2020 Vision
In preparation for this I created a mindmap over at mindmeister. Mindmapping has helped me since before I enrolled in my M.S. Ed. As a holistic thinker it helps me visually see the connections my brain makes and move those connections from in my brain to a sequence I can work with. I would recommend it to anyone having problems moving thru a problem.
The question of what will education look like in 2020 is an interesting one. My youngest child is the class of 2019 so I have a personal interest in this answer also. I will attempt to project some of my hopes instead of actually trying to be a futurist and predict where many trends will lead I would like to write about where I would like them to go, with some amateur predictions thrown in! I had four ideas.
1.) Technology will continue at a rate of accelerated change.
I enjoy teaching this concept. I illustrate this with students by letting them know that Laura Ingalls lived until months before the launch of Sputnik. We then do some timeline work to see this rate of acceleration. 100 years ago our world was very different and students will need to learn how to manage technology or it will manage them. General predictions about the future of technology are interesting and sometimes funny. My prediction for education based on accelerating rate of change is that learning will increasingly follow the tenets of connectivism. Students will become increasingly reliant on each other and other sources than teachers. Teachers will increasingly move into the role of facilitator or move out of the role of teaching. Technology that enables connectivism will also increasingly move away from sitting at a PC. Siftables is a great example of this.
2.) Integration of Mobile Computing purchased by students and co-opted by schools.
At some point some school corporation is going to have an ‘A-Ha’ moment. They will stop fighting the cell phone and start using it. I foresee a future where a majority of students, even ones in poverty, will be using phones that do more than the iPhone using websites that load faster and do more (this is a very interesting podcast). Schools will begin using technology to push out assignments, collaborative projects, etc. to student’s and parent’s cell phones. This can be done now. Content will have much more depth and connection with students. The trend is also that more teachers will be familiar with texting, social networks, wikis, blogs, etc. so they are more likely to use it without being trained and without being a the front of the curve. They will just naturally do it. Teachers become administrators and they will be increasingly interested in the idea of going green and not purchasing millions of pages of textbooks for the system every year. Schools will be more interested in allowing teachers build wikis around standards that include collaboration, research, and rich multimedia. With increasing curriculum and time freedom teachers will be empowered to take students places and organize experiences.
- Students creating their own podcast tour of historical places.
- Students creating their own movies to demonstrate mastery of several subjects.
- Students collaborating together to interview Iraq war vets.
- Students using GPS for a variety of things.
So how could this time freedom become possible?
3.) Secondary schools become more like college eliminating all day schedules.
Secondary schools will start this with the safest group first: upperclassmen honor students. Honor students will be moved out of the building, cutting cost by allowing them to take more undergrad college classes and doing their remaining high school work with online tools. These tools are what this course is about: wikis, blogs, and RSS being the backbone of this paradigm. These secondary students will be successful and promote this idea. Administrators will make presentations at conferences and the idea will spread. It will be a win/win because it lowers cost, increases student’s motivation to be part of the honor’s program and reinvigorates teachers. So where does this leave the least fortunate in this country? I spent several years teaching students who had fractured educational experiences and were part of the juvenile justice system. I am by no means an expert so my idea here may be a vision with rose colored glasses but here goes.
4.) Urban education will undergo a renaissance driven by marrying mobile technology, online applications and entrepreneurship.
I found that kids in ‘the system’ were fascinated by capitalism and I believe this was partly due to many of them being from poverty. Why not marry two things together that can fuel real learning? Why not raise students financial I.Q. while teaching and using mobile technology and online applications learned in this course to do it? This is a crazy idea, I know. This is my vision though. It seems like the grant money out there isn’t for textbooks but instead is for wireless labs. Open up the buildings, make them learning centers with wireless labs and students working on projects that actually make money. The money could go to fundraising and scholarships Students could collaborate with wikis using the mac lab at the wireless campus on projects that incorporate cross curricular standards and a slightly competitive atmosphere. I know this is a very secondary oriented idea but the same concepts can be taken down into Kindergarten. Why not have kids creating fun games together using online tools that reinforce standards? The school could become an “Innovation Campus”. These students would become increasingly attractive to the majority of companies that hire: small businesses that need people who solve problems and can wear many hats.
So what will I look like as a teacher in 2020?
Hopefully much thinner and better looking than I do now! Not likely though. Things will be different and hopefully by then I will have become a master teacher. Teachers like myself will move more and more from being the center of attention all the time to a facilitator of long and short term learning experiences that connect our students to concepts and content that matters to us, not just me. Collaborating with wikis, checking homework in my RSS reader and driving learning with questions instead of statements is where I want to go as a teacher. This is a tough transition but capitalizing on trends like increasing bandwidth, computer proliferation, brain research, and faster access to better research will certainly help. The teacher of 20/20 can not be static. Dynamic teaching based in reflection, innovation and collaboration will be required to be successful at this craft in the future. The professor that had a large impact on me once said “Teaching is part art and part science”. I agree with this. People are complicated so we need open systems of learning that stress collaboration, reflection, critical thinking and learning how to learn. I hope to be a leader in that future!
Thanks!
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