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2020 Visions 29 September 2002 |
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WASHINGTON, DC (mz) -- 27 September (Summit) & 17 September (press conference) 2002: Summit & Press Conference on the Use of Advanced Technologies in Education and Training, US Department of Commerce, "2020 Visions" document from that event is here. Tuesday, September 17 Secretary of Commerce Don Evans will be joined by Education Under Secretary Eugene W. Hickok and National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell at a press conference to release a compilation of visions prepared by leaders in industry, academia and government on how emerging technologies-in development today for a wide variety of applications-might be harnessed to revolutionize the education and training landscape. Several of the authors will participate in the press conference, including representatives from Harvard University, Microsoft, WorldCom, the National Education Association (NEA) and the advanced theme park ride design company, Kleiser-Walczak. Fourteen visions, published as "2020 Visions: Transforming Education and Training Through Advanced Technologies," provide a diverse array of views on how students, workers and life-long learners may learn in the future. These visions: • use vignettes set in the future to enable the reader to see the technologies and applications through the eyes of the user; These visions are intended to contribute to our understanding of the potential of these technologies to foster innovation in our learning enterprise, the research that is needed, and the challenges that lie ahead. Vision Authors Technologies and Learning, Ruzena Bajcsy, Director, Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, University of California at Berkeley Teaching in 2025: Education and Technology Transformed, Vinton Cerf, Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology, WorldCom, and Caleb Schutz, President, Marco Polo Foundation, President, WorldCom Foundation, Vice President, WorldCom A Day in the Life of a Young Learner: A 2020 Vision, Milton Chen, Executive Director and Stephen D. Arnold, Vice Chair, George Lucas Educational Foundation Vignettes About the Future of Learning Technologies, Chris Dede, Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies, Harvard Graduate School of Education A Vision for Life Long Learning - Year 2020, Randy Hinrichs, Group Research Manager, Learning Science and Technology, Microsoft Research, with Introduction by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation Playing Games to Learn Complex Skills: Computer Simulation for Medic Training, Gerald A. Higgins, SimQuest International, LLC and the Federation of American Scientists Next Generation Learning Systems and the Role of Teachers, The Learning Federation 2020 Classroom, Ulrich Neumann and Chris Kyriakakis, Integrated Media Systems Center, University of Southern California A Curmudgeon's Vision for Technology in Education, Randy Pausch, Co-Director, Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University Encompassing Education, Diana Walczak, Artistic Director and Cofounder, Kleiser-Walczak Future of Education = Technology + Teachers, R. Stanley Williams, H-P Fellow, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories A Visit to the Springdale School System in 2012, John I. Wilson, Executive Director, National Education Association Motivational Technology, Will Wright, Chief Designer and Co-Founder, Maxis The Last Teacher, Michael Zyda, Director, The MOVES Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, and Douglas H. Bennett, Study Director, National Research Council's Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board Tech seen as key to future education By Scott R. Burnell WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- Today's young parents might have difficulty explaining their own schooling to their grandkids, because the little ones might not recognize concepts such as textbooks and classrooms, a collection of academic and industry visionaries predicted Tuesday. Commerce Secretary Don Evans said people should pay attention to "2020 Visions," the group's attempt at describing the school of tomorrow, which was unveiled at a news conference. "There's concern that the education world, the teaching world, hasn't been as quick to adapt technologies as maybe industry has been," Evans said. "We need to provide more encouragement to our teachers as to how important it is to put these new technologies to work." The group included such luminaries as "Father of the Internet" Vinton Cerf and Chris Dede, professor of learning technologies at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. Their visions weave concepts such as virtual reality, digital assistants and tele-robotics into a world where teachers are relieved of administrative duties, free to sculpt the learning experience to meet each child's needs. Undersecretary of Education Eugene Hickok said the ideas put forth in 2020 Visions give government officials a chance to engage in some long-range, "blue-sky" thinking, instead of day-to-day bureaucratic challenges. "This is more than just a brainstorming exercise," Hickok said. "These visions will be a part of the National Education Technology Plan, which is required under the No Child Left Behind Act." The group's ideas are startling in their lack of formal classrooms and other aspects of today's system, Hickok said. Society should pay heed to this attempt to put aside preconceptions of what learning is and focus instead on the students and the ideas they can absorb, he said. The visions are meant to foster imagination of these new structures, not provide firm predictions of schools two decades hence, Harvard's Dede said. The key is not the technologies themselves, but the new forms of content and teacher-student communication they can engender, he said. Society must guard against the urge to automate teaching, which could easily lead to doing the wrong things more efficiently, he said. Simply relying on the razzle-dazzle of technologies, such as virtual reality, to keep children interested in school, would result in nothing more than "digital Ritalin," said group member Stanley Williams, founding director of Hewlett-Packard's Quantum Science Research group. Approaches like that could end up giving children a homogenized set of skills and responses for a world of random, complex occurrences, he said. Current research into what actually occurs during learning should improve future teaching methods, said Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation. The 2003 budget includes funding for several multi-disciplinary NSF centers devoted to unraveling the brain's learning procedures, she told the news conference. Cost is another key factor in making the visions reality, said group member Michael Zyda, director of the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. If the eventual cost per student of these future visions exceeds that of a textbook, there will be very little incentive for schools to adopt the ideas, he told the press conference. The research base necessary to enable the needed technology could cost tens of billions of dollars, he said. Educators should welcome the opportunities presented in 2020 Visions, said group member John Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association. Any teacher's fears of being replaced by a computer are groundless, he said, and should be replaced by the realization that technology will let teachers focus on improving the educational experience, he said. "We need to give teachers the training necessary to inspire learning with these new tools," Wilson told reporters. "We need to prepare new teachers for the future and not the classrooms of the past." Copyright © 2002 United Press International
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