I’m facisnated by the possibilites in embracing technology in education. We’ve only scratched the surface. There appears to be so much oppertunity here.
About a year ago, I wrote a post about my view of the school of the future. I was excited to read another vision today in Techcrunch. Vinod Khosla posted an article on called “Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms?”
He does a great job articulating something I’ve been trying to describe to my friends for some time.
There are new key trends that I see emerging in education enabled by advancing technology: namely decentralization and gamification. By understanding these trends, it is much easier to imagine why we won’t need teachers or why we can free up today’s teachers to be mentors and coaches. Software can free teachers to have more human relationships by giving them the time to be guidance counselors and friends to young kids instead of being lecturers who talk at them. This last possibility is very important—in addition to learning, schools enable critical social development for children through teacher student relationships and interacting with other children—classrooms of peers and teachers provide much more than math lessons. And by freeing up teachers’ time, technology can lead to increased social development rather than less as many assume.
Do you buy it? If not, why won’t it work?
And how long will it take for us to get there? My bet: by the time the first iPhone baby enters high school, we’ll be seeing a lot more adoption. By then, the parents will have grown up with computers and the students will have grown up with smartphones. Let’s hope the teachers and administrators are ready.
