If this was multimedia, I wouldn’t have to describe Roger Wagner. You’d be able to click on buttons to summon up film clips and sound bites of him waxing lyrical. Instead, I’m going to have to make do with words.

He’s from San Diego. Gangling. Bill Gates spectacles. Nerd chic. Thirtysomething, but one of life’s perpetually energetic sophomores. Happier, you’d guess, in sneakers and sweat shirt than the executive suit he wears as head-honcho of Roger Wagner Publishing Inc. To English ears, his accent and delivery sound like Kermit’s (he calls it “mult-eye-media”).

Rich? If he’s not, I guess he’s going to be. His program, HyperStudio, used by an estimated half a million American school kids, has only been on the market for a year or so, and is already the best-selling educational program in the US particularly remarkable considering it’s only available for Apple. But this April the Windows and Acorn versions come on the market and Mr Wagner looks set to become a mult-eye-millionaire.

But if you could click on a button and hear him talking about the classroom of tomorrow, you’d share my impression that it wouldn’t matter to him if he didn’t make a cent from his program. Mr Wagner isn’t driven by profit. He is a prophet an evangelist preaching not the New Testament but the new technology. And, as I found, you can’t spend too long listening to him without muttering “alleluia”.

Even the most ardent agnostics wouldn’t quibble with his analysis of the present state of affairs. There are changes happening which are certain to prove every bit as revolutionary as Gutenberg. Who needs books when CD-Roms, crammed with audio-visual material as well as text, can offer so much more? And as the big publishers are quickly realising, it’s far cheaper to press the most impressive CD than print the tackiest book.

What’s more, if the fabled Internet, cable television and the other emerging technologies prove to be half as spectacular as the hype they have already generated, they too will accelerate an inexorable shift away from the primacy of the printed word.

Schools have concentrated in the past on literacy and it’s vital that they now pay as much attention to “the new literacy”. It’s an easy enough concept: in tomorrow’s world we’ll have to be as adept at interpreting not just text, but also the interplay of digitised pictures and sounds. We’ve got to learn how to learn using multimedia.

The actual technique of exploring a multimedia document can be mastered in minutes. It’s simply a matter of “point and click”: of moving a mouse and activating the screen’s hot spots. “This is the CD-Rom style of doing things, ” says Mr Wagner, “and it’s going to continue to be the way of exploring data, regardless of whatever changes in technology there might be over the years. ”

In terms of the old literacy, being able to hop, skip and jump through a multimedia presentation is the equivalent of being able to read. “But whoever thought of teaching reading without teaching writing at the same time?” Mr Wagner’s question is rhetorical, of course, and gets to the heart of his philosophy. If we can only “read”, we’re always going to be consumers, however interactive the medium is: “a digital couch potato is still a couch potato”. To be fully literate in this new and daunting age, we must also have the power to “write” to make the medium our own.

Mr Wagner showed visitors to this year’s BETT ‘95 technology show, a simple multimedia presentation created by an eight-year-old. It included a video clip of her explaining her science project. Deadly earnest, like only eight-year-olds can be, she eyeballed the camera with the professional aplomb of a Kate Adie. “Who taught her that camera technique?” asked Mr Wagner. She learnt it, of course, from television the medium almost as familiar to her as speech and which she was now empowered to use for herself. “First time I saw that clip it sent shivers down my spine,” Mr Wagner said. We all felt the shiver and saw in that little girl’s determined stare the enormous potential this new medium has.

Of course, it puts a tremendous responsibility on teachers’ shoulders. “How can we dare to graduate students from school without them knowing how to communicate in the medium of their culture?” Mr Wagner is being rhetorical again. In the years BC (Before Computers) he used to teach “high school math and science”, and when he talks about education you know it still really does matter to him.

Children, he argues, immersed in a television culture since the cradle, are better equipped for the multimedia age than teachers and teachers have got to learn to accept that, “just like the football coach who doesn’t assume he has to be a better performer than his team”.

Teachers must recognise, too, that pupils will only learn the new literacy if they are given ample opportunity to experiment with it.

It was with this in mind that he created HyperStudio. He didn’t try to cater for big-spending executives or the technophiles who like things to be difficult, but for “14-year-old kids who’d never read a book”. His aim was to keep things simple: “to never let the technology get in the way of the creative process”. Children don’t want to be bothered with complicated procedures or confused by file types “you shouldn’t use four-letter words in front of children, especially ones like TIFF and PICT”. He “wanted a program that would be as easy as painting and not just painting with colours, but with pictures, sounds and text. The technology has got to reach the point where the technology disappears”.

HyperStudio, which won this year’s Educational Computing and Technology’s Silver Award (secondary), relies heavily on friendly little prompts, and patient reminders when you do something silly. So creating a new card or button or loading in a digitised image or sound file is straightforward.

Once you’ve created your multimedia presentation, you can append a nifty piece of software which enables it to be replayed on a machine not equipped with HyperStudio. Better still, you can start an essay on one platform and continue work on the file on a different type of machine. So the user’s technical prowess doesn’t even need to stretch to being able to tell an Apple from an Acorn the technology really is disappearing.

It’s an exciting prospect but it’s children in classrooms who’ll discover if HyperStudio measures up to Mr Wagner’s intentions. If it does, a lot of teachers are going to feel that shiver down the spine.

HyperStudio: single user Pounds 99.95; 5 user pack Pounds 299.95; 10 user Pounds 529.95; additional copies Pounds 37 (all prices excluding VAT). British supplier: TAG Developments Ltd, 19 High Street, Gravesend, Kent DA 11 OBA