Future schools, future visions

I must admit I'm a big fan of Richard Gerver and have had the pleasure of working with him now and then over the last few years. Richard was also kind enough to write the foreword of my latest book Learning with 'e's, in which he swears blind that we met on a camel in the Saudi desert - during a social event for the ELI conference. Well, he spins a very good yarn, but we really did meet in Riyadh, and we had a lengthy conversation during the same conference (back in 2013). We discussed a number of issues around skills for the 21st Century, the role of the teacher, the nature of education and the future of schooling. Richard is a well known speaker on the circuit. He's an ex-headteacher and he has some very thought provoking views and insights on leadership, change and education. And so we took the opportunity to compare our personal visions for the progress of education, discuss our mutual concerns about the current state of schooling, and share our optimism for the future. Our dialogue embraced a number of themes including the necessary skills and literacies children will need to survive in the digital age, the impact of technology and change on education, and an insight into the concept of personalised learning. It was a conversation we enjoyed very much, and as luck would have it, a film crew was on hand to capture the entire discussion on tape. Here is an edited version of that discussion, courtesy of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Public Education Development Project.



Photo by Steve Wheeler


Future schools, future visions by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Social, mobile, and personal learning futures

Many of my public presentations have the prefix: Digital Learning Futures, because for me, the future of education and learning will be greatly influenced by digital technologies.

The presentation below was for the ELI 2015 (4th international conference on e-Learning and Distance Education) event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where education and learning professionals from the entire gulf region and beyond came together to discuss the possibilities of future education scenarios.

The key argument of my presentation was that social learning, the use of mobile devices, and personal learning environments will all be vitally important components of any future learning ecology. I advised that technology is not a silver bullet, and cannot solve all the problems education is currently experiencing. Nor can it replace good pedagogy. However, once those concerns are settled I said - technology, especially the personalised, mobile devices student now own - can and often does make a huge difference in how people learn, and can neither dismissed nor omitted from any future pedagogical discourse.

Digital Learning Futures: Social, Mobile and Personal Technologies from Steve Wheeler

Photo by Victor Grigas on Wikimedia Commons


Social, mobile, and personal learning futures by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.