Will the next big thing be a fundamental re-design of a the phone as we know it? Tech crunch has an interesting article on a bendable phone that is controlled by kinetic movements as much as touch. An interesting concept even if you hate the shape (which some seem to – I kind of like it). Some think the phone will also become implanted in a pair pf glasses, with an interface that virtually floats in front of your eyes.

The bigger concept to realize is that the iPhone is not going to be the last major re-think of cell phones as we know them. Computers themselves may one day “disappear” as they become so small that we no longer notice their presence – just their interface.

I’m still thinking that 3-D printing will be a major game changer in ways that we can’t image yet. Think of how it could change online learning if you can email actual physical objects. Even face-to-face learning could be greatly enhanced by the ability to print objects. A spontaneous question from a student could be examined in a matter of minutes rather than waiting until the next day (after the teacher has had time to go home and find what is needed to answer the question).

Or will the mysterious Google X lab come up with something so crazy that we can’t even imagine the possibilities?

I still think there is also great potential in virtual worlds. At some point in the near future, some one will crack the interface issues and steep learning curve that Second Life is infamous for and we’ll have Star Trek holodecks before you know it.

The times they are a-changin’…

First of all, I have to start by saying that this model will be based primarily on courses that have moved away from standardized testing and rigid assessment-based outcomes.  I know that there are some uses for multiple choice tests in some cases… but those are very few.  Definitely not in proportion to what we see used currently.  I also believe that many courses benefit when the instructors release some control (maybe even a lot of control) and let the students be more active and even chaotic in their learning.  This system is based on these assumptions.  If you don’t agree… you might want to look elsewhere.  It could get scary here in a minute.

Okay – so let us say that you adopt a social learning environment for your college.  This would basically mean that your students are now following instructors as they share resources rather than just enrolling in a course for lectures.  These resources could be lectures, research, or current events.  The idea is that students would now follow instructors as they research their topics rather than just get a set of preplanned lectures. Instructors would get to research more and get a larger set of eyes to help them keep an eye on the world as it constantly evolves.  Students would get current, up-to-date information with real world usage.

The next part is personalized projects or assignments instead of standardized testing. If you are now using personalized projects to evaluate how well students have learned the material, students could really take as long as they needed in a course and work through at their pace.  It also wouldn’t matter if new students were mixed with veterans, because the projects would be personal and the veterans could be a source of help. It would also save the instructor from having to read 100 essay papers that all say basically the same thing over and over.

When a student wants to take a course, they would sign up to “follow” an instructor in that instructor’s personal teaching environment (which could also even be a classroom in the real world for all it matters).  They would work through the material and assignments at their pace, moving quickly through what they already know and slowing down on the stuff that they need more time on.  Once they have completed the projects, the instructor could look at them and say “great job – you are finished and ready to move on.”  Or the instructor could say “you are not quite there – spend a few more weeks in class and see how that will change your project.”  Or maybe even “that is something I have never though of – you pass, but could you stay on a few more weeks and teach us what you have found here?”

So this would be a little bit chaotic.  Students would be moving through the material at their own pace, following the research that instructors add, adding their own research, and creating projects.  New students would be joining each week and interacting with students that are half way through and maybe even about to finish.  But since the projects are personalized and application-based – this is okay.  Students could probably even help each other – which is more like real life operates anyways. When students have finished the course, they move on to the next one.

Now this sounds workable for one course at a time – but most college students take more than that.  In a new system like this, students would probably have several “streams” of courses – they lay out a couple of different paths through all the courses they want to take, and then work through each path at the pace that is best for them.  Each stream could be moving at different paces, but you as a student would be in several streams at once.  The number of streams may even determine if you are half or full time.  A student could have, say, a “basics” stream, a language stream, an art stream, etc.

There are several things that could provide difficult in this system.  Vacations and holidays would not be that big of a problem – just like in real life, you pause for the time off and then pick up when you come back.  But what happens when a professor quits? Theoretically, you could have students following professors from all over the world and their “college” is the local place for them to interact, socialize, and do things like Science labs.  The logistics behind that is kind of crazy, but interesting.  However, there are times when professors just retire or quit teaching.  With no real end point for courses – what happens to the students that aren’t finished yet?  Or what about smaller courses that only happen once a year because only 6 students take them?  A lot of things to think about, but you get the idea of where this is heading. True personalized any time, any where learning.

But despite the potential for immense embarrassment, I still find looking to possible futures fascinating (can you guess what my favorite genre of entertainment is?).  I enjoy it so much that I wrote an article on what education could look like in 10 years, based on predictions of where technology is heading. The article is called “When the Future Finally Arrives: Web 2.0 Becomes Web 3.0″ and it will be a chapter in a book called Web 2.0-based E-learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching

The great news is that chapter will be published next month. The bad news is that it took two years to get published, so a lot of what I say about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 sounds pretty dated.  This situation in itself exposes the weakness of publishing in traditional media. All of your cool, hip terms will become over-used cliches before your article gets printed.

I wish that I could just post the whole article here – I just proof-read it and I got pretty excited thinking about what the future could be like.  Some of the topics covered are:

• Affordable media centers that have wide-screen, high definition, holographic, three-dimensional, multi-touch screen monitors, with cameras that can follow your movement to manipulate the display (like Minority Report) or respond to voice commands
• Classes that easily transfer back and forth from synchronous to asynchronous.
• Integrated systems – virtual worlds integrated with the web and each other, smart-phones integrated with desktops, etc.
• Greater use of tags to organize information with more accuracy.
• Better interaction between students and between the student and instructors.
• And finally, of course, really cool technology like three dimensional printers and scanners.

Much of what I wrote on is technology-focused.  I realize that good pedagogy needs to come first in all educational situations… but if you think enough when you read it, you will see how I snuck a bunch of good pedagogy in there. If you do get to read it, I would recommend just skipping down to the section called “An Example of Online Learning 10 Years in the Future.” The rest of the stuff before that was just my attempt to sound scholarly and all that :)

That is to say – if you get to read it.  This is the other problem with traditional media: this booked is pretty darn expensive.  And I had to sign all my rights away to get it published, so I can put it on my blogs.  I can always let people that live near me read the “draft” version that I printed up for proof-reading.

Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Think about it – you don’t want to drive across a bridge designed by someone that learned engineering through following an engineering blog do you? Or, for that matter, get operated on by a surgeon that learned surgery by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.  After Universities die and education goes free and open, people will begin to realize that we need to be able to prove that people learned what they needed to in order to do certain things. Then we will need to hire people to track who learned what, and those people will need a place to work and store records. We’ll go out and buy the empty college buildings, which will cost money, so we will start charging for education again. We’ll just end up right back where we started.

Or, we could listen to the people that want to reform what we have and end up in a better place overall in the end.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.