2016 and all that...

There are always predictions at the start of a new year. Many of them are about new technologies. The Horizon report has a monopoly on this for educaion, using a virtual round table of 'experts' to whittle down all the possibilities into one or two trends that they think will be prevalent in education in the next one year, 2-3 years and 4-5 years. The problem with this approach though, is that you get predictions based on what that small group of experts in really interested in. Predicting the future is fraught with difficulty because the future hasn't happened yet. It's imaginary. But it's on the way...

Imagine if Darryl F. Zanuck, the famous movie producer, had been on an expert panel in 1946. He remarked: 'Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.' So, television was a doomed technology that wouldn't last for long.

What would Thomas Edison have said if he had been on an expert panel in 1913? This: 'Books will soon be obsolete in public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye.' He went on to clarify this prediction: 'It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.' Not a bad prediction. It is likely he was correct, but it didn't really turn out that way. People still go to the movies, but it's a special occasion rather than the norm. Most of us watch TV, use the Web to find content, and we still read - whether it is paper based books or e-books, the main question is 'do you like books or do you like reading?' We still read and we still watch. There is room for every technology, all build on each other, and none ever fully supplants.

Even farther back in 1876, William Orton, then President of the Western Union believed that the newly invented telephone would fail because it had 'too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.' He had a vested interest in promoting mail and telegram services. He was looking at the telephone through his own personal lens.

For what they are worth, my predictions for the future of learning are listed below. Some of you might argue that these are already happening. Yes, they are (and there's the secret of successful prediction!) but they will happen in new and previously unforeseen ways. We will be surprised at how this will occur, and we'll also be amazed at the speed of progress. (NB: remember these are seen through the lens of my own personal interests and experience):

1) Learning will become increasingly personalised. We will have more choice over what we learn, how we learn it, when and where we learn it and over the pace of our learning. MOOCs won't be the end. They are just the start of a huge wave of democratised learning, but that won't stop large corporations trying to muscle in to exploit the surge of interest in 'free content'.
2) Technology will become more embedded in our every day lives. It will be more pervasive, and at the same time it will become less visible, blending into the fabric of our environments (see number 3)
3) We will carry the means of our learning around with us. Our mobile phones (probably the name 'phone' will be replaced by another label - the Germans already call it a Handy) will become cheaper, more powerful and indispensable, and will connect with other technologies seamlessly, probably built into the fabric of our clothes or jewellery (see number 2).
4) Schools will connect more with outside communities and may even blend in with them. They will become places where the entire community can access learning, and where anything can be learnt.
5) Students will generate more of their own knowledge. Formal learning will involve knowledge production as well as knowledge consumption.
6) The 'knowledge experts' as we know know them will assume less importance, because all of us will have the opportunity to become expert in our own specific areas of interest. Teachers, researchers and academics will increasingly become curators and brokers of knowledge rather than simply conveyors.
7) Knowledge and skills we have previously taken for granted will become less important to learn. This could be the last generation who will need to learn to drive a car, operate a computer using a keyboard, clean the house or even visit a store to shop for food.
8) We will find new things to do with the extra time at our disposal - it won't all be leisure based though. Instead there will be even more learning to be able to do your job better. It will be just in time, just for me, and just enough learning.
9) Meetings and other work will increasingly be conducted from where you are in the world, using your personal technologies. Many will be visually oriented, and will have haptic and kinaesthetic capabilities.
10) We will all wear spacesuits and live on Mars. (OK, this last one is unrealistic, because we all know that a Mars diet is not the healthiest option - but if the UK government introduces a chocolate tax, I predict I will leave the country).

There are other things I could 'predict', but I've run out of steam (anyone remember that? No? Just me then.) Go on, make up the rest yourself....

Photo by Mario Klingemann on Flickr


2016 and all that... by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Backing the future #BackToTheFuture

Image source: Deviant Art http://mjmstudios2020.deviantart.com/art/

Many people are excited about today - Wednesday 21st October 2015. The reason? It's Back to the Future Day - the day the fictional characters Marty McFly and Dr Emmett Brown arrive from 1985 into 'the future' in the wonderful science fiction movie trilogy Back to the Future. There will be many blogs and articles celebrating this today. So here's one more (I refuse to be left out). Back in the late 80s and early 90s, the films were a must for everyone of a certain age. Those of us who were the same age as Marty, late teens, early twenties, were fascinated by what we might be doing in the future. Would we still be alive when 2015 arrived. What age would each of us be? What would 2015 bring us? How would we cope with all the new technology? What jobs would we be doing? Would we have children? Grandchildren? These are the reasons why so many of us are excited by the fact that the date has finally arrived, so we can look back on time, and compare what we hoped and expected with today's reality. We are all time travellers - in one direction at least.

In Back to the Future 2, Doc brings Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer, into to the future to try to avert a personal disaster. This is the old timeline trope where you go back in time to change something there, in the hope that it will make your own present better in some way. However, the twist in Back to the Future Part 2 is that Marty has to travel into the future to redeem his present. Along the way there are many twists and turns, and a temporal dance of intricate proportions results. It's a splendid yarn, and it kept us entertained for some time back in the day. Yet, looking at the movie now, how many of the technologies that were predicted actually exist, and what does it mean for us, living in 'the future' of 2015?

Source: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/amphalon/sets/

Flying cars are a classic example of a technology that has been predicted for more than a century. The French artist Villemard painted images of flying vehicles back in 1910. We are still waiting, because, after all, do we really need or desire flying cars? How might they make our lives better, and what attendant risks and challenges might the flying car bring to our already complicated 21st Century lifestyles? Driverless cars are probably enough to be grappling with right now. Other similar technologies featured in BTTF2 included self lacing footwear, self-drying and adjusting clothing, and yes - the hoverboard. Back in the eighties, skateboards were new and exciting. Now it seems they are largely consigned to the hardcore of youths who regularly try to severely injure themselves by performing dangerous tricks on hard surfaces in deserted city centres in the evenings. Whether or not hoverboards have been invented or indeed are commercially viable is open to discussion, but we already have Maglev trains that work on a similar principle, so we could say that this prediction is partially fulfilled.

Other technologies are conspicuous by their absence. There is no mention of the Internet in the movie. Where are smartphones and social media? All are missing because they either didn't figure in the minds of the writers, or they simply hadn't been invented at the time the movie was being made. Other technologies are laughable by their inclusion - think of the Fax machines middle-aged Marty's boss uses to fire him from his job. Does anyone still use fax machines in 2015? Controlling the weather? Hmmm. And what about the inverted, gravity defying orthopaedic frame used by Marty's ageing father George McFly? Hardly credible then, or now.

One interesting technology that does appear in the movie was nascent in 1985, but it did exist - video conferencing, and it is portrayed accurately in BTTF2. Note that several times in the movie, the characters communicate with each other through wall screens that project images and sound. I first saw videoconferencing in 1972, it has been around for a while in various forms, and it was already featuring as a futuristic means of communication in such TV shows as Star Trek. It wasn't hard to include it as a future means of communication, and of course this is particularly accurate with the advent of FaceTime, Skype and other similar visual media. But it's an isolated case of accuracy in the midst of mis-predictions.

Image and graphics by Steve Wheeler

We run the risk of ridicule when we try to predict the future. No-one has been there. It's impossible to predict it with great accuracy. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, was so excited by his wonderful idea he made this declaration (left). He was right. Every town in the U.S. has a telephone. But it's a ridiculous statement, in hindsight. The fact is, everyone who wants a cell phone has one (or more) in their pockets. Bell couldn't predict the future beyond his current frame of reference, because as Voltaire once pointed out: 'Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.' Those who can break out of their current thought culture, and imagine a different future, are the visionaries who create that future.

Voltaire also said 'The present is pregnant with the future'. Go make your own future.

P.S. I'm a big fan of the Back to the Future trilogy, so if you try to suggest I'm dissing these movies, your comments will die at the moderation stage. :)


Backing the future #BackToTheFuture 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.

Talking tech

My latest interview appears in this month's edition of Teach Secondary magazine in conjunction with a review of my new book. Here it is:

Do teachers have a choice about whether to engage with technology?

Technology is already so embedded in the fabric of schools, it's probably unavoidable now. Whether it's teacher technology, including wordprocessors, electronic record keeping or databases, or student technology, such as laptops, educational software or personal devices, technology should now be viewed as a set of tools that can be harnessed to extend, enhance and enrich the learning experience. Add the exponential power of the Web into the mix, and the argument becomes compelling. Technology offers us unprecedented opportunities to transform education. The question is not whether teachers should engage with technology, but how.

If you had to pick out the single most important technological development for education over the past ten years, what would you choose and why? 

The final line of Learning with 'e's offers a clue when I say we literally hold the future of education in our hands. The personal, mobile device has started to transform learning in both formal and informal contexts. Learning in any place and at any time is going to gain traction in the coming years, and the emphasis will be on personal learning. Students can gain access to any amount of resources and connections that will help them to learn; they can use their mobile phones to connect with others; and also create and share their own content with potentially huge audiences outside and beyond the walls of the classroom. The value of this is immeasurable.

So, you've accidentally invented a time machine, and travelled forward to the year 2115. What do the schools look like?

Communities will always need schools. How education will be conducted, and how teachers will work, is an entirely different question. I foresee a time in the not too distance future when learning spaces will blur their boundaries with the outside world, and where the use of technology to connect schools and people together while they are learning will be paramount. It's already beginning to happen. I believe the boundaries will blur in our roles too, with teachers and students becoming co-learners. The silos of subjects will also open, and trans-curricular learning will emerge - something that will be vital for the economies of the 21st Century and beyond. Children will learn new skills and literacies that will prepare them for a future we can't clearly describe. Technology will play a key role in this preparation, and teachers will remain central to the process. I don't think technology is a threat to future education. It's something we should embrace. Teachers will not be replaced by technology, but teachers who use technology will replace those who don't.

Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra on Flickr


Talking tech by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.