Is it something essentially human that makes us try to imagine the world of tomorrow? Is it part of the standard kit that we’re born with? Perhaps. If you weren’t born in the 60s it may be hard to imagine how exciting those times were. We were going to the moon! It was a sort of national thrill ride. It was everywhere in our society. We drank Tang, watched Star Trek, and subscribed to Popular Science. In the 60s imagining what the future would hold was a pretty common pastime.

All that thinking about the future, envisioning how great things will be, was good for us. If looking forward is a human instinct then it’s clearly one that has been crafted and honed by millions of years of evolution. It’s clearly a key to our survival.

The best futurists, or prognosticators, or science fiction writers, or whatever you call them… all have a tendency to look at the past and the present and follow the trend lines to get a peek at what hides around the next bend. Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, Arthur C. Clarke—all of them looked at yesterday and today and imagined a better tomorrow. In doing so, they quite often guided how that future came to be.

Alan Kay is famous for saying, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” If that’s true, then the second best way is to imagine it and inspire someone else to invent it. Arthur C. Clarke imagined the communication satellite and inspired engineers to make it real. One can’t look at the form factors of cell phones and laptops without seeing the influence of Star Trek. Looking forward helps guide us to the places we envision.

How important is it then to look to what the future could hold for education? Imagining the ways we’ll learn, the ways we’ll teach this and coming generations… doesn’t that sound like a good investment of our time?

What could be more thrilling than peering into the future and seeing how we’ll inspire kids to be curious? What are the ways we’ll be able to continue to follow our own curiosity as we grow older and, hopefully, wiser?

Curiosity is built into our DNA by evolution as well, and isn’t curiosity the place where all learning must start? If there’s a survival trait more important than a tendency to look forward, it might be the tendency to want to learn. The tendency to ask questions and seek answers. Learning connects us to our pasts, lets us examine today, and ultimately gives us a way to see into the future. Looking forward and learning are inseparable acts.

So what does the future of education look like? To understand that, let’s take a lesson from some of those forward-thinking geniuses and take a look back. What did we expect the future would hold back in the 60s?

No More Schools

The vision:

There was a common belief that we’d have done away with classrooms by now. Dick and Jane would be studying in their den, using two-way television to talk to their teacher and send facsimiles of their homework assignments across the telephone lines.

The reality:

While there are a few successful exceptions (K12, Kaplan), the promise of homeschooling hasn’t been fulfilled just yet. The kids are still walking and bussing to centralized brick-and-mortar schools to participate in learning, for the most part, the same way their parents and grandparents did. This is remarkable given that we have a mind-boggling infrastructure for learning at home. In nearly every way our homes are equipped with more technology than anyone could have imagined in the 60s. Cable television has brought high-speed internet access to an incredibly large audience. The technology of this vision is there, why didn’t we get the rest?

Teachers anywhere

The vision:

If Dick and Jane could be learning from home, then their teachers could be anywhere on earth. Anthropologists in New Guinea could be about teaching tribal village customs from the actual tribal village. The brightest brains in physics could be teaching all children about the puzzlements of quantum physics, without ever leaving their laboratories.

The reality:

Dick and Jane are still being taught by the best teachers the local school district budget can afford. While they are, almost universally, devoted, bright, talented individuals, the teachers in our public schools are not experts in every subject they teach. It is a miracle that so many of them achieve so much with so little. The need to have each teacher, in person, in a classroom of only 30 or so students per class, makes the economics of teacher salaries a foregone conclusion. Instead of teachers anywhere we have the opposite: teachers everywhere.

Instant access to the world’s libraries

The vision:

Though few saw the explosion of cheap personal computers, many thought that we’d have access through some vague centralized computer to all of the world’s books. Science fiction was replete with know-it-all computers that could tell you any fact about any person, place or thing you could imagine. Many of these computers had female voices and provided concise, yet detailed, PowerPoint presentations on the subject.

The reality:

I think we have to admit that this one is largely spot on. With the one-two punch of Google and Wikipedia it is amazing how much information we can access from nearly anywhere. It would be great to have the information processed a bit and provided in a neat summary presentation… but most of functionality of that vision is available. It may be worth a moment to recognize that the free market has some undeniable successes and this is one. Free access to a wealth of information for anyone. The downside? How reliable is that information? Star Trek’s computers were 100% accurate and reliable. Wikipedia, not so much.

Plug-in learning

The vision:

Though this vision might have been more prominent in the 80s, the idea of jacking in and pumping knowledge directly into our brains has been around since the 50s. Most would recognize this as a scene from the dystopic fiction of William Gibson or The Matrix, but many futurists saw it as a logical outcome of cybernetics and studies of the brain. A discrete metal port just behind the ear. Snap in a small connector and dial up a lesson in Shakespeare.

The reality:

While people like the idea of instant everything, they also have a certain appreciation for the fragility of their brains. No one is rushing to get a neural port implanted just yet. But look around you. Everyday we see folks of every age in all sorts of places with their bluetooth ear pieces. Every year these shiny bits of tech become smaller and sleeker. Who’s to say that we won’t one day see the next step… a small implantable chip-phone. Once the device is in your head and the network can be accessed directly, will data-streaming directly to the brain be far behind?

Shaping the future

So that’s where we thought we’d be by now. Some hits, some misses. What’s remarkable is how, at least to some degree, we can see how those visions were tugging on the way things played out. Their influence on the social and technological tides is unmistakable. That’s not to say, however, all futurist thinking results in that technology coming to fruition. Dude, where’s my flying car? But imagining the future has a tendency to help shape that future.

What’s the future of learning? How will our children and their children gain and retain knowledge? One thing is certain, we have the technology We have the tools to shape how we educate, train, and learn in ways we couldn’t imagine 20, 30 or 40 years ago. If we choose we could eliminate brick-and-mortar schools in this decade. We could eliminate textbooks, paper ones anyway, and offer course materials that are made in the open educational resources model Rich Baraniuk is championing. We could see technologies like the Apple iPhone become Personal Learning Devices, constant companions that allow anyone to learn anything, anywhere, at anytime. We could use the infrastructure we’ve got right in front of us to allow the best teachers on the planet to teach all of the children on the planet. We could do all of that and more. How?

We need only use our imaginations.

For the next 12 months, Standard Imagination is devoting its website to stimulating a conversation among the eLearning community. What do you think the future of eLearning might be? Where are we going? Where should we be going? What’s working? What isn’t? We welcome your comments and your participation in this conversation. If you, your company, organization, or agency have a point of view you’d like to express, let us know. We’d love to provide you with a soapbox of your own. Let’s see where the conversation takes us.