Social Education - Where Are We Going and How Fast Are We Getting There?

It is likely that most of us went to college in a  "traditional" setting, bricks and mortar, moving from class to class, building to building (and why was it that when you had only 10 minutes between classes, the buildings were always at opposite ends of the campus?) and, until very recently, change has come at a relatively slow pace. In 1982, I was working as a curriculum developer at the Naval Technical Training Center in Pensacola and was on a team that developed one of the first modules of training that was actually labeled "computer-based." In reality, it was training material loaded on a DEC computer and rendered to the trainee on a monitor. There was almost no interaction other than when the trainee finished reading they pressed the ENTER key to proceed to the next screen. By today's standards, the technology was extremely simple, and the lesson we learned from observing the trainees who first tried the technology was also simple: people who are reading static, technical information on a computer monitor tend to fall asleep in approximately 20 minutes.

By 2007, in comparison to that simple start, learning technology had come a long way. But during those 25 years the advances that ocurred were logical steps, each building on the other.  It is in the past 2 years, the rapidity of the advance has become exponential, and this is due to the virtual elimination (pun intended) of barriers to communication now known as social networking, which has spawned social learning. Due to the lightning speed with which social learning is growing and its ubiquitous nature, it is inevitable that the method and experience of education is going to change forever.

We have already seen such initiatives as the University of the People, launched by the United Nations and the Open Courseware project. To learn more about where we are headed, read this fascinating article entitled In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero. 

Comments

[Scott Brown]

Thanks, John - great topic! The Mashable article you point to is terrific, too - excellent examples of how so many "traditional" modes are being revisioned, and in some cases done way with entirely. What's fascinating to me is how all of these technologies and modes continue to open up the possibilities for and definitions of learning - and increase the playing field for information specialists.