Page 79 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

Over the next ten years, shops will be rarely full of stock that needs to be sold, but rather, consumers will stand in front of a two-metre high screen and next to a ‘sonic post’. As you rotate 360o in front in front of the screen, scanners take your measurements and image and present an interactive 3D image of you on the screen. By interacting with a touch-pad or via voice, you select from the general list of items, the clothes you may want to try on. This is refined until you decide what you like, and then your 3D life-size image appears on the screen wearing those clothes. By rotating your finger, your screen image rotates to see what the clothes look like on ‘you’. You can then apply other finger gestures that allow you to see how you will look from close-up, at a distance, side on, bending over etc. By placing your hand just above the sonic post, you can ‘feel’ the textures of the different materials the garment is made of and as you point to specific regions of the screen you can feel whether those jeans feel too tight, loose, too heavy, ‘scratchy’ ...
These transitions, combined with technological advances in manufacturing, will see the current, predominantly manual labour market, continue to transition to a more technological and entrepreneurial market, where the economic returns are equally substantial. Entrepreneurs will manage franchised ‘stores’ while local, small, high tech ‘factories’ will create and deliver your goods to you within 24-48 hours.
But there’s one major difference in today’s modern workplace—we can learn anything, anywhere, anytime if we know how to learn and do that efficiently. Knowledge used to be a commodity that only a few people had access to, and this was passed down through specific channels such as churches, families or schools. Today, knowledge is available instantly. If you want to know how to programme your 3D printer to make a cake, or learn to build an app, then you can find solutions to these problems on YouTube. The solutions to all these learning challenges are to be found through social media, YouTube, TED, Edx, Coursera and many other online learning services that are all free of charge. But to learn, requires critical literacy skills to discern whether the information that we are accessing is both reliable and up-to-date. But this is simply knowledge, as this process may not necessarily convey the understanding of ideas let alone concepts and more complex concept frameworks that you may require.
“This new movement is the age of the ‘learning workers’. Yes, these people largely have college degrees and advanced training, but what sets them apart is their knowledge of how to learn. Instead of having a set of specific skills, learning workers have the skills to learn as they go, adapt, and apply their learning to new situations and issues. While an old-fashioned bookkeeper may have entered the workforce with knowledge passed down from a predecessor of how to work the systems, today’s accountants and bookkeepers are taught to think for themselves and apply the principles they learned to a variety of situations, continuing to adapt and learn as they go.108 Jacob Morgan
Meanwhile punitive, standards-based assessment programmes do nothing to generate the required competencies, personal independence, agency, the ability to learn ‘on the fly’, along with the capability to be constantly learning, so we can be innovative and ingenious. These are the capabilities that are now required to be able to work and play in this emerging new world.
The challenge for today’s schools is to be brave and innovative enough to manage what governments think schools should do, while at the same time ensure that learners in our schools are prepared for the actual world these young people will be entering. Addressing this duality is not ideal but it is possible!
108 Morgan, J. (2016). Say Goodbye To Knowledge Workers And Welcome To Learning Workers. Forbes magazine. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2016/06/07/say-goodbye-to-knowledge-workers-and-welcome-to-learning- workers/#35644d5c2f93
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