Blessing has some good ideas about the future of education in terms of collaboration, multicultural issues, and valuing diversity. The page is also well-organized, and reads well. I believe that those issues will be important in 2020, but that the future when we reach it may be a whole lot less recognizable than many people guess.
Short but sweet. Emad has addressed a subset of future learners, but the ideas seem valid to me.
Heekyung very aptly captures my thoughts on the subjects in her first two lines: "The impact of development of information technology on human life is amazing. It develops so fast that we can hardly imagine what the life of the year 2020 will be like..." She also closes with a great point, that one of the big challenges to dealing with new and changing technology is deciding what the best and most effective use will be.
Andrea brings up a unique point, that effective use of technology depends in part on people who are now children growing up with technology, and our ability to teach them how to use it. Indeed, our ability to teach them how to teach themselves how to learn more about and with technology, and to tech them to teach others. The real strides may not be fully realized until people who grew up with technology begin teaching others how to use it. Referring back to my own vision, this time can be reduced if/when we as adults learn that we still might have a lot to learn from kids.
I love this. It was so creative, and so well done, and is still vary salient to the discussion. Dave describes a forward-looking view of assistant teachers that lets you directly directly imagine possibilities for teachers, and indirectly for society. For students and society would both reap gains from more efficient, effective instruction. (Maybe teachers would even begin getting paid closer to what they're worth!)
Good summary of some probable directions and benefits of technology in the learning arena. Jiaying makes good points about the benefits & problems of English being the most common languagee on the 'net, and about professors spending less time on classroom teaching, and more on other methods of knowledge transfer.
It is a good point, that students will still need to learn a lot of the same things in 2020 as they do now. But Mike's view of only the media of instruction substantially changing contrasts with the view of myself and some of the others in the class of radical differences in the shape, size, format, and choices in education. Though I could envision the former view applying to grade school education to a large extent, I believe higher education may be in for big changes.
Yes! I concur with Ken, in that the *rate* of change seems to be increasing exponentially, making the future guessable, but probably not with much accuracy. Things that we can imagine NOW might be reality in only 5 or 10 years...and what then? Whatever *they* can imagine happening in 20 or 40 years.
Do you and Mike sit together? JK ;) Again, good points. I find the chicken and the egg argument compelling. It is important that the classroom drives technology, not the other way around, where uses for the cool newest technology tool are contrived...just because it's there. But I continue to envision more substantial change, even in the teaching of kids. That change will probably be driven as much or more by the students than technology; when you learn to use a mouse when you're three, you're not going to put up with too much computer-backwardness when you're nine.
Thanks for not making anything blink, at least. Anyway, I really like your ideas. A critical look at the future, from a different angle. As for inequities between schools in wealthy and poor neighborhoods in the U.S. even in times of economic boom, we're there already. Read "Savage Inequalities" and/or "There Are No Children Here." You are quite right, in that we have to be careful where the future is steered.