I’m old school too—running a Chandler & Price print-press by footpedal is a favorite pastime.

But I wonder if the idea of school authority & sign-offs might be getting shaky in the near future.  If the world is becoming one big Dickensian England with empty cubicles and assembly lines to fill, are we fooling ourselves to think that management wants a glut of well-rounded high school & college grads who remember their civics?

Btw if I may presume to give a book recc on the subject:  “Super Sad True Love Story.”  Joe-Bob says check it out.

Institutions evolve as well, or are replaced by new ones. The educated
still will have to be diploma-ed and some education organization (viz.,
institution) will have to sign off on the graduate), this might be
electronic as well.  Paper will become a thing of the long gone past. 
Now since electronic education hides exactly who is the student, some
means will have to be constructed to assure it is “the” student who
earned the credits.  Passwords in closed systems are still vulnerable to
surrogates. Maybe electronic fingerprinting? Some clever geek inventor
will solve that problem.  The interactive ambience will be involved no
doubt.

Now I do not foresee this arrangement for the very young. They get
too antsy and have very little attention capacity.  Anyone who has
children knows this (I had double trouble with twins).  But they will
be weaned little by little to work more and more in the virtual reality
classroom environment.  Time on task will be a challenge. Probably by
the 4th grade they will be well-assimilated into the electronic school. 
Definitely by 6th grade.  These kids are already e-primed walking
everywhere with earbuds hooked up to iPhones, etc.

I am having a bit of fun using my imagination of the new “classic”
e-classroom of the future.  I don’t think I will live to see it become
factual.  I, too, have been in the classroom as a teacher for 30 years,
first in K-12 then at university level, so have had much experience
in education. Personally I like the feel of real books, love them is the
better description.  I am saddened at the thought of their demise. 
Perhaps there will still be that rare publisher who will print beautiful
books to sit in a comfy chair and peruse at one’s leisure?  They will
become museum items.

shenonymous:

Agree on the communal chatrooms, disagree on the institutional enrollment—at least in the form we know them now. 

Each year a smaller percentage of the info I get is mediated through big-box institutions.  Why should my kids be any different?

Hardly,  the classroom of tomorrow will look like a kid’s bedroom. 
Computers will be provided each child by the institution in which
he/she is enrolled.  The teacher will conduct holographic, interactive
immersive environments, based on video recognition techniques.  It
will resemble what we experience as communal chatrooms where
students can view each other as well as speak and have academic
interaction among themselves and the teacher.  The students will
be more focused on the subject of study but have the ability to kick
ideas around with others chiming in just as if it were a real 3-D
classroom.  There will be all kinds of benefits of learning experiences. 
Teachers will need to be much more educated and have highly rated
teaching skills as well.  Standards of excellence will still be the gauge
of achievement. 

There are always whiners about what is going on.  Resistance is futile.

Egomet Bonmot
“Whatever the technology, tomorrow’s schools will look a lot like Starbucks.”

This is why we are doomed.

“The idea is that teachers can be replaced by cheaper computers, at once saving schools money, preventing tax increases for school resources, and preserving educational services”

There for once is a good idea - automated indoctrination!!!

We take big-box schooling for granted but of course it’s a very late arrival on the pedagogical scene.  Picture a near-future where smart-book technology is perfected and kids can tote around their schooling under-arm like the wax tablets of old.  If schools didn’t exist then, would it be necessary to invent them?

Whatever the technology, tomorrow’s schools will look a lot like Starbucks.

My kids think online classes are a manevolent bid by teachers to cheat them out of snow days.

As a parent I am able to verify classwork assignments, grades and problems my kid understandably fail to mention.

My thanks to teachers everywhere.

Just follow the money!

As a retired teacher of 30 years’ experience, I saw
many fads come and go during my career, each
promising to revolutionize education, each failing
miserably as the putative panacea for educational
problems.

I suspect if you were to do the research, you would find that television was once hailed as the answer, later followed cassette players, video tape recorders, dvd players, the Internet, and the white board, which was just emerging as the next great thing when I retired.

To regard any of these developments as anything more
than just additional tools in the educational
arsenal is to engage in delusional thinking.  As
well, those in positions to make these expensive
acquisitions do so many times, I suspect, merely to
appear forward-thinking so as to burnish their
resumes and not be excluded from the next round of
promotions.

Replace public institutions with privatized profit centers - this is the aim of the education technologists. Teaching is reduced to content presentation, and learning with passive consumption.

I don’t disagree with you Big B, but I fear technology will eclipse our
reasoning and sentimentality.  Humans will have to find other ways
to socialize.  Watching students these days we can see new forms of
socialization taking place.  The immediacy of the electronic media
can summon a gathering at a moment’s notice. The Occupy Move-
ment here and the Arab Spring events are a symptom of the new
“socialization” even if it is to protest something or other.  People
are meeting in these events.  I don’t know exactly how the future
will play out with technology, but if we don’t want to be left in the
dust, we need to assimilate the electronic education tsunami as it
begins to hit our beach of learning.  We do not want to get swept by
the flood that is inexorable.  Already the Internet shows just how vast
is information, in its many forms.  If we want to shepherd our children
into becoming moral beings, we too need to understand ramifications
that are not readily apparent.  We have to look beneath the surface of
the sea of information to use it to better humanity rather than tear it
apart.  Don’t you agree?  I’m arguing for the idea that for the first time
in history we can actually see the future, not just guess at it, and that
we have a responsibility to be ready for it.

Up to this moment really, we have thought for nearly three quarters of
a century that those who held weapons technology, or the grotesqueness
of atomic technology held the power of the planet in their hands.  But
as it is becoming more and more clear, the power of electronic media
is eclipsing the upper berth weapons technology has held.  Electronic
media is now constantly in the hands of our young, as young as first
grade, most notably in the middle school years where students walk
the halls of the schools with a social electronic device’s listening buds
in their ears, although these days, headphones are becoming the
fashion.  The point is not fashion, though, but the accustomization of
our children to electronic hookup.  Just as we couldn’t imagine a world
without the telephone, which in its day was the technology of power,
and the next generation will not understand how we ever lived without
our iPhones, Droids, or Blackberries.  A book that might be of interest
is “Technologies of Power,” edited by Allen and Hecht. 

As noted earlier, I think the problem between humans is way beyond
the socialization through the classical classroom education experience. 
There are indoctrinations of beliefs that have chained the mind that
deeply separates humans one group from another.  The unstoppable
oncoming means of education, the transmission of humanity’s
knowledge not simply the local flavor,  will tend to undermine those
dogmas.  We need to be intelligent enough to create societies with
concordant moralities not because of some ecclesiastical tenets but
because we know we have developed with a moral faculty that pilots
our intuitive judgments of right and wrong that is involved in various
busy ways with the common culture. These intuitions are the result of
millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social animals
and are as much a part of our common ancestry as are our opposable
thumbs. This fact alone is incompatible with the story of divine creation,
but there are others.

We already live in nation of people who don’t communicate or empathize with their fellow man. It’s one of the biggest reasons that we have seen workers rights in america all but evaporate in this anti-union era. And now educators want to push for all electronic classrooms, severly limiting any stundent interaction with other students. As we have all found out about the “me first” workplace, when I don’t even know the name of the guy working 3 cubicles down, what are the odds that i’ll give a shit about him and his family come the day for paycuts and layoffs? Me first america is just putting more grease on the tracks of our train trip to Fascism.

While I see the need for each subsequent generation to be tech saavy, there is no substitute for the experiences, both positive and negative, of the interpersonal classroom experience.

My mother always used to say how she preferred we visit her instead of calling or e-mailing. Why? Because she said its harder to tell over the phone whether someone is lying or not.

Patrick-Henry, agreed!  There already are software companies that
have developed and are continuing to develop verification programs.
In the United States there is only a voluntary federal certification for
voting machines and each state has ultimate jurisdiction over having
voter certification, though most states currently require national
certification for the voting systems.  See http://www.eac.gov/ The US
Election Assistance Commission.  Each state has sovereign discretion. 
So if any improvement is desired, it has to be at the state level and
state politicians elected who would support stronger certification
regulations.  By the way, at the eac.gov site there is a link to Resources
for Voters that could offset the attempt by Republicans to disfranchise
millions of voters, one of which is Register to Vote online!

Computers and the Internet, that is, network sophisticated comprehen-
sive educational systems, both closed and open, are the very near future,
and even closer, are here right now, today.  Though this method of
education has not become seasoned yet, meaning the pedagogic kinks
have not yet all been worked out. It will mature as it gets more and more
used.  But there is no doubt it is the flash of the future.  Learning in brick
and mortar schools will become a thing of the past and money will not
be needed to build or maintain such halls of learning and all associated
costs physical buildings require.  Electronic classrooms will become the
way to interact with others with no pigtails dipped in Johnny’s inkwell. 
In the future, we will wonder if remote learning wasn’t always the way it
was done.  To think otherwise is a kind of Luddism.  Schools are wise to
embrace, to anticipate, the new technology for several reasons. 
American students are already lagging behind other nations in terms
of technology use and crucial content skills in language arts, sciences,
etc.; it takes a certain learning curve to be able to use electronics to
their capacity that can hold unlimited discrete information.  We are on
the brink of a new epoch and unlike before, we can watch it unfold.
Verification will come as the systems evolve.

D. Sirota makes very good points in his article.  The tech industry has succeeded in getting consumers addicted to the idea that the purchase of every new item is a necessity. The problem is that many of these consumers are individuals who play a role in decisions regarding the direction of education—as parents, students, education professionals, politicians, etc. They have already developed a mindset about viewing technology as the answer to everything instead of treating it as a valuable tool. Add to this the incentives and monetary rewards tech businesses offer to those who are willing to go along and you get a very distorted view of education. 

The pressure on replacing -not just enhancing- important areas of education with electronic technology has also been extending to other fields such as library systems and medical care.

I wish the same can be said of our nations voting systems.