What the Future is Bringing Us



'''What the Future Is Bringing Us entries are grouped by year. Click on the desired year or other content section'''


 * (2018)


 * (2017)


 * (2016)


 * (2015)


 * (2014)


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The documents listed below were all written quit a long time ago. They are reflective of some of the past of computer use in education.


 * (2004) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) planning document developed by David Moursund. The goal was to facilitate the development of a sequence of 1-credit (quarter hour system) graduate-level joint preservice and inservice courses to be taught at the University of Oregon.


 * (2000 to 2003) Golden Oldie News Oct-December 2000 up through Jan-March 2003. These materials were moved from an old Oregon Technology Education Council (OTEC) site developed by David Moursund). Most of the links in the referenced articles no longer work.


 * (1989) Three 1987 Math Education Scenarios. Provides some insights into math education futuristic planning in 1987.


 * (1974 to 2001) All of David Moursund's editorials published in Learning and Leading with Technology from its inception in 1974 until he retired from ISTE in 2001.


 * Free online access to All issues of the National Logo Exchange and its follow-up ICCE SIG-Logo from its beginning in 1982 through its ending in 1999, and a special final issue in the Spring, 2015.




 * "All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth." (Alvin Toffler; American writer and futurist; 1928-2016.)


 * "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay; American computer scientist and educator; born May 17, 1940.)

Introduction
All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Brief Overview of Technology Forecasting
Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as levels of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a particular future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc. The forecast does not have to state how these characteristics will be achieved.




 * If a decision maker has several alternatives open to him, he will choose among them on the basis of which provides him with the most desirable outcome. Thus his decision is inevitably based on a forecast. His only choice is whether the forecast is obtained by rational and explicit methods, or by intuitive means.

Special Message for Teachers
Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from this year's list, or other annual lists published on this website. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts on this website may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

Still another approach is to raise the following question with your students near the beginning of any new unit of study: "What changes are going on around the world that are having a major impact on this unit of study?" The idea is to emphasize change and the understanding that you are helping your students to get an education that prepares them for a changing world.

Teachers working with students may also be interested in having the students research and report on one or more "futures predictions" from 5 to 10 years ago, or perhaps when they were in first grade, or the year they were born, and so on. They can find out which predictions have become part of our world today and which ones failed to materialize, and why or why not in each case.

A Little History of Technological Breakthroughs

 * Phillips, M. (1/19/2016). Better living through robots. Bloomberg Business. Retrieved 2/21/2016 from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-19/davos-theme-better-living-through-robots.

Phillips' article discusses potential futures of robots, with various people arguing that they are currently producing little change in the world and others arguing that we are just beginning and that the pace of change will increase. In addition, his article contains some nice tidbits of history of technology. Topics covered include:

1781 Scotsman James Watt patents a rotary motion steam engine.

1830 The Liverpool & Manchester railroad begins regular commercial service.

1844 The Morse telegraph enters commercial service.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone.

1878 Thomas Edison creates the incandescent light bulb.

1886 Karl Benz is granted a patent for a combustion engine for "auto-mobiles."

1913 Ford Motor engineers the first moving assembly line for autos at its Highland Park facility in Michigan.

1916 Clarence Birdseye pioneers a flash-freezing system for preserving food.

1933 Boeing introduces the twin-engine 10-passenger 247, the first modern commercial airliner.

1934 E.I.du Pont de Nemours creates nylon.

1942 Enrico Fermi and colleagues at the University of Chicago achieve the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.

1947 A team at Bell Labs invents the transistor.

1955 IBM engineers design the first disk drive for random-access storage of data.

1958 Engineers at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor develop the first integrated circuit.

1960 Digital Equipment introduces the first "compact" computer, priced at $125,000 without software or peripherals.

1964 British engineer Leslie Phillips makes carbon fiber.

1964 Two professors at Dartmouth develop the BASIC computer programming language.

1970 The first CD-ROM is patented by James Russell.

1971 Intel introduces the 4004 four-bit microprocessor, which it dubs a "computer on a chip." This led to the first microcomputers starting in about 1975.

1972 E-mail is pioneered on the Arpanet network using the @ sign in a message address.

1982 The Federal Communications Commission approves commercial cellular phone service.

Links to Other IAE Resources
This is a collection of IAE publications related to the IAE document you are currently reading. For the most part it provides links to general categories of material available in the IAE sites.

IAE Blog
All IAE Blog Entries.

Popular IAE Blog Entries.

Possible futures of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.

Forecasting the future: good education helps prepare students for their possible futures.

IAE Newsletter
All IAE newsletters.

IAE-pedia (IAE's Wiki)
Home Page of the IAE-pedia.

Popular IAE-pedia Pages.

I-A-E Books and Miscellaneous Other
[http://iae-pedia.org/David_Moursund_Books David Moursund's Free Books. Includes books co-authored with Robert Sylwester.]

Books authored or co-authored by Bob Albrecht that are available free online from Information Age Education.

David Moursund's Learning and Leading with Technology Editorials.

Author
This page was created by and is maintained by David Moursund.