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How will technology develop over the next 10 or so years? More importantly, how will these developments affect and enhance the world of learning? VISION takes a look at what is coming up and finds that the future is nearer and will have more impact than you might think.

The term ‘horseless carriage’, as IT guru Nicholas Negroponte has observed, tells us a lot about how the automobile pioneers regarded the new contraption. They saw it only in terms of what came before. They couldn’t envisage how it would shape a future that included a Model T on every driveway, autobahns, OPEC, the Sherman Tank, drive-in movies and Jeremy Clarkson.

It can sometimes be reassuring for hardpressed teachers to think of today’s new technology in much the same way. Often the whiteboard is thought of as simply a blackboard with whistles and bells, and the web as just a big encyclopaedia. And for some there’s a feeling that technology might advance, but education will remain teacher-led, classroom-based and more or less the same as it always has been.

The simple truth is that the emerging technologies will revolutionise teaching and learning. And it will happen not in some comfortingly distant future of tinfoil jumpsuits and jetpacks, but during the next 15, 10 or even five years: the school days of the children currently in our infant classes.

These young people are growing up in a world in which the much-heralded ‘convergence of technology’ is becoming a reality. They can watch television on their PCs and, with Apple TV, enjoy their computer files and MP3s on television without ever having to think about what bit of kit does what. The 3G mobile can do just about everything except make your bed - which is probably why Nokia explores future developments with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As prices tumble (as they invariably do) and ye olde 3G gives way to systems Beyond 3G (B3G), most children will grow up able to surf the net, watch movies, or create their own movies and webpages on a pocket-size Ultra Mobile Device (UMD) - an all-in-one phone, personal organiser, movie camera, media player, PC and fashion statement.

Inevitably children will lose their UMDs (some things will never change) but it won’t mean that they’ll also lose their precious applications and files. These will all be safely stashed away online, instantly accessible wherever they are via whatever digital device they can get their hands on. It’s the sort of service students at Cardiff University will be able to enjoy this year. Using IBM’s Virtual Structure Access, they can re-create their desktop - files, applications, newsfeeds, the lot - on any computer in any corner of the wired world. Google offers something similar. Pay $50 per annum and it will provide 10Gb of online storage, together with a package of generic applications which users can download if and when they need them.

Memory chips are as cheap as, well, chips and getting cheaper. Soon schools - or any other provider - will be able to offer pupils as much storage as they’ll ever need to stash away the stuff they currently save to disks and memory sticks. So they won’t be tied to the school or home computer. They’ll be able to work wherever they can find a broadband landline or a hotspot.

And within the decade, if the EU has got its sums right, the whole of Europe will be one gargantuan technology-enabling hotspot. To be more exact, it will be served by an all-embracing network of hotspots, seamlessly linked by common protocols. Not that the infrastructure will bother the users, who’ll simply take it for granted that they can remain permanently online wherever they are, from the inner city to the remotest rural backwater. With the promise of access speeds to a UMD of one megabyte per second or more, the networked generation (that is, those in today’s infant classes) can look forward to an education in which they’ll be able to pick ‘n’ mix from the net, video-conferenced tutorials and DVD-quality distance learning packages which, because of the immediacy of the UMD, won’t seem in the least bit distant.

It poses a fundamental question. When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalised to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process? Answers to that question - and let’s hope there are hundreds - will help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material.

However, people’s dependence on multimedia, rather than on traditional text-based sources of information, could make them particularly susceptible to what scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords Professor Susan Greenfield calls “the ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors”. The more exciting the presentation, the more likely they are to be impressed by it. So, for an obvious example, young people using the net to get the truth may decide between creationism or evolution not on the quality of the arguments but on the cleverness of the web designers’ pyrotechnics. But healthy amounts of adolescent scepticism (“whatever”) kick in at about the same time as acne. So, if we are able to equip young people with the skills to evaluate different sources in the context of a media-rich world, pupils will know how important it is to take everything they find online - however wicked the graphics - with a huge pinch of salt.

Their parents only had to cope with information in the mass media, books and the web. Today’s children will have all of that and more. They’ll grow up in what has been described as “an internet of things”. Intel, Microsoft and others are spending millions on the technology that will allow mobiles to track down and chat to any smart devices in the immediate vicinity. These ambient, ubiquitous and pervasive technologies will enable even inanimate objects to interact with students.

The educational potential is incalculable. The banished Duke in ‘As You Like It’ claims that he can find “books in the running brooks” and “sermons in stones”. In the wireless world this won’t be poetic licence but the literal truth. Artefacts, buildings and landmarks, tagged with sensors and processors, will be able to emit multimedia information - and they’ll be able to determine its relevance (or lack of) to you. For example, as pupils on a field trip gawp at the run-down ruins of a castle, their UMDs will pick up a multimedia recreation of the castle in its heyday. On the screen of the built-in camera they’ll be able to impose the virtual recreation on to the real thing, listen to commentary, follow up web links or download information from a range of inanimate objects nearby. They’ll be able to save the information, manipulate it, annotate it with text, sound or graphics and share it with mates back in school - or virtual mates anywhere on the planet.

This ability to share, of course, is already becoming the dominant feature of digital life for young people. MySpace has more than 50 million members with 160,000 new ones joining everyday. YouTube is visited more than 100 million times a day. More than half the world’s bloggers are still in their teens. It’s estimated that by 2010 more than 70% of digital information will have been generated, not by commercial producers, but by Joe Public.

Wikis, chatrooms and IMs allow students to collaborate on projects with peers across the globe. They find it as easy to swap coursework as their favourite album tracks. Down the ages, teachers have asked, “Is this all your own work?” But it’s a question that is becoming increasingly meaningless as students spend more time on the net where it’s second nature to borrow, share and adapt information. Indeed the real skill is in assimilating and synthesising a range of second-hand materials in a way which makes it new and uniquely your own.

It’s a new order that no longer fits with the traditional systems of assessment. So teachers will not only have to think again about how, where and with whom students learn but also how that learning is evaluated. Simultaneously, they’re going to have to keep pace with emerging technologies and rethink exactly what it is that teachers can do to ensure that the networked generation gets more from education than a symphony of wows and yuks. The benefits will be enormous, but it could be considered a daunting prospect by some. Stablemen probably felt much the same when the first horseless carriages took to the road.

Further information

For a readable summary on developments in ubiquitous computing see David Ley’s essay in 'Emerging Techologies for Learning Vol 2'. It’s available as a pdf file from: partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=rh&rid=11380

For more on the seamless wireless network visit: www.wireless-worldinitiative.org

For video simulations and discussion of how we might use the network visit:
cisco.com/uk/humannetwork

For details of how ubiquitous technologies are being used in museums and public spaces see: www.cio.com/archive/071505/et_article.html, and visit: ookl at www.ookl.org.uk

For IBM’s Virtual Infrastructure Access at Cardiff University visit: www.ibm.com/news/uk/en/2006/12/uk_en_news_20061219.html

For Baroness Susan Greenfield’s views on multimedia and children’s learning see: education.guardian.co.uk/schools/comment/story/0,,1760235,00.html

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