future school

Alvin Toffler tells us what's wrong -- and right -- with public education.

Miguel Brechner's keynote this morning focused on the CEIBAL one-laptop-per-child project in the schools of Uruguay. Uruguay is only a small South American country, about the size of Wales, and with a small population, and in the past it has not been particularly well known for its educational achievements. But today the spotlight was well and truly on Uruguay. In a gently humourous style, and laced with football analogies (he delighted in reminded his audience that Uruguay had once beaten Brazil to win the Soccer World Cup), Miguel Brechner demonstrated how giving a free laptop to each child has liberated them to learn in their own way and in their own time. Children now really want to go to school he said, and are upset if they miss even a day. He showed how the education landscape has been changed in Uruguay, and how social equality is being achieved among the youth of his country. Clearly very passionate about his cause, Brechner argued that not only should is access to broadband absolutely essential for education, in today's connected world, it should also be considered a human right. While many of us had heard these mantras before, given that Negroponte's vision has been in existence for well over a decade, we were all nevertheless impressed by the manner in which this project had been implemented, in humility, a great sense of purpose and with an eye on the future for Uruguay's youth.

In their article, “Schooling as a Knowledge Profession,” Jal D. Mehta, Louis M. Gomez, & Anthony S. Bryk point out various flaws with the current educational system in America, the greatest of which being that we are still operating within a paradigm that mirrors the antiquated trends of the industrial age. 

As we make our way through July, 2011, I am thinking of the ways that teaching will change in the not-too-distant future. There is increasingly sophisticated technology to come. Can we imagine what we will use in a year from now? How about two years from now? Are you ready?

For the first time in it's history Twitter is starting to make large scale changes to the main functionality of the site - What does it mean for you?

In-view vision, whether in visor, heads-up, or projector form, would have the capability to lock into and exploit the full potential of applications such as augmented and mixed reality, where the onboard processor can generate and superimpose information about objects or people to give the viewer instant information about what or who they are looking at. This would be an important step forward for augmented reality tools, which currently rely largely on mobile phone cameras to function. A look at the TED video of Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense wearable technology may give you a sense of how this can be achieved and the positive (and possibly negative) effects that may emerge with this ambient approach to interaction with the environment.

Although she is committed to boosting interactive digital technology for learning, Diana Rhoten’s talk is framed by movies.

“We really want to be disruptive in our work. Our goal is to shock the system, by bringing to light the concrete, cutting-edge examples of what the future of learning could look like.”- Diana Rhoten

Let me pose this scenario:

Every day, you walk down the same street. You walk past the buildings, see the crowds and yawn.  But on this day, you decide to use your smartphone and look down on t...

Many of us assume flâneur-like trajectories when we traverse our way across cyberspace, clicking through hyperlinks, sometimes happening by chance upon pages that interest us, and where serendipitous learning ultimately occurs. Heutagogic learning is essentially self directed and autodidactic, and at its most informal, may involve sense-making of the digital landscape by wandering seemingly aimlessly around it. But there is still a self-determined purpose underlying the actions of the learner.