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Issue 11: |
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| Article 5: |
The Future Of Education By Peter Kline Check out this article from Peter Kline. It's remarkably similar to the visions relayed by innovators throughout the world. Will Peter's vision come to pass? Only time will tell, but if something similar doesn't occur, we're going to be in pretty bad shape. -- ED |
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Tomorrow's schools won't look much like the ones we're familiar with now. That's because technology will play an increasingly prominent role in raising human intelligence at ever faster speeds. Working at home with computer games that they are pretty much hooked on, students will be able to learn within the first two or three grades most of what it now takes to graduate them from high school. They'll be able to spend the rest of their time in classrooms that look rather like think tanks. There they will gather with teachers and other students in seminars where they can test the value and flexibility of what they know in sophisticated discussions, laboratory experiments and technology development sessions. At other times they'll be writing plays, creating works of art and otherwise enjoying high level cultural experiences. |
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This shouldn't surprise anyone. Those of us who grew up with Ma Bell's black telephones and expensive long distance bills now can't sit down in a public place without overhearing a call between people that may be on opposite sides of the world. All this happened so quickly that movies only a few years old look old fashioned because the characters aren't using cell phones. If cell phones could take over the world so quickly, it will be no wonder that computer learning games will do so ever faster. This profound change in the way we learn will teach large numbers of skills and large amounts of information very quickly. Computer games will use brain compatible techniques to make learning so much fun that students will have a ball learning calculus, engineering, metaphysical poetry and how to buy and sell stocks on the international market. Stupidity will die out so quickly that parents will never know what hit their children, and will feel they have to take time off from work to play the games too so they can keep up with the discussions at the dinner table. Ray Kurzweil conveys all this in his new book The Singularity is Near. *\(See the guide to books list on our site - ED) In it he reveals how quickly technology will educate us in these new ways. He reminds us that whereas a quarter of the population owned telephones 35 years after they were invented, a quarter of us were on the Internet only 7 years after it made its appearance. So look for the mass production of genius within the next five years. Also, think about how in your spare time you're going to be able to become an expert in any of the subjects that interest you. That's because current trends tell us that public acceptance of educational technologies will proliferate so quickly that 5 years from now suddenly getting a whole lot smarter will be the latest fad. The average IQ will skyrocket until the end of the century when, Kurzweil predicts, our great grandchildren will be a million times smarter than we are. But there's a possible dark side to all this. In about twenty years computers will take over the job of improving themselves. That's why we will be able to get a million times smarter. But only if the machines decide to allow us to continue participating in their world. Since we're already on the road to turning the world over to machines that are smarter than we are, it's time now to decide how we're going to protect ourselves from decisions they might make that would lower our self esteem, compromise our life styles, or perhaps eliminate us altogether. Between now and the time we've lost control to a high power that we've created, we need to come together and build into the process of education and the creation of new possibilities a shared sense of what we value and how we're going to protect it and assure its survival in the years to come. This means taking a hard look at what we believe, what we're teaching and what we value or ought to value in order to preserve the qualities of experience that are important to us. How much are we willing to do to protect human rights, the proliferation of democracy, and the protection of the biosphere? If education is going to make everyone smarter, we need to build curricula now that will ensure that part of that "smarter" includes such issues as these. Kurzweil has been right up to now, and he argues convincingly that the future will be upon us much sooner than we think. So now is the time to think hard about the elements of curriculum we wish to proliferate and protect so that what's most important about human life doesn't get overlooked in the rush to make all of us smarter and to make our machines even smarter than we are. There's no way we're going to stop this trend, or even slow it down. So the only thing left to do is deal with it. Among other things, we need to deal with the fact that in today's universities different academic disciplines don't communicate nearly enough with each other. That's one of the reasons our view of life tends to be so fragmented. Because they are not regularly critiqued from the perspective of the colleagues in other disciplines, today's experts have managed to keep their turf protected from the kinds of new ideas that might shift their paradigm. It's important to change this situation. Reality doesn't change when you walk down the hall from your class in education theory to your class in neurology. But the world of ideas you confront in each of these classrooms may be logically incompatible with the other classroom. That means that somewhere something has gone wrong. Part of the challenge for the future is that we are going to have to spend more time making sure that the assumptions adopted within different disciplines are compatible with those adopted in other disciplines. Where there is incompatibility the erroneous assumptions or sources of information must be rooted out and the information, theories and perceived facts changed accordingly. That is part of the challenge modern educators will have to face if they want to build a shared view of reality that fully supports the opportunities that human beings still have to make their world a better place.
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Article 6: Book Reviews about Game Design
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