Joe Hartley

Mass education gets personal.

Thursday Mar 13, 2008

As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)

Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:

"Mass education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural education—indeed , all education—has to be totally reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups and even individuals."

We are approaching a time when we will be able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning through distant online mentors.

This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.

The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.

Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work, and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content, and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.

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