Teaching with Personal Computers

By the end of the twentieth century, the personal computer will prob ably be an anachronism, as the slide rule, the mechanical typewriter, engineer drafting sets, and the once ubiquitous filing cabinet are today. Presently-not-envisioned, but more powerful, hardware and software will reduce costs and enhance availability of information, administrative, and deci sion-making assets. Burgeoning tech nology and shortened product and serv ice development cycles will impose new production processes, and the resulting training requirements, upon all organi zations. Because of this very rapid tech nological development, training pro grams, both in-house and external, are chasing a very fast-moving target. The effort to stay current is momentous, but the consequences of falling behind may be fatal. Application of these developments has been apparent in professional train ing programs for some time. For exam ple, word processing, introduced in the mid-1970s, now dominates office ad ministration; and temporary services companies have developed extensive multi-purpose training software to pro