The Future of Teaching and Learning Technologies

The evolution of a few critical technologies has the potential to change the way teaching and learning is done is the near future. Among those technologies are biometrics, global positioning systems and real mobile computing. Previously unthinkable paradigms for education are now—or soon will be—affordable, as Moore’s Law slashes the cost of intelligent devices. This chapter presents some challenging ideas about how learning might be done in the future and what the future of colleges, classes and courses —if they still exist —might be. Predicting the future accurately is at best difficult. Extrapolations from the present into the future are fraught with unpredictability. In 1958, a Boeing 707 320-B, the first United States (U.S.) commercial jet liner, cruised at 607 mph (Boeing, 2004). You’d expect that today, 46 years later, airplanes would fly much faster; yet the Boeing 747 and even the future 7e7 actually cruise a bit slower (Boeing, 2004). Spotting a trend doesn’t necessarily mean it will continue.