What does the future hold?

What does the future hold?

3 Future of ICTs and Pedagogy

3.1 Predicting the future is hard

Predictions about the future are almost entirely wrong. Here are just some of the predictions made by very smart people about how ICTs were going to revolutionise learning and teaching:

·         Thomas Edison in 1913 on the potential of movies.

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.

·         Sidney Pressy from the 1920s on the potential of automatic teaching machines.

Within the next twenty years special mechanical aids will make mass psychological experimentation commonplace and bring about in education something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. There must be an "industrial revolution" in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education.

·         Patrick Suppes in 1966 on computer-based learning

the processing and the uses of information are undergoing an unprecedented technological revolution......One can predict that in a few more years millions of school-children will have access to what Philip of Macedon's son Alexander enjoyed as a royal prerogative: the personal services of a tutor as well-informed and responsive as Aristotle

Why?

There are many reasons for this failure of prediction. We'll focus on two. I encourage you to think about these as you are working on your Part D Essay, reading and watching the following resources and thinking about your future as an educator.

Amara's law

This "law" suggests that

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

We always think that "technology X" is going to have a huge impact in the next year (it usually doesn't) and we struggle to see just how "technology X" may change society in 10 years time.

Schema

Let's return to the T. S. Elliot quote that started this learning path

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.

The way we understand the world is based on our internal schema, which are in turn based on our experience. How we see the future is constrained by our schema. It's difficult for us to break out of our schema, our assumptions.

If it's hard for individuals to break out of their schema, it's even harder for institutions. Schools are based on a set of schema. Tyack and Cuban (1995) describe the "grammar of school" to refer to the set of assumptions or schema that are embedded in how school's operate. Any innovation (e.g. ICTs) which doesn't make sense within that grammar is seen as nonsensical, or very soon gets appropriate and used in a way that makes sense within the grammar of school.

Hence radical change of school becomes difficult. Seymour Paper draw on these ideas to write an article titled "Why school reform is impossible".