2020 learning technologies

When I try to gaze into the future I hurt my eyes. It's difficult to see much beyond the end of the year, so trying to predict what technologies we might see in schools by 2020 is like staring into a very strong spotlight. We can merely speculate. It's not even worth trying to extrapolate trends based on developments from the previous 10 years. Change is not linear, it's exponential. That means that the change that has happened over the last decade, rapid as it has been, will in no way compare realistically with the changes we can expect over the next decade. But I'm going to stick my neck out anyway .... so how about this for a prediction?

It is highly likely that more informal tools and technologies, such as handheld devices, mobile phones and games consoles will take an increasing role in formal education. I can say this with some confidence, because there are already some signs of this happening in some schools. We don't know what informal personal technologies will look like in 2020. But teachers and education leaders are beginning to realise that there is a huge untapped potential in today's personal technologies. For example, the Nintendo Dual Screen and Wii games technologies are already being used effectively for teaching in some schools. iPod tools are connecting learners with content outside the walls of the school. The GPS capability in mobile phones has enormous potential for the teaching of geography, while the context aware facilities in smart mobile phones can extend the classroom beyond its traditional walls and out into the world, embracing history, natural sciences, citizenship and art/design. Imagine children using their context and location aware devices to access information about art or natural history exhibits in a gallery or museum. Imagine them capturing images of the places they visit which they can later upload onto their blogs, or videos they can create of real-time events beyond the classroom. Imagine the impact of augmented reality (AR) overlays on live images from an iPhone camera, feeding children with information about the world as they move through it, exploring. All of these things are already happening in a limited way, and we can imagine that such applications will and must spread, as smart phones become cheaper, more reliable and more powerful.

Some cynics might predict that there will be little change over the next few years in schools, because a) they are conservative organisations b) there is very little money available to invest in new technologies in schools and c) when introduced, new technologies are seldom successful in schools across the board unless a government initiative forces them to be adopted (see for example Interactive White Boards and school VLEs). Pragmatists might also point out that even if new technologies are introduced into formal learning spaces, they are often applied poorly and innappropriately, or are used in ways that fall short of their true potential. There is also the question of whether all children will have access to personal tools such as smart phones. Schools don't have budgets to ensure that all children have a personal technology. The only way this will happen is when they become as affordable to purchase and use as a ball-point pen or a pencil.

I'm going to conclude this blogpost by predicting that in school, children will one day use personal technologies in a similar way to the way they now use pens and pencils. We won't be seeing ICT suites in the future, anymore than we see pencil suites now. We need a seamless provision that blurs the boundaries between what children use to learn when they are in school and when they are outside the school gates. We need to be in a position where the excitement of informal learning and the powerful richness of social media, personal gaming and instant messaging can continue inside the formal learning space. The sooner this happens, the better.

Image source by Mac.Merc (Modified)

2020 learning technology by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.