Prognosticators at eSchoolNews say that five trends in technology are poised to have a major impact on education in the near future.
Extreme BYOD: Children “wear” technology.
People like Diane Ravitch and even reporters to some extent are education historians, but the article calls Jason Ohler an educational futurist. I suppose his role is the exact opposite of Ms Ravitch’s. Speaking at the recent International Society for Technology in Education’s virtual conference, he offered an example of “extreme BYOD,” one of the trends, predicting that wearable technology will be used in schools.
An example might be a kid who’s struggling with fractions. He takes a test that spots that difficulty, and then the cloud analyzes that information and predicts what lessons might be helpful. Then, those lessons, which include media of all sorts, are sent to his wearable device, along with related content.
The education field is barely getting used to Facebook and Web 2.0, and Mr Ohler is talking, in this article, about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. For example, we already have Google Glass, but Mr Ohler was talking about using technology like that in the classroom.
Codifying what teachers already do well is a waste of money, and kids need someone to smile at them and say ‘Hi’ when they come to school. All the devices in the world will never change that need on the part of our youngest citizens, but if technology can be brought into the service of those professionals who have dedicated their lives to children’s learning, so much the better.
Anyway, the five trends are:
- Big data — “The more, the merrier.”
- Immersion (augmented reality) — “I’m standing somewhere; the cloud knows where I am.”
- The semantic Web — “Everything talks to everything.”
- Extreme BYOD — see the artist’s rendition above
- Transmedia storytelling — “in use everywhere but education”
As far as “immersion” goes, think of the movie Eagle Eye, starring Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan. The imdb.com synopsis reads, “Jerry and Rachel are two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes Jerry and Rachel into a series of increasingly dangerous situations, using the technology of everyday life to track and control their every move.”
This is the intersection of immersion and the semantic Web. By knowing where kids are at every moment, “the cloud” can provide them with lessons that are appropriate for the physical location. It might even be able to find a satellite photo of their current location or know who else is around that might know something about converting decimals to fractions.
Well, all I can say is, teachers have been doing this for years. The trends touted as “transforming” by eSchoolNews will change the way technology is used in our schools, and that’s a big deal. As for transforming how students learn or how teachers teach, I think doing that is outside the realm of possibility. At the present time, we can’t even use computer programs to understand an essay written by a student with reliable accuracy. And teachers have been adjusting to real kids’ learning styles since long before MS-DOS 1.0 was loaded on an eight-inch floppy disk.