Information Age Education Blog

The first IAE-pedia entry in the What the Future Is Bringing Us series was published on December 1, 2008. It included some articles that were published on the Web in 2007. My goal was to look at forecasts for likely changes in technology that were “coming down the pike” and consider some of their possible educational implications.

Less than three weeks ago, I began writing What the Future is Bringing Us: 2018. Access the current 2018 entries and those from the past 10 years in References and Resources at Moursund (January, 2018). This means that current readers can look back over the past ten years, and think about some of these old forecasts. What follows are three of the entries from What the Future Is Bringing Us: 2007. That IAE-pedia page contains information about some forecasts made in 2007 and some made in early 2008.

We are all interested in improving the quality of education that our children receive both in and outside of school. If there were a “magic pill,” to accomplish this task, I believe it would have been discovered. So far, no such luck.

As I read the education literature, I search for success stories. There are many such stories. But, is there a magic pill, or some ideas that can be easily replicated?

The MIT Technology Review is on my regular “must read” list of magazines that I subscribe to. Every issue contains articles that challenge my current knowledge and insights into how the world is changing.

The first issue of 2018 is certainly no exception. Antonio Regalado’s article about gene editing, These Are Not Your Father’s GMOs, caught my attention (Regalado, January/February, 2018). In brief summary, gene editing that merely changes a gene without inserting “foreign matter” is legal in the United States. For example, it is legal to insert an extra copy of a small piece (a snippet) of a plant’s DNA strand into the DNA strand, or to remove a snippet. This can be done with current technology, and it is being done.

Larry Cuban is an emeritus professor at Stanford University. He is a prolific writer about our failures and successes in improving education. A recent article provides a few of his reminisces about the year 2017 (Cuban, 12/29/2017). Quoting from this article:

I was one of the founders of the Math Learning Center (MLC) and have served on its Board of Directors since this 501(c)(3) organization started 40 years ago. During these 40 years, I have advocated for increased use of calculators and computers in math education. Several hundred of my math education and computer education publications are available free online (IAE, 2017). Three of my more widely read math education articles are (Moursund, 2017a; Moursund, 2017b; and Moursund, 2017c).

One of my contributions to the MLC was getting it started in developing some online Math Manipulatives programs (Moursund, 4/19/2013). A catalog of the MLC’s current collection of 11 free online math manipulatives is available (MLC, 2017).