Barefoot In the head

If you think so....

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Location: Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom

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Sunday, July 29, 2012

Out flew the Web and floated wide, the mirror cracked from side to side

Academics have been seriously discussing 'modern' issues with education. Open Learning, Distance Education, Autonomous Learning, Lifelong Learning, Collaborative Learning etc.

While we were in the middle of these serious deliberations, the carpet was slowly sliding from under our feet. We did not have to make those important things happen. They had all happened by themselves. Because of three developments in technology: the Internet, WiFi and Tablets.

Wherever these three things are available, people do open, distance, autonomous, collaborative lifelong learning. Provided they can search, read, understand and form beliefs from information.

And where these technologies are not available, they will be, in just a few years.

We should now change our agenda and figure out what the next big issues are in education. We have to figure out how to dematerialise our institutions and convert the existing brick and mortar into museums of education where future generations will come and say, 'Oh, so that's how they used to educate people!'

'The used to teach children to do arithmetic in their heads!', they would marvel.

Just as we look back at our past, in vast palaces that are now museums, and say, 'They used to cut off huge blocks of ice from the glaciers in the mountains, wrap them in straw, and carry them with hundreds of animals and men into the hot plains - just so the emperor could have an ice cube in his drink'