"I would argue the classroom twenty years from now will be a space reconfigured and repurposed for different needs," he said. "No more 'tablet armchairs.' The classrooms may look more like living rooms. We're going to see classrooms moving away from lectures to a more collaborative environment, heavy on group projects. I could see a student's tools all contained on one device, sharing wirelessly on a common screen or with each other, device-to-device, and much more web-based."
The devices they use will also continue to shrink. Students are already showing a preference for tablets and web-books over laptops.
"The social web has enforced a powerful notion of collaborative knowledge creation," Jim Groom, instructional technology specialist and adjunct professor at Virginia's University of Mary Washington told Ars. "How can a classroom in this moment ignore the shape of the web?" he asked. His university is planning a pilot program to give 900 new students not just their own blogs, but a complete domain and space in which they will work, archive, sandbox, rant and play, and over which they have complete control.
Trudy Sweeney on 24 Feb 12Abstract AER 56 explores national and international policy priorities for building students' innovation capabilities through information and communication technologies (ICT) in Australian schools. Section 1 sets out the Australian policy context for digital education and highlights some of the emerging challenges. It provides an overview of two Australian school education policy priorities: that of how to meaningfully include technologies into teaching and learning; and how to build innovation capabilities in students. Section 2 critically examines the education and economic policy contexts for digital education in Australia, their intersections with international economic priorities, and the role of commercial technologies markets in schools. Section 3 discusses those Australian education policy priorities that focus on how students build both their discipline-based knowledge and general capabilities, such as creativity and innovation, using technologies. Section 4 provides some insights into how students currently use technologies for learning and communicating with each other inside and outside of school, and reflects upon what are the implications of these practices for students and policy implementation in schools. In Section 5 the discussion focuses on the physical and human characteristics required by all stakeholders to enable learning with technologies in 21st century schools. Section 6 challenges existing policy approaches to technology-use in schools, and argues for more open approaches to the deployment and use of technologies and digital resources in schools.
