The Future of Learning

March 19th, 2013 | by Michael Keller      http://txchnologist.com/post/45764091204/the-future-of-learning

A great deal of buzz has been building around educational technologist Sugata Mitra after he won the 2013 TED Prize for his idea to build a school in the cloud where students could learn from each other.
He says his idea is to construct “a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online … [that is] designed to try out a range of cloud-based, scalable approaches to self-directed learning.”
This is just one example of the first steps away from the traditional one-teacher-to-many-students model of teaching that educators and communities are starting to take.
The folks at Envisioning Technology, a trend-forecasting firm that we’ve featured before, have visualized a number of emerging technologies that they believe will rewrite the educational paradigm in coming decades. Mitra’s project is just the beginning.
See their interesting infographic and Mitra’s prize acceptance speech after the jump.
“Education lies at a peculiar crossroad in society,” the creators of “Envisioning the Future of Education Technology” write in introducing the visualization. “On one hand it has the responsibility of anticipating real-life skills by preparing us for an increasingly complex world – but education methodologies can only be formalized after practices have been defined. This dichotomy is particularly aggravated when it comes to technology, where fast-paced innovation and perpetual change is the only constant.”

(Click the graphic to enlarge)
Here is the intriguing talk that Mitra gave at TED in February to accept the $1 million TED Prize to start his School in the Cloud.