2020 – Future of Computing

Published by in edtech, science, web 2.0 on April 2nd, 2006

Just found some fantastic articles for reading in the days to come: “2020 – Future of Computing” from Nature magazine. As they should be, all articles are available online in full-text, and free.

“2020 computing: The creativity machine” (PDF) by Vernor Vinge is my favorite so far. The subtitle is, “What will emerge from using the Internet as a research tool? The answer, Vernor Vingeargues argues, will be limited only by our imaginations.”

Sadly for many school administrators today, that future (using this definition) may be sharply limited. That is why advocates for the conversations in the blogsophere, like you and me, have to get out of our echo chambers and talk to these people!!!

Here is the introduction from the article:

We humans have built a creativity machine. It’s the sum of three things: a few hundred million computers, a communication system connecting those computers, and some millions of human beings using those computers and communications. This creativity machine is the Internet. It has already changed the way we do science, most importantly by enhancing collaboration between researchers. The present-day Internet provides convenient connections between computerized labs, simulations and research databases. It also represents an enormous financial investment that is driven by the demands of hundreds of millions of con- sumers. As such, the total Internet software and infrastructure investment dwarfs the bud- gets of scientific research programmes and even of many government defence programmes. And more than any megaproject of the past, the essence of the Internet is to provide coordinated processing of information.

I would add that the essence of the Internet is GLOBAL CONVERSATION. This is not just about data swapping and sharing, although that is a big deal. It is also about empowering human voices to be heard and speak together as never before in human history.

I am here in Fort Worth, Texas, with Miguel Guhlin, who is co-keynoting a conference tomorrow with me, and he was talking tonight about a metaphor of Plato’s cave in the context of web 2.0. I find this very thought provoking.

Those of us engaged in this read/write web enabled conversation across the globe (literally) have emerged from the cave of traditional education. Unfortunately, the vast majority of students, teachers, educators, and parents remain in the cave. They are looking at the grey and black 2D shadows on the wall, taking their multiple-choice high-stakes tests, and think they understand reality and education. But they don’t. If their worldview is limited to a transmission-based model of education measured by “clean assessment” methods (as I’ll discuss tomorrow,) then they are figuratively not yet seeing in 3D or in color.

Both the challenge and opportunity is ours to embrace.

On this day..

Comments Off
© Creative Commons License