Michael A. Burstein especially caught my attention. I was not at all familiar with his work. Burstein’s first published sci-fi short story, TeleAbsence (published in 1995), is an excellent example as it is entirely about schooling in the future. Not surprising, considering that, in addition to writing science fiction, Burstein has been a science teacher and editor of science textbooks.

Burstein’s TeleAbsence occurs in a not-too-far-off future where private schools have adopted virtual reality (VR) immersion technology to bring together students from all over the US in simulated classrooms. The story touches on several topics that are relevant to current discourse on education, including equality issues relating to race, poverty, access to technology (US’s domestic digital divide) and private education, how future technologies will shape instruction, and how students will interact in high-tech education environments.

One of the surprising things in Burstein’s story is the seeming persistance of the traditional classroom model of education, even in a high-tech setting. Burstein has the students hooking up to simulators, where they are essentially made stationary, to engage the VR experience which has them transported to a classroom which is indistinguishable from what we would expect to see in modern classrooms (or classrooms in the 1970s for that matter). Burstein explains the reasoning for this setup in the story, but it’s not clear whether he, as author and a teacher, thinks this is an optimal educational setting or whether he’s admitting to an inability to alter the existing paradigm.

Burstein creates a very compelling and realistic vision of the future of education as it might have looked in 1995. Many of the issues that crop up in the story are very relevant today. However, as I’ve mentioned in some of my previous articles about how science fiction affects our perceptions of the future, the point, or at least the usefulness, of science fiction is not to predict the future, but rather to provide vivid scenarios of what might be to stimulate and inspire our thinking in the present. For that reason, it’s just as informative to look at what what is missing in the story as well as what is there, to consider how changes in the anticipated progression of events might change the scenario presented. For example, for Burstein, one of the benefits of the VR model that his story suggests is that it allows the students and teachers to work with holographic representations of objects, areas, etc. in a classroom setting. It makes perfect sense to think this way considering where technological development was at in 1995. Today, however, we can imagine that this will be possible in the near future in a physical classroom setting using augmented reality (AR) technologies; especially when technologies like Google’s Glass Project become available. Furthermore, many emerging technologies are very affordable (with costs trending fairly steeply downward), including tablets and smartphones. This suggests that the technologies that enable the type of education that Burstein envisions may not be as far out of the reach of people of meager means as is suggested in the story. In fact, some research suggests that the cost of technology may not be the most important factor in the US’s domestic digital divide although it seems to cut across socio-economic and racial lines (see for ex. Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin, PEW Internet on minorities and the digital divide, and The Broadband Digital Divide and the Nexus of Race, Competition, and Quality).

That we can identify weaknesses in Burstein’s story when we consider it from the perspective of current contexts, by no means detracts from the value of the story and its usefulness for exploring how technology and education may develop in the future. As a compelling vision of the future, the story allows us to explore a range of issues (in fact, a remarkably broad range of issues in such a short story without it coming across as cluttered or overbearing) and contexts that will be important for educational development over the next decade, at least.

Burstein’s “TeleAbsence” has been published in his collection of short stories, I Remember the Future, and is also available as a standalone e-book from Fictionwise. The collection of short stories also includes a closely related, more recent story titled “TelePresence”. I haven’t finished reading that one yet.

Due dates are:
Submissions of title and 250-word proposal due: July 1, 2012
Notice of acceptance: July 13, 2012
Papers due: December 1, 2012
Review result notification: January 15, 2013

To submit a paper:
Submissions to this special issue of On the Horizon should be sent to the guest editor at moravec@gmail.com.

I remember seeing a Star Trek episode (don’t remember which series or which show – but I’m going to guess that it was Deep Space 9) where there was some imminent danger and a bunch of children had to be confined to their classroom. I was surprised that, despite all the attention paid to the evolution of technology in Star Trek, the classroom that was shown was pretty much exactly as you would expect to see if you walked into a classroom in the US today.

I came across another reference to school in Star Trek; this time a Vulcan school. Karen Henke, on the Future of Education Network website, describes a scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Vulcan children sat alone in pods and repeated what was said to them by a disembodied voice.

Other examples that I can think of are mostly intended to be critical of schools and thus portray them as staid institutions where facts and acceptable knowledge are forced upon children. For example, Bradbury’s Farenheit 451:

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

In Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series describes a world where everyone from Earth is resurrected, except for young children. In one of the final books it is finally revealed that the young children have been resurrected on another planet, named Gardenworld, where they are raised as “Ethicals” and eventually help transform Riverworld into a suitable home for the resurrected humans.

I have vague memories of some other mentions of schools and classrooms in science fiction but, because of my habit of moving from country to country every few years, I don’t have access to my sci-fi library right now. So, I can’t leaf through the books to check.

Do you remember any interesting portrayals of schools or classrooms or other forms of education from science fiction? Post them here. Help me get a collection of examples together.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

Tom Bissell – Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation. Via Brainpickings

Click here to read more about Googles Education on Air conference on Google+.

Piotr Czerski says:

We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term [generation] in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

Click here to read the rest of Piotr’s article.

Another sticky problem in robotics and computing, is developing robots that can talk naturally. Natural language has proven so complex that we can’t program machines to do it because we don’t entirely understand how it works ourselves. One thing that I’ve suggested in casual conversations is that perhaps the best way to get machines to talk would be to have them develop and learn their own language and then teach them to translate to our languages.

As it goes, whenever you come up with an idea, there’s most likely someone working on the same somewhere in the world. And such is the case at Sony’s Computer Lab in Paris. Their robots perform various actions with their bodies in front of a mirror and give new actions a name. They then interact with the other robots, 20 of them in all, to discover that they have named the same actions. The robots adjust their vocabulary until they reach agreement on specific terms. They have proven remarkably adept at doing this and have even developed relatively complex concepts such as “left” and “right”. Also, they develop their language so rapidly that the researchers have had trouble keeping up often needing up to a week to decipher the robots language. Now we just wait and see if the robots can figure out how to translate their language to ours…

Bonus ill-structured problem: Pedagogy – robots – language?

As an ardent follower of the development of information technology for nearly two decades, I’ve seen similar emergences/disappearances/re-emergence of several technologies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s some colleagues and I were tracking and developing technologies for collaborative writing. We were positive that these technologies were about to break through. It made perfect sense to us; we had the tools to do it, and we felt that the incentive to adopt the technology was there. It turned out we were wrong. Collaborative writing tools didn’t really start to take off until the end of the 2000s. Around the same time that we were playing around with collaborative writing, Netscape was developing interesting tools that looked set to transform web browsing into a significantly more social experience than it was at the time. Well, we all know what happened to Netscape, and the web didn’t really start getting social to any notable extent until the mid 2000s.

A lot has been written about factors that affect technology adoption – turns out it’s a strange and constantly changing mixture of context, society, economy and serendipity. ‘Nuff said. But, what affects technology abandonment and why does it seem that we sometimes abandon technologies in a way that either immediately or eventually seems to work against our interests? Well, here’s an interesting article that discusses exactly that in a very interesting and relevant context – the Hunger Games books. Apparently, some readers have been questioning why a future society with various technologies that seemingly surpass our current technological capability, don’t have some technologies that we consider basic today; such as the Internet. The authors and specialists that they spoke with make an important point; that one technology is not inherently better than another. When the nature of our problems change, our requirements for tools change and we go off looking for something new and shedding the old.

I was on a panel at a symposium on the future of education held at the University of Iceland (UI) last Tuesday (March 20, 2012). The key speaker was my advisor, Dr. Arthur Harkins, and with me on the panel were Dr. Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir, lecturer at UI, and Dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, Dean of the School of Education, UI.

There has been little discourse on the futures studies, and in particular the future of education, in Iceland. Consequently, the Icelandic language lacks many of the concepts used in futures discourse (for ex. Icelandic philosopher Gunnar Dal suggests in his book published in 2005, Stórar Spurningar (transl. Big Questions) that perhaps there may at some time be a field of study referred to as “futures studies” – I guess he didn’t notice that there has been such a field since the 1950-60s developing increasingly rigorous methodologies). The symposium, along with a growing interest in the future of education in Iceland, provided a great opportunity to expand Icelandic discourse on education to include discussions about futures.

The symposium started with a talk given by Dr. Harkins on the future of education from a human capital perspective. Participants were quick to point out that educational needs are based on many factors other than human capital needs. Although I was one of the people that mentioned this, I do acknowledge that the human capital perspective is an important one as policy makers increasingly consider educational development in terms of work force preparation. Nevertheless, that might also be taken as an indicator of the need to re-emphasize other aspects of education, ex. democratic participation, etc.

One point that was raised repeatedly by participants was the need to consider ethical aspects of education in descriptions of education futures. I responded specificially to this concern towards the end of the symposium. I think that what was really at issue was a lack of understanding among participants of what futures studies about education really entail. In my mind futures studies are inherently ethical as is particularly demonstrated by two essential assumptions underlying all futures studies:

1. We do not predict the future because we have no way of knowing the future. As Dr. John Moravec has put it in a course that we teach together at the University of Minnesota, “We have never been to the future and have no experience of it!” What futurists do is to consider what forces are driving change in the present and how they could affect the future. Important in this process is to identify possible sources of inequality.

2. The future is not something that happens to us; it is something that we create. By projecting toward the future on the basis of the changes we experience in the present, we consider a range of possible futures to be able to select the type of future that we prefer. If we have a clear vision of a preferred future, we can consider the steps we need to take to achieve that future. One of the most important considerations in identifying preferred futures are the ethical implications of change.

To wrap up the symposium, Dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, briefly discussed some critical questions for consideration. One is especially worthy of attention, i.e. whose job is it (or will it be) to think about the future of education? Is it the role of research institutions, think tanks, policy makers, practitioners…? In my opinion, it is really a combination of all of these and probably more. As Michael Fullan has said, educational change is cultural change, i.e. because education is both a reflection of the society and culture that it serves and a tool for constructing that society and culture, education and culture are inextricably linked. We can hope to produce educational change on the basis of scientific evidence or what have you, but if the society to be served isn’t buying it, change is unlikely to occur. Therefore, if we want to change education to serve the future, the preferred future that we are shooting for has to be based on a vision that is shared and equally preferred by at least a majority of those affected.

The symposium was recorded (at least audio) and I hope to have the web address for the recording soon and will post.