Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
So what is the future of learning? The OECD draws a few scenarios for us:

1. Attempting to Maintain the Status Quo
Scenario 1.a: "Bureaucratic School Systems Continue" - The use of ICT continues to grow without changing schools' main organisational structures.
Scenario 1.b "Teacher exodus - The 'meltdown scenario'" - Widely different organisational responses to shortages - some traditional, some highly innovative - and possibly greater use of ICT.

2.Re-schooling
Scenario 2.a "Schools as Core Social Centres" - ICT used extensively, especially its communication capabilities.
Scenario 2.b "Schools as Focused Learning Organisations" - Extensive use made of ICT.

3.  De-schooling
Scenario 3.a "Learning Networks and the Network Society" - A multitude of learning networks, quickened by the extensive possibilities of powerful, inexpensive ICT.
Scenario 3.b "Extending the Market Model" - A wide range of market-driven changes would be introduced into the ownership and running of the learning infrastructure, some highly innovative and with the extensive use of ICT.

Artichoke comments, "Check out the 'ICT triumphs regardless' positioning of information communication technology throughout the thought document... I suspect we may have produced a more compellingly audacious document, something without the pervasive sense that ICTs will be ubiquitous, extensive and in some ill defined way the rescuers of future schooling." Well maybe. But the world in which ICT does not triumph does not, today, seem very likely. And the characterizations of the different schools of thought are certainly to some degree accurate, enough so that I am seeing the terminology repeated elsewhere (reg. required for this one, sorry).

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 06:17 a.m.

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