In nineteen seventy seven when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in junior high school one of my teachers predicted the future of education. He claimed that when our kids were in school the desks world recognize the particular student and automatically mark them present or absent, every student would have their own computer terminal at their desk tied into the master classroom computer and all the students information would be stored on punch cards. Punch cards looked a lot like a Scan-Tron forms but were thick with holes that the computer read. Of course this was back when only NASA and big companies had computers, they were huge and slow and one needed a engineering degree to operate one.
I image things will change quite a bit because of new technology, some bad changes but mostly good. Probably the biggest social change is that technology is making the world smaller and better known. Even if a person living in La Verne California has never met a person living in Baghdad Iraq, they can still read each others blogs and maybe by some miracle have a little less hostility toward each other. Hey, its a start.
Students having laptops is certainly a wonderful thing. Anybody remember encyclopedia books, or having to run to the library to do research? All that is now at our fingertips and with a Wi-Fi equipped laptop we can access it almost anywhere.
I like to imagine in a perfect world students from anywhere in the world would be able to attend a virtual classroom at any school, anywhere in the world at little or no cost. Students in third world countries with Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program could attend a virtual classroom at Harvard, MIT or even ULV.
