This article is the transcription of a short intervention I made during the 5 plus forum. It’s a 7 minutes prospective on education in 2015.

Introduction

 I have only seven minutes to tell you about the future of the entire education. So let’s start right now with six topics.

 First topic: Social [as in social learning to be more specific]

 Teachers are already using twitter or Facebook into their classroom. They use social networks for different activities: to teach foreign languages or to exchange with experts. Be careful, some Facebook friends and twitter followers, maybe some of you, have already been turned into coworkers by teachers. They are helping their students and pupils to build their own personal learning network. In five years, active learning will be more about learning-by-connecting and less about learning-by-doing. This means that social capital, as defined by Bourdieu, will be more and more important in 2015 for success at school and at work. Teachers will have to deal with social equity in their classrooms.

Besides they will teach students and pupils how to turn information into knowledge, providing them with skills that fit a knowledge economy. Knowledge won’t define only an abstract economy in 5 years. Knowledge will be an actual currency.

 Second Chapter: The Cloud [The approaching and threatening big bad cloud] 

Actually, I am quite optimistic about the cloud in education. From my point of view, with the cloud, the time is ending when teachers and students, like doomed Titans, were creating resource already created a thousand times by their colleagues.  Remixes, mash-ups will be forms of art at schools and at university. It will a big question for assessment.

In five years teaching will be mostly done right into the browser. Tools used by teachers and students will be all about reaching good resource, customizing them, and most of all collecting them, because to turn students into innovators you need first to show them what already exists.

In five years, with their students and pupils, teachers will produce huge amounts of data, information, faster and faster and some of these products will be globally available. Imagine pupils, all over the world, translating classic literature to learn foreign languages, twenty minutes a day, on the same website. It could be huge and it’s technically possible now but the question is: how can we drive this digital creativity at a global or local scale? I will finish this second chapter with a similar idea: we are talking about grid computing. What about creating grid teaching or grid learning, services that could link globally the needs of learners with the capabilities of educators ?

Third Chapter: Interaction

It’s difficult to define interaction. But if you ask kids and teenagers they will give you a concrete answer: they want to act and impact with their computers. They are used to interactive media providing them with immediate and personal feedbacks. They experiment various forms of interactivity every evening in virtual worlds. Believe me; teaching them with non-interactive and non-immersive materials is harder and harder.

A few teachers are using interactive media or serious games. A few of them are creating interactive media or video games with their learners. If you are lucky you could find Alternate Reality Games or Web Quests in classrooms. And I heard that Interactive fiction is reborn in some schools. But it’s not enough. Pupils and students need to feel as powerful in classrooms as they feel at home in their own digital environment.

The web is now a cognitive prosthesis for the majority of them and a source of confidence. When they are in their classroom without an individual internet access, they miss a part of their body. In five years school will stop mutilating digital natives.

Fourth Chapter : Porosity…

I selected this topic to talk about the future of the classroom. From my point of view, classroom will not disappear in five years: classroom will be everywhere.

Look take digital contents not directly related to education, they keep on penetrating schools through the internet. It blurs the frontier between formal and informal learning. We can say that museums and other institutions are entering the classrooms. But if you look closer, classroom is also entering these institutions by imposing its needs such as assessment.

For sure, mobile devices will shake the school’s walls. Or maybe they will move them further apart. Smartphones are already used for tutoring services. In five years teachers will be able to locate knowledge right into the environments of pupils and students: think about GPS, QR codes, Augmented Reality or RFID chips. It will be a big step for memorization and comprehension. In five years, school will be deeper, larger, multilayered and global.

Fifth chapter: Recognition [as in recognition interfaces to be more specific]

Nowadays it is not surprising to use high tech products with complex recognition interfaces without even reading the guidebook. Grandparents are playing video games with gesture recognition control pads. Toddlers have fun with touchscreens. Amazing. In fact we are spending less time, less cognitive energy to understand how to take benefit from these devices. Instead, we can focus on how to create, how to share, how to play and how to learn.

You can really learn with different senses using gesture, speech or touch recognition. You can even drive software with your own thoughts. It’s an important revolution for everyone but it is crucial for the ones who have disabilities. In five years, school will be friendlier with children and adults with disabilities. And it will be more efficient teaching literacy to the ones who have difficulties with text-based learning.

Last chapter: Dimensions [as in “dimensions of ICT” to be more specific]

Let’s start with traditional 2D images. They have been familiar for years among teachers and students. But recently some complex applications of 2D images have become more common in classrooms such as mind maps or data visualization. These new applications could be Trojan horses that will make 3D images replace 2D images. For sure, 3D will enter schools soon because everyone agrees that 3D illustrates perfectly some abstract knowledge making them more comprehensible for kids.

Let’s enter the fourth dimension which in our digital age is more controversial. We cannot deny that a right-to-forget is needed on the internet but we cannot forget that kids’ duty at school is to remember and to accumulate knowledge. Kids are glad that the work they have done in September is no more dumped in July. It motivates them to imagine that the digital work they have done is globally available forever. In five years teachers and students will be more at ease with the dimensions of ICT, especially with the third and the fourth.

Conclusion

To conclude, let’s enter briefly the fifth dimension: actually, we are trying to know how long it will take for the school of today to become the school of 2015, but we are imagining the school of 2015 today! So we are trying to measure the speed of the evolution of school. In fact we need to answer this question: what is the pace of time for school? From my point, the future of school is a question of pace, and, as everyone knows, pace is money.