This Web page: http://tlt.gs/20predictions2000
Excerpt from: "A New Vision Worth Working Toward: Connected Education and Collaborative Change"
What follows are twenty
predictions about teaching, learning, and technology -- based on observations. Most of these
predictions are about how things will continue to change. Of
course, major new discoveries or social upheavals are impossible to
predict, and even the consequences of currently significant new
technologies may bring surprises in the next few years. Who
knows what shape the Internet will have in 2005? Who knows
what the next “big thing” after the Web might be?
1. The Safest Prediction
In
the next decade at least one major new trend in the educational use
of information technology will NOT have been predicted by anyone
highly respected in fields closely related to education or
technology. Technology can change quickly and
unpredictably, even if human nature cannot.
2. Accelerating Accumulation of Knowledge; Wisdom,
Selectivity, and Guidance
The
accumulation of information and knowledge will continue to
accelerate. Respect and reward for conveyed wisdom,
knowledgeable selectivity, and thoughtful guidance will grow. People
will pay a premium for services that pre-sift information; i.e.,
for the privilege of NOT receiving so much information or
communication. Learners with good information tools at
home or in school will become less dependent on teachers for access
to information; but more dependent on them for
perspective, interpretation, analysis, motivation, and direction.
3. No “Moore’s Law” for Learning
No
“Moore’s Law” for learning will emerge. No new
application of technology, no new educational approach will double
the speed of human learning. More combinations of
technology and pedagogy will be developed and both the speed and
effectiveness of education in many fields will increase
significantly, but not dramatically.
4. Variety of Educational Needs, Abilities, Goals,
Programs, and Institutions
Teachers,
learners, and other human beings will continue to have a remarkable
range of educational needs, abilities, and goals. The
variety of educational programs and institutions in the United
States will increase, even as consolidation continues in closely
related industries (e.g., publishing, communications media).
5. New Technology Applications Enhance Traditional
Courses
New applications of
technology, that appear to offer the potential for improving
teaching and learning, will continue to arrive at an accelerating
pace; but the dominant model for using technology in
higher education will continue to be the enhancement of traditional
classroom-based courses. More new buildings will be
opened on higher education campuses than will be closed.
6. “Distance Education” Becomes More
Creditable
Fully
asynchronous “distance education” courses, especially those that
require no special meeting space, will become more credible and
attractive -- and will be used for many kinds of instruction. Many
people will welcome supplementary educational ATMs [Automatic
Teaching Machines?] into their homes and offices. Unlike
the role of ATMs in banking, these educational ATMs will not be
viewed as the preferred alternatives for most kinds of traditional
education.
7. Distance Education and Online Education Mix with
Face-to-Face
Mixtures of
online and face-to-face education will become more common than
programs that offer either one alone. The most widely
used patterns will be:
- Courses in which students meet
face-to-face with each other and the teacher(s) some of the time and
in which they are also assigned combinations of group work and
independent work including a variety of media and tasks; e.g.,
electronic mail, the Web, new technology applications, books,
writing papers, science labs, etc.
- Programs or sequences of courses,
in which some of the courses include regularly scheduled
face-to-face group meetings of students with faculty, and some of
the courses do not. The latter may be completely
“distant” and asynchronous, or may include some live
communications at a distance.
8. No Proof, But Widespread Adoption of Email, Web, and
Instructional Combinations
No
conclusive proof of the general educational superiority of any
technology application will emerge. Evaluation and
assessment activities will be used more frequently to improve the
results of continuing investments of time, money, and other
resources in educational uses of technology. However,
some combinations of technology application, teaching/learning
approach, and subject matter content will be widely adopted because
they are so easily implemented, reasonably priced, and OBVIOUSLY
effective in achieving important educational goals. Debate
about these combinations, if it arises at all, will be brief and
inconsequential. For example, the vast majority of
faculty members will decide to use electronic mail and the World
Wide Web in their scholarly work – including teaching – without
the benefit of convincing evaluative studies.
9. Increase Technology Investments; Forums
for Exploration, Planning, Advice
Presidents,
boards, and other academic leaders will continue to increase
institutional resource allocations for academic uses of information
technology – and to be uncomfortable about doing
so. Consequently, more colleges and universities will
form internal groups representing diverse constituencies (faculty,
academic support professionals, administrators, students, …) and
provide them with a forum to:- Explore and develop ways of
improving teaching and learning – with technology.- Plan for the continuing
integration of new technology applications into all scholarly work
and for the institutionalization of change. - Offer academic leaders the best
advice and help them shape related policies and decisions.
[These groups are
like TLTRs -- Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtables.]
10. Institutionalize Change, Accept Risk, Make
Space/Time Flexible
More
colleges and universities will recognize the need to plan for and
institutionalize a process for change, and to accept the increased
risk of failure along with the exciting prospects of new
success. This attitude may be instigated by, but not
limited to, the increasing importance and more widespread use of
information technology in teaching, learning, and research. To
institutionalize change, colleges and universities will:
- Develop new administrative units
to support changes in teaching and learning.
- Provide incentives and reduce
obstacles for faculty members to take risks in trying to find,
develop, and use combinations of technology, pedagogy, and content.
- Make it easier for faculty,
students, and academic support professionals to reconfigure their
schedules and the spaces in which they work together. Do
so by making flexibility a high priority when retrofitting
classrooms, renovating old buildings or designing new ones, and
modifying the system for scheduling course activities.
11. Widening Expectation-Resource Gap
At
most educational institutions, the gap between expectations and
resources will continue to widen (with respect to the improvement of
teaching and learning with technology). The need for
academic support services will continue to grow faster than the
supply. The competition from industry to hire technical
support professionals will become more intense. Both learners
and teachers will need the services of librarians more frequently
and extensively so long as sources of information continue to
proliferate. Demand will continue to increase for the
services of faculty development professionals, instructional design
specialists, and other pedagogical experts (as a consequence of the
increasing number of faculty members who want to use new
applications of technology in their teaching).
12. New Faculty Responsibilities, Increasing Workload
for All
More faculty
members will decide that their professional responsibilities include
keeping current with the knowledge accumulating in their fields,
pedagogical options, and supportive technology applications. The
workload for faculty, academic support professionals, and academic
administrators will continue to increase.
13. Extend, Coordinate, and/or Outsource Academic
Support Services
More
colleges and universities will form local centers and/or related
institutional Web-based directories, forums, and services to
coordinate the work of existing academic support services, encourage
the development of new combinations of those services, and make it
easier for faculty and students to find and use those
services. More institutions will also “outsource”
some technology and other academic support services and/or develop
inter-institutional collaborations for more cost-effective delivery
of those services. Other new commercial services may
provide “academic” support services directly to faculty members
or students – with or without the involvement of the colleges or
universities in which those learners and teachers do their
work. This may be a new role for textbook publishers and
other companies in education-related industries.
14. Student Technology Assistants
To
meet the growing need for academic support services, more colleges
and universities will take advantage of one of their unique
resources – the students. They will move beyond current
programs of using students for clerical help in the library and as
room monitors in computer labs. They will provide more
training for these student assistants, give them opportunities for
more technologically and consultatively challenging work, and
promote some to positions of responsibility for supervising and
training their peers. Many students, especially those who
are not pursuing technology-focused careers, will find the training
and experience of these roles a major asset in preparing for most
jobs or further study as the value of technology skills
continues to increase in most fields.
15. More Speech on the Web
Human
speech on the Web – recorded or delivered live -- will take a
central role in many kinds of education. It will become
easy for faculty members and students to add recordings of their own
speech to text and other information media. Voice
recognition software may dramatically alter human-computer
interaction and all related communications/education
activities; probably NOT by eliminating keyboards, but by
adding another attractive mode for controlling technology and
entering and editing text.
16. Better Understanding of Face-to-Face Communication
and Other Teaching/Learning Options
Educators,
corporate leaders, and many others (religious leaders?
entertainers?) will learn to take greater advantage of the unique
possibilities of face-to-face communications. They will
do so in conjunction with the invention of new ways of combining
applications of technology, pedagogical options, content, and
purposes. They will discover the new power of matching
all of these with the different capabilities and styles of
individual learners, individual teachers, and groups of both. The
“human moment” [see Connect by Edward Hallowell] in which two
human beings talk AND LISTEN to each other in the same place at the
same time will be more highly valued and sought more intentionally
and frequently.
17. Academic Freedom Redefined
As
faculty and student roles shift and new educational resources are
integrated, academic freedom and faculty leadership will remain
highly valued; but they may be redefined. Many
faculty members will embrace greater responsibility for identifying,
selecting, and implementing pedagogical options – and supportive
applications of technology.
18. Adjuncts Become More Important
Adjunct
faculty members, especially retirees from first careers, will
continue to become a growing part of the teaching faculty at most
colleges – both in classrooms and online. Support services
for adjuncts will become more common and necessary. Part-time
teaching may prove among the most attractive and
self-respect-enhancing new retirement options.
19. Access, Disabilities, and Information
Literacy
Access to
computers, related information resources, and “information
literacy” will become higher societal priorities. More
educational institutions will recognize and respond to the need to
provide such equitable access for all --- regardless of wealth or
disabilities. Many colleges and universities will develop
programs for defining and regularly revising access and information
literacy goals; and for helping students, faculty,
administration, and staff to achieve them. Eventually,
colleges and universities may only need to offer guidelines about
the expected information literacy competencies of entering students,
and to provide some modest remedial services for the few who require
them.
20. Educational Rights and Educational Costs
Debate
will continue on how much education, of what kind, for whom. As
with health care, the notions of a citizen’s educational rights
and the locus of decision making about them will be difficult to
resolve. Human society will recognize that the costs of
the most effective kinds of education (like the costs of much of the
most effective kinds of health care) will continue to rise faster
than the costs of food, clothing, and housing. Quality of
life for will depend on access to better quality education and
health care for all. [Will enough world resources be
generated and allocated to provide everyone with adequate food,
health care, shelter, clothing, and education? How will
“adequate” be defined?]
Finally, the concluding section of this paper will describe a new
kind of Vision – a vision that seems both feasible and worth the
effort to achieve it. Yet, it is not a vision of an end,
but rather of the means for steering in the right direction,
confirming progress, and making mid-course corrections.
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