From e-World to 2020, an Educator’s Vision

Back in 1969, Richard Lee Evans, of the group Zager and Evans, wrote the lyrics to the song In The Year 2525. One of the verses read, 

“In the year 5555

Your arms hangin' limp at your sides

Your legs got nothin' to do

Some machine's doin' that for you.”

That song was written before the personal computer revolution, but during the time of the space race, and in a period of increasing use of technology. Looking back however, it seems almost quaint, certainly outdated, as our use of technology has exploded in ways Evans could never have imagined.

Today I am not looking at the year 2525, but a year much closer to our own, 2020, a mere six years into the future, and attempting to glean from my own crystal ball what wonders are in store for us as we round into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I’ll be looking at changes in the use of technology in education. If the last decade has taught me anything, it is that there will be leaps in technology that are nearly impossible to predict, and also that in many ways technology use will change very little in the actual classrooms across America.

Perhaps it will help to look at smaller pieces of the big picture, examining each one for potential changes. Then we can piece them together to form a vision of the future which may be somewhat realistic. Let us begin with Web 2.0.

When the World Wide Web emerged as a popular entity it was more of a static creature. Only the dedicated technologists among us were using the web at its birth around 1991. And a few years later when Mosaic, the first graphical web browser was released, the web was a fairly static place. It was read-only, which meant you did not interact with web pages, you simply read them and consumed content.

Web 2.0, the Read-Write Web, changed things. A variety of technologies were introduced to make it easy for non-techie people to publish to the web. This power of publishing revolutionized how the web was used. Now people could easily create blogs and wikis, and have them seen by potentially millions of people. Later came podcasts, audio recordings which could be listened to by everyone, and still later vodcasts, bringing video to the masses. The video revolution was completed by the website YouTube, which allowed anyone to publish their homemade videos to the web. There seemed to be no limit to what people would publish!

This won’t change in 2020. People will be publishing, but the publishing will be easier, and more integrated into our workflow. In Web 3.0 the culmination of the efforts to move applications to web browsers will be complete. With Web 3.0 all web-based applications will seamlessly publish to an included webspace, and those spaces will automatically generate URLs to be publicly shared when desired.

The race to complete this task will be between Apple and Google. Although Google has a head start with its Documents and Sites products, Apple has been in this game for longer, starting with its attempt to create an online BBS called e-World back in 1994. And Apple is unquestionably the world’s innovator when it comes to creating unique, user-friendly products. Apple has begun this move with its move to iCloud, where users can easily store their photos, and documents created by the iWork suite of web-based apps, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. And already, any of these documents can be shared with others.

But Web 3.0 will be more than just an extension of Web 2.0. It will erase the boundaries between products such as blogs and wikis. It will erase the boundaries between applications, making everything interoperable. And since apps will have moved to the browser, it will be imperative that the web is operated on open standards, so we will finally say goodbye to Flash, with its proprietary infrastructure, and move to a free, open architecture HTML 7. (Note: I am bypassing HTML 6, as I think it will be surpassed already by 2020.)

Web 3.0 will erase the boundaries between people who wish to publish together. Like a wiki, which can be shared, and the history of individual contributions both preserved and viewed, web publishing in Web 3.0 will have this as the default. Perhaps an example is in order. Today, when one writes to a blog such as this one, one can open that blog up to comments. And like this blog, should you comment back on it, that comment will be published for all to see. But unlike the blog itself, the comment is not editable. Why not? Why shouldn’t we each be able to change our minds, improve our writing, delete things we said in haste. Web 3.0 will change that.

So what will all this look like in the classroom? Well, since it is only a mere six years away, and education by nature and design is slow to change, perhaps not all that different looking, except in subtle ways. And perhaps a few not so subtle.

By 2020 ebooks will have become the norm. School districts across the country will have recognized the waste of money it is to purchase textbooks that are beginning to be obsolete nearly as soon as they are printed. Since ebooks can be continuously updated with new text, graphics, animations, etc. at any time, and simply uploaded for users to download, their currency and capabilities will make it obvious they are clearly the better choice. 

The move to ebooks will be one of many reasons all districts will finally commit to providing portable 1:1 computing for all students. This device will be a tablet, which will also run any of the thousands of apps developed for education. The move to tablets, with their reduced storage capacities (when compared to laptops), will coincide with the Web 3.0 capability of online storage for everything. Photos will be stored in places such as Flikr, iCloud, Drive, and Dropbox. Video will be stored in places like YouTube, Vimeo, Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox. The same for documents and audio files. And because Web 3.0 has now standardized publishing with HTML 7, these tablets will be able to create and publish websites as well. There will be no more pages which can’t be viewed! Note to teachers: there will also be no more copiers or paper handouts, everything will be delivered digitally!

The social nature of Web 3.0 will also bring changes to the classroom. Since all students in school in 2020 have been raised with the internet being constantly available, they will use it naturally, seamlessly sharing data and resources with each other, ignoring the constraints of ownership. Contribution will be the defining factor of learning, not a final product. The ability to share, to collaborate, will become the primary means of measuring educational success. 

Since collaboration has become the new standard, previous methods of evaluation will begin to be seen as relics of an education era gone by. No longer will standardized tests, the static measure of progress in 19th and 20th century education, be seen as valid measurements. Since it is now obvious that all information is readily available, the skills of retrieval, manipulation, and synthesis of information will become the new standards of measurement. Student progress will be judged by the ability to connect with other students, to find information, to collaborate with others, and by finding solutions to problems together. 

This will require everyone to make greater, and more precise, use of tagging, along with improved social bookmarking in such sites as diigo and delicious. RSS feeds will be ubiquitous, automatically generating collections which will self-publish in pre-defined categories to web-spaces of our choosing. All tags, feeds, and social bookmarks will conjoin, allowing public mashups which can be republished in new forms. This manipulation of data, now simplified in Web 3.0 using HTML 7, will allow all students, not just those who are avid programmers, to create sites utilizing the work of others to collaborate the creation of new work. And this work will be open for others to use. Imagine Creative Commons on steroids. All student work becomes CC, no attribution. All work is expected to contribute to the work of others.

Education in 2020 will be different than today. It will require teachers to become collaborators as well. Educators will share resources with peers, just as students will be expected to share. At the upper grades, teachers will become facilitators, guiding students toward resources and helping them make connections between prior, current, and future knowledge. The prevalence of video technology and the pervasive use of an improved access to the internet will mean some  teachers will be available at all times for distance education. 

Some things may not change in 2020. We will still have politicians asserting their world views into education. We will still have a society which values sports and entertainment over education. We will still have people fearful of technology, fearful of change, fearful of loss of control. Such is human nature. 

But we will still have hope. And within that hope is the dream that we can use these technological advances to improve and strengthen the education of our children. We can help them use their natural curiosity, and their natural inclination to work together, to create a model which they will carry into adulthood. And in the end, by working together, they will teach us what we should have known in the first place.

Resources

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/
Picture of e-World disc by Jim Braley