WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- Today's young parents might have difficulty explaining their own schooling to their grandkids, because the little ones might not recognize concepts such as textbooks and classrooms, a collection of academic and industry visionaries predicted Tuesday.
Commerce Secretary Don Evans said people should pay attention to "2020 Visions," the group's attempt at describing the school of tomorrow, which was unveiled at a news conference.
"There's concern that the education world, the teaching world, hasn't been as quick to adapt technologies as maybe industry has been," Evans said. "We need to provide more encouragement to our teachers as to how important it is to put these new technologies to work."
The group included such luminaries as "Father of the Internet" Vinton Cerf and Chris Dede, professor of learning technologies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. Their visions weave concepts such as virtual reality, digital assistants and tele-robotics into a world where teachers are relieved of administrative duties, free to sculpt the learning experience to meet each child's needs.
Undersecretary of Education Eugene Hickok said the ideas put forth in 2020 Visions give government officials a chance to engage in some long-range, "blue-sky" thinking, instead of day-to-day bureaucratic challenges.
"This is more than just a brainstorming exercise," Hickok said. "These visions will be a part of the National Education Technology Plan, which is required under the No Child Left Behind Act."
The group's ideas are startling in their lack of formal classrooms and other aspects of today's system, Hickok said. Society should pay heed to this attempt to put aside preconceptions of what learning is and focus instead on the students and the ideas they can absorb, he said.
The visions are meant to foster imagination of these new structures, not provide firm predictions of schools two decades hence, Harvard's Dede said. The key is not the technologies themselves, but the new forms of content and teacher-student communication they can engender, he said. Society must guard against the urge to automate teaching, which could easily lead to doing the wrong things more efficiently, he said.
Simply relying on the razzle-dazzle of technologies, such as virtual reality, to keep children interested in school, would result in nothing more than "digital Ritalin," said group member Stanley Williams, founding director of Hewlett-Packard's Quantum Science Research group. Approaches like that could end up giving children a homogenized set of skills and responses for a world of random, complex occurrences, he said.
Current research into what actually occurs during learning should improve future teaching methods, said Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation. The 2003 budget includes funding for several multi-disciplinary NSF centers devoted to unraveling the brain's learning procedures, she told the news conference.
Cost is another key factor in making the visions reality, said group member Michael Zyda, director of a virtual environment and simulation institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. If the eventual cost per student of these future visions exceeds that of comparable textbooks, there will be very little incentive for schools to adopt the ideas, he told the press conference. The research base necessary to enable the needed technology could cost tens of billions of dollars, he said.
Educators should welcome the opportunities presented in 2020 Visions, said group member John Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association. Any teacher's fears of being replaced by a computer are groundless, he said, and should be replaced by the realization that technology will let teachers focus on improving the educational experience, he said.
"We need to give teachers the training necessary to inspire learning with these new tools," Wilson told reporters. "We need to prepare new teachers for the future and not the classrooms of the past."
