Future Learning: Desire or Fate?
Professor Gilly Salmon, University of Leicester
Are we educating students well enough:
those who will need to solve the challenges
of the 21st Century?
http://www.futures.hawaii.edu
http://www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/calf/
“…but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the sea-shore,
and diverting myself in now
and then finding a smoother pebble
or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay
all undiscovered before me."
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
In Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol II, Ch. 27
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
The future is not to be forecast but created.
What we do today will decide the shape of things tomorrow
Ervin Laszlo, Founder of the Club of Budapest
There are so many variables that you don’t know what the
hell is going to happen. That’s when a leader or a group
comes in and says what they want to see happen.
(Hank Lederer of the Minnesota Futurists)
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”
Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society
Ernest Rutherford
(Founder of nuclear physics, Nobel Prize winner) once declared
‘talk of nuclear power is moonshine’
British Astronomer Royal,
Sir Harald Spencer Jones, 1957
space flight is ‘bunk’ (Russian Sputnik launched 2 weeks later)
Thomas J. Watson CEO of IBM,
“there is a world market for five computers”
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
Big trends
(looking backwards for looking forwards)
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
1 horse power
1,000
Horse power
Motive power: industrial revolution 10 3
3
Computing power
5
Performance =10 increase
Costs = 10 3 decrease
Computing power
Performance = 104 increase
Costs = 10 2 decrease
http://www.computerhistory.org, http://www.informationeconomy.sa.gov.au/digital_engagement/jargonbuster/optical_fibre, http://www.applebytes.info/apbC.html,
Laszlo ( 2006 p. 106)
E-assess
Blog
Podcasts
Wikis
E-portfolio
2008 UCISA/JISC Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning
Browne, Hewitt, Jenkins & Walker
Social
bookmarks
Constraints/
challenges
Drivers
Enhancing L & T
Lack of time
Meeting students’ expectations
Committed local champions
E-learning strategies
Technology
Enhanced
Learning
in
Higher
Education
Staff skills
Career Development Opportunities
Support for Web 2.0 technologies
Central support/funding
2008 UCISA/JISC Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning
Browne, Hewitt, Jenkins & Walker
Technologies ‘to campus watch’
Adoption Horizons (in years)
Grassroots video
(capture, edit,
share)
Collaboration webs
(personal,
flexible, free)
Mobile /devices &
broadband
(affordable,
portable,
deliverable)
Data mash-ups
(converge, rerepresent)
Collective
intelligence
(large numbers,
explicit & implicit
collection)
Social operating
Systems
(organisation of
knowledge round
people rather
than content)
7 Metatrends over 5 years
Communications
Between
human &
machines
Collective
sharing
& knowledge
generation
3 dimensions
of computing
People
connecting
via the network
Users as
content
producers
Games as
pedagogical tools
Ubiquitous
platforms
http://www.nmc.org/horizon/
Lord Robbins
Lord Dearing
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11463
Micro trends
(making a difference)
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
Never doubt the power of a small
group of people to change the world.
Nothing else ever has.
Margaret Mead
Be the change you want to see in the world
Mahatma Ghandi
Microtrends – on Facebook.
http://apps.new.facebook.com/microtrends
Visioning
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
To them that come after us, it may be as ordinary
to buy a pair of wings to fly to the remotest regions,
as now a pair of boots to ride a journey,
and to confer at the distance of the Indies
by sympathetic conveyances,
may be as usual in the future as literary conveyances
Joseph Glanvill, philosopher, clergyman
and chaplain to Charles II
of England 1661
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
Some men see things as they are and say, why?
I dream things that never were and say why not?’
Robert Kennedy
“Change comes most of all
from the unvisited no man’s land
between the disciplines”
Norbert Wiener
Gilly Salmon, July 2008
Pictures from Flickr: Avi- Abrams, hornsrev.dk/Engelsk/default_ie.htm, www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/10/cool-road-rail-vehicles.html
enchgallery.com/fractals/fractalpages/suspension.htm,
A word about ‘resistance’
Creating the future through curriculum
Delivery
Pedagogical
Challenge
Development
Choice
of learning
technology/
enhancement
Design
New books & Learning Futures Festival
www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/festival
www.podcastingforlearning.com
Thanks for listening
Please carry on the discussion online
Additional refs/bibiography
Stille, A. (2003) The Future of the Past, Picador, London.
Long term views of trends.
Laszlo, E. (2006) The Chaos Point: the world at a crossroads, Hampton, London. See
the nice foreward by the (now late) Arthur C. Clarke & the brief excursion into chaos
theory.
Dregni, E. & Dregni, J. Follies of Science, 20th Century visions of our Fantastic Future
SpeckPress, Denver Colorado. Fabulous & easy read, and loads of pictures, good mix
of science and fiction, also attempts to look well at 21st Century science.
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/tlig/surveys.aspx
The UCISA surveys- 2001-8.
2008 Horizon Report
Johnson, Laurence F., Levine, Alan, and Smith, Rachel S. 2008 Horizon Report. Austin,
TX: The New Media Consortium, 2008.
http://www.nmc.org/horizon/
Like the hype cycles models?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle, reasonably good, free summary. The
Garnter paper usually have to be paid for. Their new book is Mastering the hype cycle:
how to choose the right innovation at the right time. Fenn & Raskino.