Tenniel who blogs at School@Home found a Must Read Education Article. The article is by Thomas J. Frey who has published The Future of Education for The DaVinci Institute.
I agree with Tenniel, the whole article is worth reading. I’ll summarize a few concepts, hopefully enough to wet your appetite so that you’ll go read the whole article.
The article starts off with the observation that certain systems can limit us. Thousands of years ago the Greeks had a number of famous mathematicians who made great progress. A couple centuries later the Romans came along. The Romans had no famous mathematicians. Why? It is largely because of Roman Numerals. Roman Numerals made math too complex. Just writing a number was a complex operation. Roman Numerals were a limiting system.
Thomas J. Frey stepped back and asked “What systems do we employ today that are the equivalent of Roman numerals, preventing us from doing great things?” He lists a couple limiting systems. The first one was:
Income Tax System - The income tax system is currently the mother of all boat anchors, slowing commerce and the pace of business to a crawl. Currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 64,000 pages in length, the United States tax code in use today will stand as a shining example throughout history as one of the world’s most incomprehensible systems.
Thomas Frey took a fresh look at education. He came to some interesting conclusions. In the introduction Thomas Frey predicts some great changes to education:
Within two years a radical shift will begin to occur in the world of education.
While many people are making predictions about the direction that education systems are headed, we have found the best predictors to be hidden in the participative viral systems springing to life in the online world, such as iTunes and Amazon. These bottom-up approaches are quick to develop, participant-driven systems that are closely aligned to the demands of the marketplace.
In this paper we will focus on the key missing elements that will cause the disruptive next generation education systems to emerge. These missing pieces will likely be created within the next two years through private funding and will cause a dramatic educational shift in less than five years.
The primary missing pieces are a standard architecture for an organic courseware module and the software necessary to build this courseware. The solution to these missing pieces will be a participative courseware-builder that allows the general public to create courses on any conceivable topic. We expect many companies will attempt to solve this problem, but the market will quickly gravitate towards the one it likes best.
Once the market begins to gravitate towards a favorite courseware-builder, a number of new systems will be developed to grow the courseware library, build integrity, make it universally distributed, archive results, and add functionality.
I think he is optimistic in terms of how quickly there will be a chance in education. I don’t see a fundamental change in public education in America happening in a couple years.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in the article, and it is well worth reading. Take 15 to 20 minutes to see what Thomas Frey is predicting for the future of education.
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