Serendipity35

After writing yesterday about schools addressing the 21st century skills for the jobs of the next decade, I came across a post by Will Richardson that seems related. (Interestingly, I read the post on Facebook, not on his blog.)

He is doing a presentation at Educon 2.2 called "The 'Decoupling' of Education and School: Where Do We Begin?" He is thinking about how schools will change as alternative learning platforms become available which challenge and threaten tradition schooling as the place to learn.

He quotes from the book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America and the quotes resonated with me in relation to my earlier post which was focusing on where the jobs will be, and where students will learn what they need for the "real world."

"If educators cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education, developed over the past 150 years, will dissolve into a world where the students with the means and the ability will pursue their learning outside of public school.”

It's common to hear secondary and college students with entrepreneurial spirit point to people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or any of the others who gave up on college to start an innovative business - and made a fortune.

We already see signs that students and businesses are willing to look beyond traditional schools, especially for learning in the widening world of technology and media.

If you want to make a prediction for an education trend for the new decade, this quote would be a good starting place.

“Schools were prevalent in the era of apprenticeship, and they will be prevalent in whatever new system of education comes into being. But the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and they are already beginning to erode the identification of learning and schooling. As these new technologically driven seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more adaptive venues, and schools will have a narrower role in learning.”

Part of the problem with schools and technology learning is that schools adapt very gradually and that is not a model that works for the radical pace of technological change.

"Schools have fiddled with learning technologies on the margins of the system, in boutique innovations that leave core practices untouched. The emergence of new forms of teaching and learning outside of school threaten the identification of learning with formal schooling forged in the 19th Century.”