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With YouTube, for example, students can post their ideas to the world and get rapid global feedback. With tools like Twitter and its cousins, they can follow firsthand details of events unfolding anywhere in the world, from revolutions to natural disasters. With mashups and related techniques, they can combine sophisticated data sources in powerful new ways. One school group I know of created a Second Life model of Los Angeles, using the database of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to show each plane flying in its actual spot! With Skype-like tools, students can connect with experts and peers around the world in real time.

Effective Thinking, which would include creative and critical thinking as well as portions of math, science, logic, persuasion, and even storytelling; Effective Action, which would include entrepreneurship, goal setting, planning, persistence, project management, and feedback; and Effective Relationships, which would include emotional intelligence, teamwork, ethics, and more.

Instead of today's focus on pre-established subject matter, with thinking skills presented randomly, haphazardly, and inconsistently, the student and teacher focus would always be on thinking in its various forms and on being an effective thinker, using examples from math, science, social studies, and language arts.

These would range from small projects in earlier years ("I made this app or this website") to larger projects ("I collaborated with a class in another country to publish a bilingual novel"; "I started a successful company") to participation in later years in huge, distributed projects around the world ("Using Galaxy Zoo, I discovered a new, habitable planet").

Producing effective letters, reports, and essays was an intellectual need of our past. Working effectively in virtual communities, communicating effectively through video, and controlling complex technologies are what students need to be successful in the future. Thinking, acting, relating, and accomplishing—in the technological and fast-changing context of the future—are where we should focus our students' attention.

find, identify, monitor and update which are the most relevant "information sources", hubs or curators in every possible area of interest. Search engines and traditional media do not presently provide this information

Some of these would certainly include online searching, research, critical thinking, comparative analysis, evaluation and verification of alternative sources, classification and labeling, questioning, summarizing and synthesis skills (among others)

In other words, researchers, educators and guides prefer to refer to trusted "curators" of specific information areas rather than to rely on Google-style secret and commercially-driven algorithms.

New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed.

As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did.

And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning.

This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world.

Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.

Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.