Future of Technology and its Impact on Teaching and Learning

Integrating Technology Colleagues,

This is the beginning of a new strand, Warning: it's not for the faint of heart, for those who like things the way they are, and certainly not for technophobes. This is for those who are comfortable with technology and curious about its future, and who want to know how it will affect the way we and our students live and learn. It's for adult basic skills practitioners who have watched the transformation of literacy from "getting meaning from text", i.e. print based, hard copy print materials, to getting meaning from text as an interaction with a digital device such as a computer that speaks digital pages out loud at a rate that enables those who can "aud" it to get meaning from text faster and sometimes better than most people can read hard copy text in the traditional way. It's for those who are engaged by new literacies such as getting meaning from a proliferation of videos and audios. It's for those who have watched the evolution of the personal computer in our lives to the omnipresent personal device that is carried everywhere, a personal audio and video communication and information device, a problem solving (and yes, a problem-creating) device, the smartphone. It is for people who wonder what will replace the smartphone.

I hope that this strand encourages you to reply with comments on the many articles posted, and to post links yourself to articles about the future of technology in our lives, how it will impact us as workers, family and community members and, of course, as learners, how it will affect us all -- our students, families , communities, society and culture, and ourselves.

To begin this new discussion strand, I have a short article from a business journal to suggest. It has the intriguing title: "Death of the Smartphone and What Comes After" http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-the-smartphone-and-what-comes-after-2017-3?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits . Take a couple of minutes and read it, then a few more and reply. Anything surprising here? Anything disturbing? Is it is grounded in what is already happening, for example, with the well documented thinking of Elon Musk, Ray Kurtzweil and others, or is this hype or fanciful futurism? 

Have you read an article or book recently on the future of technology and its impact on teaching and Learning that you would like to recommend, that you would love to have others' reactions to? Teaser: I have a book to recommend, but first want to wait to see what you suggest.

I hope this topic grabs you, that you will make some time to read, think and discuss the implications of the technology that lies just ahead, that together we can build some vision(s) for teaching and learning in this bold new world of technology and, ready or not, in which we will live and learn.

David J. Rosen, Moderator

Integrating Technology Community of Practice

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

 

Comments

David and all, the article was not surprising for me because the authors of The Matrix movie series and the team that made Wall-e at Pixar have fairly well predicted these tech shifts would move into our bodies and what likely outcomes would result. Both fictional worlds point out how humans become zombified versions of humanity, happily clueless to the harsh realities around them. Of course both movies don't want to end in a downer so some entity comes to the rescue to remind humans what makes them so uniquely special and gives us a good kick in the butt to snap us out of our malaise. Sadly, neither storyline shares much about how the awakened humans drive off into the virtual sunset. 

Educationally, there was one line in the article that I found myself thinking quite a bit before it appeared in the text. "...to ask what even makes us human in the first place?" Think about our educational focus in our last hundred years or so. In spite of some of the lip service about improving thinking, the focus has been mostly on acquiring knowledge, being able to process information appropriately, and compliance with requests. All three of these concentrations can be augmented or even replaced when technology is at the point where technology is integrated into our bodies. That leaves one wondering what's left of us? It turns out, that humans have some very special mental abilities that many species lack and machines have not come close to reproducing, yet. If you take a moment to review the Habits of Mind, please think about how or if technology can replace these items. I feel that maybe three of them could be at least assisted by technology infusions, but the rest of those items almost help define what would keep us human at that stage of adaption to cyborg life forms. Perhaps education may find more fertile ground today in a focus more on how our learners think, adapt and respond rather than filling up temporary storage with academic trivia? 

In the short term, I think about how much better prepared my students would be with their Habits of Mind skills developed more. Education typically has approached this situation as if increasing academic success would naturally develop habits of mind. I am beginning to feel it is the opposite relationship that logically follows and have been shifting my personal focus with students more in that direction with positive results so far.

The integration of technology into our environment and even our bodies has already started and should be expanding rapidly as the article suggests. As more and more technology gets integrated, there may be a much greater range of abilities offered, but I strongly fear there is greater opportunity of abuse from those able to push the buttons that control those technologies. Call me paranoid, but the increase in technology integration presents another threat to our loss of humanity simply from a loss of personal control. Even if one were skilled in some habits of mind, lets say empathy, it seems a simple matter for integrated technology that controls vital centers of our bodies would be able to override that empathy if given the correct stimuli. Is it cool that technology may someday fix my heart up so that I don't live in fear of it failing, sure! I love that possibility. In the same breath, I worry about how much that technology would increase my dependence on those that can maintain that the proper working of it. Today, if my mechanic refuses to work on my car, I can still muddle around and probably get it going ... I don't think I will be able to do similar repairs to that futuristic technological heart in me.

By the way, anyone interested in learning how to program?  Seems to me that those who can speak the language of the machines will become hire up on the "power" scale with each technology innovation. Such exciting and potentially scary times as technology continues to evolve at exponential rates. 

 

I find this discussion to be very interesting. Yes, technology is advancing daily and impacts our life in more ways that we realize. I never speak to my mother's doctor. All the communication is handled via email. I can see the results of her x-rays and tests on a secure web portal, so I can do my own research to understand what's happening. I teach at a distance and do not see my students face to face. Most of my friends and I communicate via social media. And I engage with my peers in meaningful discussions online. My first day back from the COABE conference was spent in my office. I worked over 8 hours and did not speak to another colleague. There was a great deal of communication happening - just not face-to-face. As I read through this conversation, I was reminded of one of my favorite TED talks - Connected But Alone.  Sherry Turkle talks about how we are 'alone together' and I wonder if this is where we are heading. Maybe in our future, we won't be spending time teaching technology integration into our life, but rather - we will shift to teaching how to live without technology and build personal, face-to-face, meaningful interaction? 

Your thoughts? 
Kathy 

Integrating Technology and Career Pathways Colleagues,

If you know about "blockchains" it's probably as "the underlying technology supporting Bitcoin digital currency transactions". A  blockchain is "a digital ledger that uses cryptography to allow participants (each with a unique signature) on a network to use the ledger and record transactions to enable granular traceability" (from "Blockchain Goes Mainstream with the Announcement of the IBM Blockchain" ) There has been serious work done in the past two years by Badgechain Community, colleagues interested in how digital badges (micro-credentials) can be made secure and reliable using blockchain technology.  Now, with IBM, a company that has already committed itself to an Internal career pathway with digital badge stepping stones to certification, I wonder if there are good applications for blockchain technology in other realms of adult basic skills and career pathways learning. For example, could blockchain technology be the answer to how to create a lifelong learning transcript, ideally one that allowed learners to stack digital badges or micro-credentials toward a list of full, market-worthy certifications? If so, would high tech, health care, manufacturing, construction, and/or other industry sectors use these transcripts for hiring, in-house education and training, career advancement, and partnerships with community college and community-based adult employment training programs?

Your thoughts?

David J. Rosen, Moderator

Integrating Technology CoP

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

Integrating Technology Colleagues,

I'll eventually get to all those strange acronyms (VLE, PLE, OERu, and P2PU) here, if you read the whole post.

Chances are that you know what a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) -- also know as a Learning Management System (LMS) -- is. You might not know what a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is, however. Or you may. ("Should this matter", you may wonder, "to me or to the adult learners I work with?") There's a good chance that if your students are doing online learning or blended learning, you are having them use a VLE. These typically offer some great opportunities for you and your students. They are whole learning systems with learning objectives, assessments, and usually an information management system to help you know where every student -- and a whole class -- is, where the students are or are not making progress. This is often very useful in individualizing or personalizing the learning by objective or competency and, of course, for learners' self-pacing. Also, because VLE's are fully designed they don't require curriculum development expertise -- and time -- that teachers often do not have, especially since so many teachers in our field (about 80%) are part-time. There are however, disadvantages, too. The biggest is that no pre-designed content management, course management or learning management system is perfect for your students' needs. To address that, some teachers use a VLE and they then add their own designed or chosen online materials, often using Open Education Resources (OERs) or other free online resources. That enables them to fill in the content that might be missing from the VLE, or to add a wider range of learning resources to meet more students' needs or preferences. These strategies together, incidentally, help your students become familiar with more online learning environments, with the range of learning tools and modalities that they might need at work or for personal online learning now and in the future..

Thinking about how adult learners will use online learning in the future is fascinating, but since technology changes so rapidly, it's future is hard to predict. One thing we can be pretty sure of, however, is that whatever online learning tools we are using now, ten years from now many of them will have been replaced by something better, and 30 years -- well, that's hard to even imagine. So, if we are preparing our students for lifelong learning, not only to pass a post-test and get to the next "level", or pass a high school equivalency test, it would be useful to project what they might need once they are no longer in our classes, what they might need in post-secondary education, for online training courses, and in finding their own learning resources to meet their self-defined learning needs throughout their lives. It isn't good enough for students to just learn how our program's, school's or post-secondary organization's one proprietary VLE works. The next VLE they encounter will be different, and increasingly, especially for their personal learning, there may not be any VLE.  So, let's look to the future. What online learning skills will we, and our students, need?

"Wait," you may be thinking, "before we look at that, what exactly is the difference between a VLE and a PLE?"  Here's a short YouTube video by Stephen Downes that lays that out quite simply. Take a look.

So now that you know what PLE's are and how they differ from VLE's, you might want to bring yourself up to speed on them by taking a short, free, hands-on Open Education Resource Course on PLE's.  Digital Literacies for Online Learners might be useful to some adult education teachers and administrators, for their own use and for thinking about how to prepare their students for future online learning. If you're intrigued, check out the Course Guide. You'll discover that the self-paced online course will have you using a range of online learning tools, including wikis, online discussion forums, a resource bank, a course blog, a free, open source social network, an open source web service for annotating, discussing and sharing reflections on web site pages, and -- whatever it is -- an "unhangout". The idea is that as a teacher and learner you will experience a lot of different online learning tools and free platforms, where you -- and perhaps your students who use the same tools,  or who may use the approach of building a Personal Learning Environment -- can learn to feel very comfortable in trying out and learning to use a range of tools for online learning.

Finally, if you work in a school or program where there are several teachers who want to take this free course together, to share what you are all learning, and support each other in learning it, this is one of many free OERu online courses that people in Peer to Peer University learning circles are using. If the idea of forming your own practitioner learning circle as a blended learning professional development model intrigues you let me know, and we can discuss that here.

David J. Rosen, Moderator

Integrating Technology CoP

djrosen123@gmail.com