Thursday 19 March 2015

Looking ahead to 2025

Jeff Haywood, VP for Digital Education at Edinburgh University
Post compulsory education in an even more technology rich world.

Technologies are not in a vacuum, but are socially shaped
They arise and are used in response to need
By 2025 there will be new technologies that we can't imagine today.

What sorts of things will we have to take account of over next few years?





Over next few years, we will see an increasing desire to develop an HE system that is fit for purpose in the 21st century. Political desire for change and modernisation will be in a policy agenda. Big consequence for the systems we use, and for the suppliers.

NMC horizon report in 2014 set out the significant challenges impeding higher education technology adoption in 3 categories:
Solveable
Low digital fluency of faculty
Relative lack of rewards for teaching

Difficult
Competition from new models of education
Scaling teaching innovation

Wicked ( complex to define, much less address)
Expanding access
Keeping education relevant

"IT has been extremely consequential in higher education over the last 25 years, but principally in output enhancing ways that do not show up in the usual measure of either productivity or cost per student"
Quote from William Bowen in October 2012

Things we have to look out for
Data based research for all. Will be a significant challenge we all have to grasp. So much data out there, can buy processing, storage analysis tools cheaply. Everybody can do research. How do we bring this in, give people the skills in analysis, data visualisation etc. We will have to engage with it.

Digital data and longevity. This is not just about research data, but our own data. How do we help people create, document, use, store, share and preserve data?

Bring your own technology. Not a threat, but an opportunity. People bring stuff that we don't have to buy, procure, manage or refresh. We would be foolish to ignore or exclude this. How do we capitalise on this? Support it without feeling the need to own or support it.

Open is going to grow. Open data, open science, open publications, open education. Is becoming accepted, and normal by default. Open virtual laboratory. Open Shakespeare. How do we capture citizen science? It will happen anyway.

Technology futures that will impact education:

Security, identity, surveillance, malevolence
Ubiquity of fast internet
Mobile everything and wearables
Internet of things, consumer devices and instrumentation
Semantic web and ubiquitous information, find and digitise on demand
Intelligent agents. Helping us to do things at scale.
Data driven world, analytics, predictive, on demand compute
Personalisation. Me+free+easy models will dominate
Video/audio will be easier than text
Speech recognition. Any voice instantly.
Real time translation. May not be a dominant language in future. Will radically change international collaboration
Digital/physical co presence. Think Princess Leia in Star Wars. Will radically change virtual meetings.
Social Internet. Collaboration and mass crowd sourcing
3d printing will be common, fast and cheap.





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