How will technology develop over the next 10 or so years? More importantly, how will these developments affect and enhance the world of learning? Futurelab explores.
The term ‘horseless carriage’, as IT guru Nicholas Negroponte has observed, tells us a lot about how the automobile pioneers regarded the new contraption. They saw it only in terms of what came before. They couldn't envisage how it would shape a future that included a Model T on every driveway, autobahns, and the Sherman Tank.
Similarly it can sometimes be reassuring for hard-pressed teachers to think of today's new technology in much the same way. Often the whiteboard is thought of as simply a blackboard with whistles and bells, and the web as just a big encyclopaedia. And for some there’s a feeling that technology might advance, but education will remain more or less the same as it always has been; teacher-led and classroom-based.
The simple truth is that the emerging technologies will revolutionise teaching and learning. And it will happen not in some comfortingly distant future but during the next 10, five or even, for some, two years. Young people are growing up in a world in which the much-heralded ‘convergence of technology’ is becoming a reality. They can watch TV programmes on their PCs and, with Apple TV, enjoy their computer files and MP3s on television without ever having to think about what bit of kit does what. The 3G mobile phone supports a multitude of activities and, as prices tumble, it is likely to give way to Ultra Mobile Devices (UMD) where you can surf the net, watch movies or create their own movies and webpages on a pocket-size all-in-one phone, personal organiser, movie camera, media player and PC.
Even if this ‘indispensible’ UMD is lost it won’t mean losing precious applications and files - these will all be safely stashed away online, instantly accessible. Also, memory chips are getting cheaper. Soon schools will be able to offer pupils as much storage as they'll ever need - so they won’t be tied to the school or home computer. They’ll be able to work wherever they can find a broadband landline or a hotspot.
And within the decade, if the EU has got its sums right, the whole of Europe will be served by an all-embracing network of hotspots, seamlessly linked by common protocols. Not that the infrastructure will bother the users, who'll simply take it for granted that they can remain permanently online wherever they are, from the inner city to the remotest rural backwater. With the promise of access speeds of one megabyte per second or more, the networked generation (those in today’s infant classes) can look forward to an education in which they’ll be able to pick 'n' mix from the net, video-conferenced tutorials and DVD-quality distance learning packages which, because of the immediacy of the UMD, won't seem in the least bit distant.
Within schools, all this technology can only help to develop curricula that focus on equipping students with the skills they'll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material. But we need to ensure that they have the skills to evaluate different sources in this media-rich world.
And this information will not only be available via PCs and mobile devices. Artefacts, buildings and landmarks, tagged with sensors and processors, will be able to emit multimedia information – and they’ll be able to determine its relevance (or lack of) to you.
Furthermore, sharing content will become increasingly important in young people’s education. This is, of course, already a dominant feature of digital life for young people. MySpace has more than 50 million members with 160,000 new ones joining everyday. YouTube is visited more than 100 million times a day. More than half the world's bloggers are still in their teens. It's estimated that by 2010 more than 70% of digital information will have been generated, not by commercial producers, but by Joe Public.
Wikis and chatrooms allow students to collaborate on projects with peers across the globe. They find it as easy to swap coursework as their favourite album tracks. Down the ages, teachers have asked, "Is this all your own work?" But it's a question that is becoming increasingly meaningless as students spend more time on the net where it's second nature to borrow, share and adapt information. Indeed, the real skill is in assimilating and synthesising a range of second-hand materials in a way which makes it new and uniquely your own.
So, it will be a brave new world where teachers will not only have to think again about how, where and with whom students learn but also how that learning is evaluated. Simultaneously, they're going to have to keep pace with emerging technologies and rethink exactly what they can do to ensure that the networked generation gets an education that matches its life outside of school. The benefits will be enormous but it could be considered a daunting prospect by some. Stablemen probably felt much the same when the first horseless carriages took to the road...
This is the first in a series of three articles by education innovation charity Futurelab (www.futurelab.org.uk) looking at how and why education needs to change. In the next article, to be published on 9th March, we will hear from learners themselves as to why they think we need to adopt a new approach for 21st century learning.