Earlier this week, I found myself engaged in a fascinating discussion with researcher Daniel Erasmus about the Future of Education.
As part of a research project backed by Finnish textbook developer Sanoma WSOY, Daniel is talking with people around the world with an array of perspectives about what learning environments will be like in the year 2020. "The industrial, "one-size-fits-all" model of education is no longer seen as the most effective way of transferring knowledge," he writes. "The way that children absorb information has changed significantly in the last 20 years. For example, they are now much more likely to make use of video technology, such as YouTube, to find out more about something instead of through books. The Internet has also transformed how students interact and communicate with each other. Information is more easily shared on the Internet, and group discussions are as likely to take place in instant messaging virtual conferences, social networking sites, or 3D virtual worlds as in physical locations."
Over a 4-hour conversation, Daniel took me through his "scenario planning" method. Scenario planning is, more or less, a fancy way of saying "imagine the future" but with an interesting twist. "We operate under the premise that what we expect to happen tomorrow dictates what is done today." In other words, we create the future we expect. So Daniel's research is all about figuring out what a lot of people think might happen.
Oddly enough, that's more or less what we do with DEMO – get hundreds of companies to talk about what they are doing in the future in order to identify new market trends.
The conversation with Daniel was interesting on many levels, especially the point that sometimes you have to talk about something in order to understand what you think about the topic. Until Monday afternoon, I hadn't articulated much of a perspective on the future of education. But I clearly have one.
For a long time, I have believed the system of public education in the U.S. is profoundly broken. Money is unevenly distributed among schools, testing standards measure the wrong things, classroom management trumps learning and exploration, teachers are inadequately compensated and wrongly incited ... my opinions go on.
But I am also hopeful, inspired mostly by the curiosity of young minds. When kids are engaged with discovery, magic happens. The institutions that structure public education tend to stifle that magic, but technology may be the savior in the "future of education" and it just may be the thing that lets kids drive their learning. In my scenario, kids will "teach" kids, or they will more effectively learn together. Classroom teachers become catalysts and mentors, rather than drill instructors tasked with promoting a roomful of kids to the next grade level. Technologies driving the social media revolution will enable this collaboration within a class, throughout a school and across the globe, uniting kids and igniting their curiosity to learn.
Just as technology today is shifting power and authority from centralized media to millions of individual bloggers, for example, these same technologies and techniques will shift the locus of learning from a central curriculum committee out and into the hands of students.
Daniel and I drilled on this idea for several hours (and when the video is available, I'll gladly share a link with you). At the end of our time together, he asked me who else he ought to talk to about the future of education. It occurred to me then that I ought to address the question to you.
What's your scenario for the classroom of 2020? How will technology leverage and change institutions of learning? How will information technologies impact the tools of teachers and students? Surely you have some opinion on this challenging question. Drop me a line at chris@guidewiregroup.com. I'll collect your ideas and report back to you – and to Daniel's project.
If we can imagine a dynamic classroom of the future, maybe we can fix some of the problems of education today.
