Posts Tagged ‘iN2015’
Looking down the road
Posted on: March 6, 2009
One of the tasks I gave my teacher trainees this coming e-learning week is to watch the iN2015 video.
Someone else made this video available on YouTube, but I don’t know if this has been officially sanctioned, so go to the source above if the YouTube version disappears.
But along comes Microsoft and they too have a vision of what the world might look like in the future, but this time in 2019.
Many of the technologies featured in the video already exist now, so I don’t really understand why M$ projects their use in 2019. Maybe they have forgotten that we live in exponential times.
Maybe that is when they think such technologies and the accompanying mindsets will be entrenched.
I certainly hope we don’t have to wait till then because it will be too late. If we want to gain a competitive edge, we must adopt meaningful and powerful technologies now.
Image above is linked to the original. Used under CC license attribution 2.0 generic.
This week marked the start of my introduction to my preservice teachers to what I call 21st Century Learning Environments.
They will be exploring Second Life* as a multiuser virtual environment and NIE’s very own Classroom of the Future as physical realisation of what learning environments might look like in the not-too-distant future. I am also requiring them to watch the iN2015 video, the vision of what Singapore might look in seven years time. Then they must read one of Prensky’s articles on digital natives.
Why do this? I’ll cite the example that our Education Minister gave today. A child born today will enter the primary school system in 2014 and probably the work force around 2030. What was the context for his example? We are preparing our future and we cannot use irrelevant strategies from the past.
I want my trainees to look into the crystal ball, fuzzy as it may be, so that they can prepare themselves now for the future. To do this, they must visualise what the future holds and they must understand the ways that digital natives might think. They must fulfil the needs of their learners, not the need to complete syllabi or their need to teach the way they are comfortable.
*I am looking forward to the videos that they might find about the educational possibilities of Second Life. It is serendipitous that Karl Kapp attempted to answer some common questions about the educational aspects of Second Life. I couldn’t agree more with his answers!
