of information where, in a flash, they can move freely throughout the globe via the Internet and gain physical form with desired dimensions at their destination. Electronic media represent the marriage between art and science and our students will need an understanding of both the creative and the technical processes involved.

Traditional Textbooks Will Change.

       The speed of change for developments in the visual arts and related areas of art history, aesthetics and criticism will soon move faster then the time which is required to write, review and publish traditional paper texts. With shrinking natural resources and labor expenses, traditional teaching resources will eventually become cost prohibitive. In the interim, authors and editors of traditional paper text materials will search for a generic, less dated, treatment of resources in an effort to avoid their publications rendered useless by technology's constant advance. The new resources of our age will be found on the Internet and occasionally produced in digital form on CDs or other removable media which allow for quick and cheap update and distribution. Educational institutions will switch their textbook funds to cover the expense of contracts for information delivery, for Internet access, for computers and for classroom display equipment.

Methods of teaching will change.

       Teaching methods in traditional art education involved assignments for learning through individual studio production, group projects, worksheets, textbook reading assignments, demonstrations, and lectures. Lectures in the art room required frequent use of slides and overhead transparencies for classroom projection of images, text and diagrams. Art room teaching will change to include lectures incorporating digital images, animation, video strips, and sound prepared and periodically upgraded using computers and multimedia presentation applications with projection equipment. Worksheets, lectures and textbook reading assignments will go digital, multimedia, and online with assessment and feedback features incorporated into the resources. Multimedia learning experiences have the potential to accommodate numerous learning styles, increasing student interest, participation and learning success.

       Group learning projects will move beyond the classroom and out into the world where learning can involve students from around the globe who participate in the creative development of real world online art resources, images, teaching tools and future learning applications. Since the future art and design market will demand people who can creatively solve open-ended challenges, participate with others, manage their own time, evaluate their own progress, utilize an assortment of resources and communicate ideas in words and images, the international group learning experiences will be designed to yield critical experience in the use of technology, networking and cooperation. Groups of students in classrooms will join individual students working in their homes where each can take on the responsibility for helping to complete the communal project while communicating with others via technology. Of course, these are not the traditional skills typically addressed in the art learning environment so art teachers must join other educators in the process of expanding their curriculum to provide student's with the skills of the future world of work..

The control and responsibility for learning will be diversified.

       Teachers who demand total control and full responsibility for their art learning environment must accept several changes which are coming with the new age. The role of mentor is converging with that of the learner. Teachers will spend less time trying to maintain control and seeking to deliver learning in mass. However, they will spend more time planning, developing learning resources and assisting the learning process with strategies for individual and group discovery. When computers and the Internet are part of the learning environment, students will be expected to take more responsibility for the content of their learning and for the rate at which they learn. Students will also be able to make choices concerning the method and location in which the learning will take place. There is a very good chance that school districts will incorporate online art credit available to self-motivated learners who choose when they work on the assignments and whether they will work at home or at school to complete their learning. In the classroom, the 'sage on the stage' must give in to the 'guide on the side' teaching style. In this scenario, parents of students working from home will be expected to accept some of the teaching responsibility traditionally held by the classroom teacher.

       Other remote students and professionals will become involved when group learning projects engage computers and the Internet. Remote teachers, their students, and knowledgeable authorities like librarians, artists, curators, historians and scientists will be expected to share responsibility in these learning experiences. However, the local teacher must also be ready to exchange the traditional classroom isolation and control for the roll of a remote educator for students in other locations who are involved in the online group learning projects.

Internet based learning will build trust, tolerance and understanding.

       Online group projects and the exchange of teaching ideas and resources will carry an increased potential for the global cultivation of tolerance, understanding, trust and the appreciation of diversity. International group projects, video-conferencing, email exchanges, electronic chat sessions, and international online art exhibitions of student work will enable positive multi-cultural exposure for learners.

School administration and procurement will change.

       One welcome change for education will involve school administration's realization that they must throw off much of their old, slow paced, systems of procurement and management if they expect to make efficient and responsible use of their time and public funds in support of learning. Technology will provide many of the tools for these changes. However, traditional methods must give in to flexible and opportunistic funding systems where informed decisions and quick action can save huge sums of money. In other situations, decisions involving leasing agreements rather then equipment purchases may provide the best solution in the face of constant innovation and change in computer applications and hardware for the learning environment.

The faculty lounge, teacher workroom and the library will go online.

       Research, planning, project coordination, news of current events and gossip have all moved from the library, faculty lounge and teacher workroom to the Internet. Web resources, email and special interest groups allow for an educator to loose their sense of isolation, stay informed, talk over problems and develop solutions with the help of other experienced professionals in their field. As a member of an art education listserv, such as ArtsEdNet, one has access to an international wealth of intelligence, experience and ideas. Online library resources, virtual museums, galleries and teaching resources are multiplying. With computers in the art room, advice and application specific information is available through listservs, web pages, tutorials and downloadable software. The Internet seems to be the only feasible method for the accumulation and distribution of these resources given the speed of change inherent in this technology and the growing expense for mass publication of textual material.

Educators will go to school - online.

       Distance learning courses in the virtual college are credible and applicable solutions in many areas of higher education. Online courses are being incorporated into traditional certification and degree programs. In addition to the initial online learning experiences in teacher preparation, Web based courses and video conferencing resources can provide for teacher renewal, additional certification and greater expansion of the knowledge base. Since the virtual university can be asynchronous to other responsibilities and events in the lives of teachers, it will continue to grow as a viable educational asset for teachers.

The value of the visual arts within our culture will change.

       Visual literacy is critical for our future citizens. With technology have come extensive tools for deception and persuasion though manipulated images and animation.

       Television, print media, video games and the Internet are laden with visual maneuvers ranging from entertaining special effects to deception for profit or political persuasion. Present and future visual arts curriculum must address these developments and the increasing value of visual literacy within our culture.

The Next Generation Internet and Internet2 will amplify technology's changes for teaching and learning.

       The Next Generation Internet (NGI) enterprise is a multi-agency Federal research and development program fostering collaboration between government, academia, and industry in an initiative with the prospect of dramatically transfiguring our Internet within the next five years. The federally funded Next Generation Internet (NGI) is expected to have an operational test network of at least ten sites across the U.S. running more than 1 gigabit per second by 2001. In short, we can expect to see communication speeds increase from 100 to 1000 times in the very near future (NGI Implementation Plan,1998). As part of the initiative, the university community has joined together with government and industry partners to accelerate the next stage of Internet development in academia. The Internet2 project, is bringing focus, energy and resources to the development of a new family of advanced applications to exploit the capabilities of broadband networks media integration, interactivity and real time collaboration which are essential for support of national research objectives, distance education, lifelong learning, and related educational efforts (Internet2, 1998 ). As a result, tomorrow's art classrooms may include student access to real time digital libraries, virtual video visits to art museums, artist's studios and college studio classrooms, as well as, video conferencing with museum staff, artists and advanced learners in remote locations. The sheer size and speed of the new network will challenge traditional teaching strategies as they create multimedia and video learning environments where new applications will revolutionize the way people work, and learn.

Conclusion

       No doubt these implications for change will prove to be only part of technology's wake. Certainly, a few of the changes in art education have been developing for several years and are evident after only a few years of innovation. Yet, when the stage is set for momentous change, as is the Twenty-first Century, one will do well to try to prepare for the inevitable new challenges which are on their way. Art educators will benefit by incorporating digital media into their art program and they should actively seek ways to connect their art learning environment to the world through the Internet. Art teachers should learn to explore the resources of email and the World Wide Web to build an understanding of technology's wonderful new tools. Experience with those tools will bring confidence, enthusiasm, new resources, and teaching ideas which can improve learning while preparing students for the new age in which they must live and work.

        Robert A. Fromme is an art teacher at East Central High School in San Antonio, Texas.

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