The following are conclusions drawn from the above readings as well as on-going readings
from class and other trade journals and experience in the field over the
last ten (or so) years.
Technology
- Continue to double every 18 months to 212 gigahertz.
- Quantum computing ushers in massively parallel processing
- Miniaturization and portability!
- All information all the time.
- Web pages: content now has meaning to computer (XML).
- Web sites will watch users and analyze content and become self-adapting to the surfer
- Open source replaces proprietary source.
- On demand licenses reduce cost of proprietary software ownership.
- Grid computing ushers in utility computing models.
- Real-time translators reduce/eliminate language barriers to learning
- Technology hype bubble bursts and stops being viewed as a way to reach larger numbers
of students and instead becomes an enabler of new learning paradigms.
Marketplace
- Just in time manufacturing showing proof of concept today. Just in time knowledge is hot, but not yet widely accepted, but will be by 2012
- Business processes will become as easy to define as data is today in spreadsheets.
- As new generation grows up, technology “disappears” It will be just another tool.
- As outsourcing trend becomes a perfected model, companies become highly specialized service providers.
- Corporations themselves will become powerhouses for training and retraining talent
- Information Technologist and business personnel will seize to be distinguishable.
Public Education
- Under demands of dissatisfied parents, P.E. as we know it will radically change.
- Under budgeted and understaffed, will see private industry support, perhaps even privatization in some states.
- As private industries move in, educational goals will change.
- Private school systems that build research and implementation hand-in-hand for delivering courses will emerge.
- More and more schools will go on-line. Just as competing businesses are partnering today, schools will also partner to deliver best of breed educational opportunities.
- Team oriented teaching will become the norm.
- Real-time evaluation of student progress will free up teachers to teach more and grade less while keeping students learning at fastest pace possible.
- Students will be taught from the context of real-life problems.
- Technology will become an enabler, thus expanding the role of the teacher, not diminishing it.
- A lot of time and energy will be expended teaching students the fine art of data retrieval and critical analysis of data.
- Teachers facilitate learning rather than lecture.
- 9-month educational system will be faded out for 12-month, year-round educational system.
- Grade based evaluation will be supplanted with performance indicators
Instructional Technology
- Will continue to react to new technologies and finding ways to use them in education.
- Concepts largely restricted to IT classrooms and other cutting edge experiments will be adopted and trickle down into standard classrooms.
- Increases in bandwidth will allow off-campus hosting learning modules…data gathering from classrooms across nations will speed up research of new ideas
- Student progress will be tracked in real-time.
- If Business-method patents become the norm, then learning systems and theories will be patented as well and may spark fracture of entire field.
- More technology background folks will enter the largely educational background dominated field of Instructional Technology. This will spur unprecedented innovations in the field.
- In the next 10 years we will finally see concrete evidence from research on whether Technology really does facilitate learning.
- Technology will continue to mean more and more things. IT’s taxonomy will be refined to be more precise and distinguish between different types of technologies.