Looking forward, looking back: 2056

Mr Frank James
South Australia, Australia

… a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep …William James, who lived in the USA 100 years ago, wrote of his belief that, ‘a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep …'. I love this quote because it enabled me to write about my work with educational media technology, from radio and TV to film and computers, without having to commit to any one of the competing concepts of visual literacy.

By 2056, things in school might well look very different from now but there's nothing new under the Sun in human behaviour. Today's educator, peering past new-again 2056 appearances, might see nothing very new in student learning behaviour, nothing, indeed, that Socrates wouldn't have been able to recognise, and might sum up everything by saying ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. But that still leaves a lot of possibilities for technological changes, so let's get a large acquaintance with particulars of things as they might be in 2056 at school.

Global connectivity, lifelong learning and diversity will all have contributed to those 2056 particulars, and how they get used. So will communities of practice among family and friends, as well as convergence of homework and working from home. (2) In 2006, when I use my PC and digital TV to watch news and Behind the News, I get awed. In 2056, whatever's been happening since 2006, it'll be a lot less daunting looking back from 2056, than it is looking forward from 2006!

With people living longer and travelling less, school as a preparation for life is likely to reflect those trends.With people living longer and travelling less, school as a preparation for life is likely to reflect those trends. If standards for keyboard skills learned and interactivity practiced have been made mandatory for interactive television by then, more and more kids will be reaching school communication-ready.

If, by 2056, outcome rules have replaced content rules for things like children's TV and food, after a look in the school tuckshop and a browse in the resource centre, our intrepid time travelling educator might feel able to form a view on how effective this sort of reform has been in one school, at least.

When Tom Brown's School Days was written, Tom Brown had to travel to school by stage coach, and from all different places across England. His classmates also had to make similar journeys from their homes. To get an education, a student had to travel to a school. By the time the story was published as a book, students who had to travel were able to travel much faster and more comfortably by steam train. By 2056, a student in a school or at home will be able to locate learning experiences anywhere in the world and have them retrieved online (or on the information highway, to emphasise the comparison with travel by stage line or railway).

Googling Tom Brown's School Days ‘scored’ about half a million websites, including a free Project Gutenberg (3) Download of the eBook by Thomas Hughes, another ebook from amazon.co.uk, and details of a new tele-movie version of the story for broadcasting on ITV, as well as items from Answers.com and Wikipedia, among others. I didn't get around to browsing Columbia University's project Bartleby website.

The search engine on PBS Online News Hour (4) found me an item about robotics that I had forgotten, and I was glad to be reminded of it, despite its irrelevance to this theme - didn't Socrates predict just that sort of outcome in his Phaedras?

I've been using my broadband online PC to make interactive digital television interact, watching their TV program 'collectors' and browsing content, like collector-cam, on the ABC website when I want to watch an item again or show it to someone else. What if, by 2065, you are wanting news and current affairs to make sense to 2065 kids, what development will it have to get by then?

Googling ‘Frank James’ got me over-informed about a famous outlaw … Have you tried Googling yourself lately? I tried Googling myself, but Googling ‘Frank James’ got me over-informed about a famous outlaw, who lived some time ago on the other side of the Earth. I tried Googling ‘frank james helsinki.fi’ (helsinki.fi being a website that contains some of my older articles) and a ‘stats automaton’ that tells me how many times each gets downloaded each month. How real is that? (p.s. I don't know!) Googling 'future school' scored half a billion, but the search engine on the website of my favorite print journal, the Economist found no articles there!

And that's where I came in! To me, that just says ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.

Notes

1. William James, Preface to The varieties of religious experience, 1902
2. www.ewenger.com/theory
3. www.gutenberg.org/etext
4. www.pbs.org/newshour

Postscript
One of the first applications of telecommunications in education was 'guest lecturing', and one of the first lessons learnt about it was 'chatty and discursive promotes interaction', and trying to have the last word went right out of fashion in authoring for electronic publication as I saw it.

Further postscript
The reason I've written nothing about disability above is that I'm disabled, and I just think school should be no less inclusive than the community at large.