23 July 2009

Pinto's Point

Education revolution

By Jim Pinto

In the past, information was available only in text format. Until the arrival of the printing press, manuscripts were hand scribed, and limited to very few copies for the elite.

When widespread education arrived, people read, memorized, listened to lectures, and took tests to “pass.” Even today, formal education has not really shifted from that basic model.

Traditionally, content was organized into disciplines, arts and sciences, and further divided into smaller content silos, each to be learned in a prescribed curriculum of courses and topics. Today’s colleges are tethered, isolated, generic, and closed, with central control, standardization, and top-down administration of courses, tests, and degrees. This applies broadly to schools, community colleges as well as universities.

Lecturing has been used to educate for hundreds of years, expecting students to go to a lecture hall at a prescribed time and sit still while a professor talks for an hour.

But that formal education does not reflect the life students are living today. Huge amounts of information are available at high speed and on demand. Files are shared, and the world is mobile and connected.

Our society no longer learns only through books and classrooms. We are now visual and spatial learners. Information comes in a variety of dimensions, text-based, graphical, musical, audio, and visual. There are:

• 3.5 million song on iTunes
• 4 million books on Amazon
• 60 million blogs online
• 4 million entries on Wikipedia
• 100 million user accounts on MySpace
• 6 million videos on YouTube

Students listen to lectures on iPods and iPhones, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. Anyone in the world can study using material from over 1,800 open courses at MIT. And this is only the beginning of the education revolution.

New immersive learning environments, built on state-of-the-art data modeling and intelligent game systems, are the future of education. The application of “serious” video games carries significant implications for education. You can get more data in a video game than you can in just about any other learning environment.

Digital learning tools promote multidisciplinary thinking and an appreciation for multiple perspectives while solving authentic, real-world problems. Sophisticated online search engines lead learners to specific details, discarded after their use and resurrected when necessary.

Traditional universities will be “irrelevant” by 2020.

Related links:

• Thomas Frey - The Future of Education:
  http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2007/03/the-future-of-education/
• Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020:
  http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705298649/Universities-will-be-irrelevant.html
• 2020 Visions for the Future of Education
  http://www.tcpd.org/Thornburg/Handouts/2020visions.html

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.