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.

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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.

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