If, in the era of Facebook and Google, IBM has lost some of its “cool” in recent years, the 100-year-old company (check out this great video celebrating its Centennial) has redeemed itself with WATSON – the Jeopardy winning computer.
This past week, I had the opportunity to listen to four of the top IBM researchers muse about the world of 2050. They admit, like many of us in education also do, it is difficult to event plan five years out, but Don Eigler, Spike Narayan, Dr. Winfried Wilicke, and Thomas Zimmerman did identify some interesting trends. While there was some talk of flying cars (maybe not quite the Jetsons), the continual growth and change in the movement of data, the requirements of energy in a world that will need to be sustainability-focussed with water being the new oil, I was struck by the idea of synthetic immortality — and just what it might mean for schools.
The idea of synthetic immortality was put forward by Thomas Zimmerman, whose Data Glove invention sold over one million units in the field of Virtual Reality. Zimmerman was also named California Volunteer of the Year in 2009 for his science-enrichment work in schools. The idea of synthetic immortality is that, since we are creating and posting so much digital content about ourselves and others — and this is only increasing (apparently some people are now basically digitally documenting every hour of their life), in the future — we will be able to pull all of this data together and, even after someone dies, create an avatar that someone could interview and engage with. This will sure change book reports. You want to interview a former Prime Minister, you can just call up the synthetic version of that person. With all the digital content, it is not something I had considered — our perpetuity beyond our lives. A good deal has been written about managing social media after one dies, like this recent New York Times article and this one in Time but not, at least from what I have seen, about how this could all be aggregated together to virtualize someone.
While it is difficult to even get my head around what schooling and learning should and could look like for my kids over the next 10 years, it is interesting to hear people predict what it could look like for my kids’ kids.
One final connection on this topic, if you haven’t seen this video, A Day Made of Glass — Made Possible by Corning, do take a look at it. It is an interesting window into the future:
The subject does make some of our current conversations around the edges of change seem quite small, given what is likely coming soon.
cultureofyes.ca 
And if you’d really like to to challenge your ideas about 2050, have a look at the article 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal by Lev Grossman on the cover of Time Magazine (Feb. 21, 2011). The premise of the article is that we will eventually transfer our mind/soul to a machine. And where, exactly, does that leave school!
The article isI reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s story, The Last Question, which my students always think is just weird. Wait till I pair it with this article!
Wow – great link – thanks. Here is the story for others who are interested: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html
Yeah I agree with Ms. Miller that predictions into what the year 2050 will be are very interesting. Imagine a world where you can just download an install “learning modules” like what they can do in the Matrix. What would happen to schools then? Would people finally admit than that teaching specific content is fruitless when anyone who wants to can download and install content into their cerebral implant whenever they want? Will schools insist that “everyone please turn off your implants for this test?” or will we FINALLY catch up to the actual world..
The line between man and machine will blur, at least for those people who can afford it. Already I have more information at my fingertips nearly whenever I want it (excepting when my phone is out of battery or out of range of service). Why would I memorize anything unless I use it daily?
We need more educators predicting the consequences of this future, so we can adapt in advance of the changes, rather than always be on our heels reacting.
Yes David – I actually didn’t include some of the more “out there” predictions from the IBM scientists. They said we have become quite comfortable with artificial hips, and knees and other enhancements to our physical bodies, so we are bound to have opportunities for other enhancements / implants around a range of brain functions.
It is hard to separate the possible from the science fiction sometimes – but in looking what has changed in the last 15 years, and given the speed that this change is incerasing – it is stunning to think 40 years out.
It really was interesting to listen to the IBM researchers share their life’s work. It just amazes me the patience people commited to research have. It takes years for them to make progress and often others capitalize on their inventions. I too wonder what the future holds for us and for our schools.
As you know, I like speculated about the future of school and share these posts with your readers:
http://www.shift2future.com/2010/09/stephanies-first-day-of-school-in-2020.html
http://www.shift2future.com/2011/01/tylers-loving-school-in-2016.html
http://www.shift2future.com/2010/05/welcome-to-your-life-in-2020.html
Let the future begin…
Thanks Brian – your links are great and your blog is a wonderful place to engage in future thinking around schooling and learning.
I love this stuff too, but 2050 is too far away. Projection this far into the future is fantasy, which is kind of fun but not very compelling because its too speculative. Its can distract more than inform. Try 2030. Its still impossible to predict the details but the broad strokes of this mid-term future are predictable and therefore we have a higher degree of responsibility for thinking about them and responding. A current Gr 6 student will be just starting career and family in 2030 so that mid-term future is a good test of what we are doing in schools right now. Are we preparing that student for the predictable elements of his/her future? It seems clear based on current trends that BC will be less European (with new Canadians from all parts of the globe but primarily from China and the Pacific Rim), family and social structures will be less traditional and more diverse, life will be faster paced (and thus more volatile socially, politically and economically), we will be increasingly challenged environmentally (we are already running out of places to put Vancouver’s garbage), primary resources will be harder to get and more expensive, there will be shortages of some foods, wealth creation will be increasingly based on ‘knowledge work,’ the issues that our society faces will be be more complex (due to growing global interdependence, greater connection and faster pace) and generally speaking the past will be a less reliable predictor of the future. These changes are already evident and demand an immediate response so that the students now in the educational pipeline will not find themselves gloriously prepared for a future that no longer exists. Of course, much of what we do now remains important and useful in preparing students for such changes but some of what is done needs to change, some should just stop and some new things need to be added. Since the imaginary Grade 6 student will be in high school in 19 months we don’t have much time to adjust school practices before the window of opportunity (and duty) closes. I find that to be a more compelling thought than the interesting, but distant, speculation of futurists – not because they are wrong but because attention to such speculation can, paradoxically, reduce the urgency of response to change that is already occurring.
Thanks Bruce. I like that perspective – if we think too far ahead we reduce the urgency we have right now. I often talk about the urgency of my own kids – they are in the system now. While I am interested in the what if’s of 2050 – but it can dull the need for the changes so many of us are speaking about that need to continue to happen now.
This post is fascinating to me, Chris. I spend time trying to think about what schools might look like in 20 years and beyond, but two things haunt me. Firstly, my head starts to spin with the dazzling array of different technologies that will be available to society (which are demonstrated in the video–and I am sure this is limited only by the limits of our imagination) and my inability to conceptualize where we might be able to go. But secondly (and you know that I am the farthest thing from a doomsday prophet), I am haunted by where schools might NOT have moved to relative to these technologies.
Earlier tonight, I commented on Tom Schimmer’s excellent blog post on trying to explain 21st Century Learning to a non-educator on an elevator. My best effort was
“21st Century Learning is helping students learn to use collaborative means to exponentially multiply their knowledge, to develop critical thinking abilities to evaluate information, and to foster communication skills that will allow them to contribute to the global and multicultural collective in a way that demonstrates their individual creativity.”
To this end, I hope that as a collective group of educators and leaders, we continue to push the movement forward at a pace that is commensurate to the pace that the world is changing around us, and create adaptable 21st Century Learners.
Great stuff, Chris!
Thanks Cale – it is an interesting balance we have – to continue to push on the edges of what we are doing and could be doing and what the future will and / or might be while at the same time “making sure we don’t get too far ahead of the parade” (a quote I often hear).
Tom’s post is really good – my three sentence response to Tom:
Students owning their own learning.
Teaching guiding and supporting the learning.
Parents as real participants in the learning.
I noticed a lot of people here are saying that they are afraid of what’s to come.
Here’s my suggestion: don’t worry about the future. Just like what Chris said in this post, it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen five years from now.
Today, we are talking about how in fifty years from now, a laptop’s CPU will be able to host an artificial intelligence engine that will out-pace the human brain. But that theory is only backed by Moore’s law, which is set to fail fourteen years from now — then, we are going to have to find another form of CPU that will replace our current transistors, and God knows when we’ll discover such a thing.
We are also talking about how there are going to be flying cars. But it has been for sixty years that we have been talking about how there are going to be flying cars in the early 21st century. That hasn’t happened yet.
But it’s not to say that there are never going to be flying cars in the future. In fact, looking at how quickly the 20th century progressed technologically, and how we DID have the resources to build these vehicles, we should have seen them in today’s day-to-day lives.
So what happened? We found better ways to communicate! Instead of physically sending, say, a Canadian person to Japan to attend a conference, it was much simpler to communicate directly via teleconferencing. Hence businesses and governments spent more time investing in better IT infrastructure, instead of better transportation.
In other words, technological progress strongly relies on what’s needed today, and what’s needed to improve today. Just, look at IBM WATSON. Sure it all started with a novel idea to have a computer interact with humans, but the main incentive to continue building this software was to simplify human task.
Instead of focusing on the future, focus on the core meaning of education. Focus on why you teach. Focus on doing the things that will never change, and keep doing them well.
What is important for us is to try and see around the corner to what is coming next. Too often schools are reactionary to society and we suffer from questions around relevance.
Very good comments. Thanks.
Great post Chris, the dialogue offered by all of the people who posted is very interesting. Bruce’s comments regarding responding to mid-future possibilities based on current trends resonates with me. As public institutions with complex funding issues, collective agreements and political challenges we are unlikely to be able to keep up with the amazing technology presented in the links shared by others. My guess is that public schools will always lag behind the technology and the ease of access to information that will be available to students in their homes (or on their phones). I am not suggesting we abdicate our responsibility to support technological literacy – but our key contribution to personalizing learning for the 21st Century will be support students in developing the skills and competencies to function effectively in a world facing the many challenges and changes outlined by Bruce. These include fostering creativity, teaching critical thinking, scientific literacy, how to evaluate the veracity of the information available in web 3.0 based on evidence, the ability to work collaboratively in groups, environmental sustainability literacy, multi-cultural literacy, social media literacy and so on. This work is urgent. It will require that we invite and engage all partners in the community to co-develop the changes to the system that are needed for us to be successful.
Nicely said Kevin. I worry that if we put our focus on the technology part of the 21st century learning agenda, we will always feel behind and won’t hit on the key skill pieces that we all believe are so important. It can’t be said enough that this is not about technology.