Visions of the new school. Our classroom will only exist within the electronic bits that pulse particles of light into the ether that lies between the flat panel and the optic nerve. We’re taking the instructor and turning him into the digital character of our choice; no one is afraid of computer monsters around here. We’ll materialize the software of our choosing into a virtual reality playground that enters the third dimension, maybe the fourth, if any of you can point us to the right download. You’ll walk between tools, grab the ax size paintbrush and slash brushstrokes onto the canvas, kick virtual buckets of color into space, and you can forget about finger paints as your hands do the fancy-dance frenzy to smear the image into a psychedelic landscape. Learning will become a physical exercise in our new world.

Right now, we’re amateurs, painfully aware of that status, too, but we’re not standing still. The computer industry has given us scissors that have been trained to cut up reality, and we’re running as fast as we can with them. Taking our cue from the many innovators, inventors, and thinkers who have created this digital age, we are using their inspiration as the textbook and video tutorial for what our next steps have to be. We bow down before the countless super-minds who have invented the algorithms that bend the light of the universe to our liking, and we thank each of you.