So we’ve got a few things going on as we contemplate the future:

- a steady stream of ever-more-sophisticated tools and resources
- a steady lag in applying sound concepts to practice, in spite of occasional successes
- a theory base that often isn’t much help to either understanding the new technologies, or solving the pragmatic problems of everyday practice

That’s an exciting future because it poses many opportunities for improvement!

Educational research into online education continues to focus on media comparison studies. Research as a whole continues to be driven by journal publication in support of tenure and woefully out of date and more and more disconnected with reality. New opportunities in virtual environments like SecondLife are being squandered by educators moving in to create classrooms where they can have student avatars sit in virtual seats and attend broadcast lectures — 2D education in a 3D world. Textbooks are obsolete before they’re out of copy editing - to say nothing of printed, adopted, and sold.

Questions that need to be asked are being ignored:

1. Shouldn’t we be focused on *distribution* of what we already know? If we can teach 10% more people, the impact is massively more important than learning to teach those people we already reach 10% better. (Thank you, Dave Wiley)

2. How does a program of national testing help raise the academic qualifications of the nation when we don’t have a set of standards that everybody is behind? And how can we be supporting the use of invalid (but reliable) instrumentation in the service of punishing the most challenged schools? Anybody who actually believes the political rhetoric surrounding this is missing the point.

3. Why isn’t there a National Teacher’s License? And why can’t an individual take the test for licensure without the endorsement of an institution with vested interest in maintaining their own market position in selling that endorsement? The test is valid or it’s not. The incremental value of the university endorsement — which represents a financial conflict of interest — needs to be examined.

4. Is the classroom really the answer? Schools are ‘education factories’ and have been organized like production lines. Is this how people really learn? If we’re going to examine classroom 2.0, why aren’t we looking at the fundamental assumptions that classrooms have outgrown their usefulness.

5. What *do* students need to know? And are the teachers, parents, and administrators *really* the ones to determine that? Who is? Is there a foundational core of skills, knowledge, and attitude? Why is it different in California than Connecticut? Does local control of schools mean we need to accept locally stupid students? Is the “best education we can afford” something we want controlled by property taxes? Or the Feds?

6. What is the purpose of Education? And how can we justify what we’re doing to kids in schools under *any* of the generally accepted notions of that purpose?

7. With seven million teachers in the US, how do we get skills, knowledge, and attitudes up to par? Who’s going to foot the bill? Where is the time going to come from?

Looking at a more specific application:

Despite a wide adoption of computers and other networked devices in the larger populations, the response of Education is to limit, control, or shut-down. Laptops are being excluded from lectures in colleges across the country. Nobody’s asking the pointed questions about the utility of lectures. Only that laptops are “disruptive.” And I’m sure they are.

We’ve spent millions in this country to linkup and digitize classrooms. Now we’re spending more — and writing legislation — to prevent the realization of that investment.

There’s an axiom. “Teachers teach the way they were taught.” How many teachers today learned to learn on a computer? Too many are now saying, “I don’t have time to learn all this stuff! Just tell me what I need to know to use this in my classes!”

There’s a profound disconnect between Education, and Learning. Those who are charged with educating the next generation seem more interested in proving that they’re educating than in assuring that the next generation is actually learning anything useful. Perhaps it has been this way since Socrates’ time.

When teachers — even teachers who are charged with knowing, using, and supporting educational technology — have difficulty in dealing with basic tools like email, I think we’re a long, long way away from any kind of breakthrough.

Personally, I’m of the mind that some “Social Singularity” (which is already in progress) will overtake education within a generation. When credential inflation collapses the market for those credentials, the system that provides them will become valueless. The economic collapse that’s pretty much inevitable will hasten that end.

So, basically and perversely, I’m betting on the apocalypse for educational technology to gain a foothold.

Until then, too many people have too much riding on maintaining the status quo to permit educational technology, instructional design, and systems approaches to education to really get more than lip service and anecdotal adoption. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I think the end is nigh.

Discuss.