Greg Whitby keynoted on Sunday, and he relayed a wonderful story in his keynote about the difficulty of looking to the future. He described a San Francisco town planning meeting back in 1898, in which the greatest minds gathered together in a great symposium in order to cogitate upon the thorny matter of looking ahead to the future. Very high on their list of key priorities was how to solve the inevitable crisis of an over-abundance of horse manure. Horses of course(s) being the main transportation system at the time, and the cable cars being not particularly developed and certainly not widespread enough to offer a realistic solution. Little could they have known back then that only 10 years later the invention of the automobile would consign horses to a mere footnote in history.
The point is that looking to the future in terms of technology and education is a very difficult task. Sir Tim Berner's Lee is looking ahead to the semantic web, which is very Chomsky-sounding, and essentially looks at meaning, vocabularies and rules for how pages and data are interlinked. Travel further down the path of AI and you get to technological singularity, in which Ray Kurzweil predicts computing power will massively exceed the computational power of the human brain and that we will eventually end up in a realm of posthuman species. Which sounds very sci-fi. But then the term was coined by Vernor Vinge, and don't forget that the likes of Mark Twain (1898) and Murray Leinster a.k.a William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1946) wrote science fiction stories which predicted the rise of image transmitting technology and the internet decades ago.
What we do know is that the existing model of school is based upon a very Victorian model of controlling children and packing them out into the world with the brains crammed chock-full of facts. This is best expounded by the excellent RSA animation of Ken Robinson's lecture about changing educational paradigms, eminently watchable:
Greg then spoke about how we still continue to be constrained by such time-honored constructs as timetables within schools. Learning is taking place around the world, every second of every day, and the billions of people who are learning right now at their own pace, at their own place of choosing, are not operating to a timetable. Or if they are, then it is a self-constructed one. Greg displayed a rather nice tube map showing trending technology - I searched for it and think it may be this one but I also really like this one related to 2012. Plenty to think about there. It also reminded me of this poster which I have above my desk in my office.
Greg highlighted a couple of interesting pedagogical thinkers:
- Prof. Richard Elmore and his notion of the instructional core
- John Bransford and How People Learn
- Andy Hargreaves and his views on Professional Capital
All in all there was much food for thought in this keynote and it led us nicely to what for me was the final section involving Robert Landau and Tim Carr.
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