In the year twenty twenty

In the fall of 1986, I took a graduate education class entitled Major Philosophies of Education. It was a night class that met three hours once a week face-to-face, of course (no online opportunities yet). One of the requirements of the course was a group project (no wiki here) to create a school based on a philosophy of our own choosing. So our group set out to decide what our philosophy would be and how our entire school system would be structured (with pen and paper). Now as I remember correctly, my group of four was pretty forward thinking. And note that at the time, there were no personal computers, cell phones, and even video cameras were like dinosaurs. However, we came up with a philosophy called “elitism.” And the basis of our philosophy was that each student in our district would have a computer in which they were capable of connecting with their school district and teachers and subject area content and able to pretty much be virtually linked to their school 24/7. We even presented our project in video format (way before podcasting and YouTube). Pretty elite (and good foresight I must say) for 1986, huh? Fast forward to now . . . 2007. Elitism, as my 1986 educational philosophy project described, is reality. Wow, have we come a long way in 20 years.

So what will our world and education be like in 14 years from now in the year 2020? First, there will still be the elite--those that have the most up-to-the-minute technology devices and access to the coolest online tools. That reality will never change. As much as we might like to think, believe, or dream that the world and education will even itself out, that no child will be left behind, there will always be the underprivileged. When I first began teaching with computers in my classroom one of the first questions I would ask my students at the beginning of the school year was, “Who has a computer in their home?” Two or three hands would raise per class. As the years passed, those students became the minority. Now every student has at least one computer in their household.

The world will become flatter, smaller, and more connected as we reach the year 2020. Web 2.0 will continue to evolve and flourish. The masses of people, and by masses I mean people of all ages and all walks of life, will continue to add content to the World Wide Web and to learn and grow from and with each other. The Web will be alive, live, real time, no wait, 24/7 with internet connections faster, broader, and perpetually portable. There will be new terms and ways to connect, collaborate, and share, to add to wikis, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, feeds, steaming video, etc. And it will change, evolve, and grow at speeds we can’t even imagine. A good portion (if not all) of an individual’s life will be online.

But what does this mean for education? I truly don’t see education keeping pace with the speed of technological changes. At least not in the United States. The funding (and the priority) is just not there. And the federal government will provide less and less and the individual states (and local governments) will have to take up more of the burden. On the other hand, this financial impact may change the whole face of public education. We may see many more privatized schools or maybe we will see the merger of local school districts for the sake of financial security. Technology totally set aside, money is definitely a big issue for the future of education.

I’m always an optimist, and definitely am when I think of the future of education, but I do believe that problems we face now, today, in our schools will never be resolved. As new technologies emerge, new problems will always follow. The teachers coming out of college today will be in the education system for the next 30 years. And although these new teachers are entering their classrooms with more technology training than say ten years ago, we still deal with the problem of retraining and good solid professional development as new technology methodologies emerge. So again, technology grows and changes at a very fast pace, but our educational systems lag.

With technology, teaching (and really most occupations) will become a lifestyle rather than a job. People will always be connected, which makes it hard to separate career from personal life. I’ve always felt that teaching has never been a 7 to 3 job. From September to May, teachers immerse themselves in their classrooms and the job never stops. Some of my best lesson ideas have come to me in the middle of the night! With the “World Live Web” and connectivity, I see teaching in the year 2020 as a never-ending constant. In the future, students to students, teachers to students, and teachers to teachers will be ever-connected . . . sharing, collaborating, and doing so in real-time all the time.