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a quick historical review of the digital revolution shows us: huge increases in data speeds and transfer rates, exponential growth in computer power, massive increase of storage capacity—again, all while the technology is getting cheaper and smaller.

In a 1960s lecture hall you might typically find TV monitors

Then if you jump 30 years into the future, to the 1990s, you find that analog technology was replaced by digital technology: projection systems that were considered very, very sophisticated at that time.

ask yourself: What did not change? The instructors still lectured, delivering in a broadcast/absorb model the very same way they did in the 1960s. In terms of learning, this was just a little bit of a shift. While the digital revolution disrupted so much of our society and our lives, it impacted education only in small, incremental ways. And generally, that is still true today in 2010.

I often make the argument that over the past 50 years, we’ve been primarily focused on automating education

but we haven’t really geared up to change or transform the basic way we’re teaching

Open Education Trends

At the core of the open content movement in higher education are illustrious efforts that have been going on now for almost a decade, to make high-quality university-level course materials free and openly available to the world, via the web.

Connexions has focused on building an environment that allows experts to collaborate on developing textbook content.

People have raised questions about the sustainability of open content models.

But what we’re starting to see now—and it is still relatively early in the unfolding story of open content—is a commercial ecosystem beginning to grow up around existing open content.

Impact of Open Content

We’re on the verge of seeing the cost of education content fall dramatically. The $150, $200 textbook model, I believe, is simply unsustainable, and we are going to see that model fall apart in the not-too-distant future.

I also think we may see an important movement toward best-of-breed content.

For example, I might put out a particular piece of educational material. Someone may take that material, modify or tweak it, and bring his own innovation to it. Over a relatively short period of time, we end up with high-quality, innovative, best-of-breed materials.

We’re entering an age when it’s becoming more and more ridiculous that our faculty are, every year, re-creating Econ 101 over and over again at our institutions.

largest population of users of MIT/OCW materials are not educators, and they’re not students. They are self-directed learners. They’re people who are coming to MIT because they have a passion to learn something.

Personal and Open Learning

Let’s move on and look at learning technology trends, especially the emergence of the personal learning environment [PLE] and the open learning network [OLN], e-portfolios, and the semantic web.

you’re probably aware of the “post-LMS era” that people feel we’re entering.

I have yet to find a standard definition of the PLE, but some of its characteristics include that it tends to be a highly customized environment, built by the learner himself.

Learners use web 2.0 tools to aggregate content and connections—so you can gather information from many sources, while at the same time making connections with other people around that content.

we see that while the LMS has been out there and in development for 10-20 years or so, it has really been built just to support status quo teaching—lecturing and very traditional forms of education—while personal learning environments like mine tend to be much more open and participatory, as well as learner-centric.

The question becomes: Will the LMS and the PLE diverge?

The idea here is to leverage some of the open standards that are emerging—the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards, plus standards outside of education like the open social API standards from Google—and to use these standards to allow us to mash up the LMS and personal learning environment.

Next, electronic portfolios: Since 2003, the use of e-portfolios on our campuses has tripled.

Reflection is a critical component of any really good e-portfolio implementation; it’s a great way for students to engage in learning.

A missing piece, I would argue, especially on the reflective side of e-porfolios, is a credentialing model. A new credentialing model will open the doors for better uses of e-portfolios, and possibly unlock the floodgates of disruption in fundamental education practices.

This is the very best model of pedagogy that 18th century technology can provide.  It’s teacher-centered model that is one way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. It’s time for a rethinking of the entire model of learning.  We need to move to a customized and collaborative model that embraces 21st century learning technology and techniques.  This is not about technology per se – it’s about a change in the relationship between the student and teacher in the learning process.

Are we willing to accept that an Industrial Age form of education isn’t much good for children who have to work in a digital age?

Portugal launched the biggest program in the world to equip every child in the country with a laptop and access to the web and the world of collaborative learning. To pay for it, Portugal tapped into both government funds and money from mobile operators who were granted 3G licenses. That subsidized the sale of one million ultra-cheap laptops to teachers, school children, and adult learners.

The impact on the classroom is tremendous, as I saw this spring when I toured a classroom of seven-year-olds in a public school in Lisbon. It was the most exciting, noisy, collaborative classroom I have seen in the world.

too often, in the American and Canadian school system, teachers still rely on the traditional model of education. Teachers often feel that this is the only way to teach a large classroom of kids, and yet the classroom in Portugal shows that giving kids laptops can free the teacher to introduce a new way of learning that’s more natural for kids who have grown up digital at home.

First, it allows teachers to step off the stage and start listening and conversing instead of just lecturing. Second, the teacher can encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the teacher’s information. Third, the teacher can encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the school. Finally, the teacher can tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

simply providing computers in schools is not enough. Teachers facing a classroom of kids with laptops need to learn that they are no longer the expert in their domain; the Internet is.