21st Century Schools

Although a lens to view the future is clouded, and must be filtered through the past and present, the ability to stand back and think about the impact of technologies on student learning will under-gird research in technology for the education of children, youth, and adults in the 21st century. We must view the coming changes, and they will be massive, from the perspective that technology provides access to learning but does not control it; that technologies are not the content of education rather, they provide a cornucopia of tools for learning.

The technologies we know now will change and merge, at an increasingly rapid pace. In 1965 Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, predicted the exponential growth of technology. Moore's law postulates that the processing power and speed of any electronic calculating device will double every 18 months. At the same time, the price for that technology will decline approximately 35% a year relative to the power. If this continues to be true, researchers will have an abundance of exciting new tools to use as they study the curriculum and children of the future. Those tools will not only be more powerful than we have now, they will cost less, making them affordable for research, for schools, and for business.

Educational research will undergo massive paradigm shifts we can only imagine. Because we live in a revolutionary time of astonishing advances in technologies, a world of constant and unrelenting change, new paradigms appear before the implications of their predecessors are digested. We know that schools must make changes to accommodate the technology revolution. West is already making changes in curriculum, teaching, and learning.

Living in a world of constant change is not easy, and predicting the nature of the coming changes brought about by the accelerating pace of technology advances, the accompanying information explosion, and the future's research agenda in education is a little like going backpacking in a primitive wilderness area. We must explore technology applications with children and youth and attempt to keep abreast of the rapid advances and potential uses in education and anticipate increasingly interesting possibilities.

The critical gear we carry on the research trail into the future is our mindset, one of exploration, of investigation, of accepting new ways of doing new things.

The literature on change describes levels of initiation and acceptance of innovations. Educators are divided into at least four groups, quite similar to what one experiences on the trail: the forerunners, the trailblazers, who innovate; those who come along and build on what others do; the middle ground who try what the first two groups find out; and those who lag behind. As we negotiate the wilderness trails ahead, accepting and adjusting to paradigm shifts in teaching and learning will become the survival tools for schools of the future.

The focus of the future's research agenda must remain on children and youth, the learners and the teachers, and how to find strategies to harness the power of the technologies in this endeavor. Education must come to grips with the technology revolution quickly, design and use new learning experiences, and teach more process skills than ever before. A mindset that encompasses creativity and subsequent innovation will be required if we are to explore and harness the potential offered by technologies. Futurists and educational reformers argue that new schools are needed for a new age, that the social power of technology will force us to redefine education, a task that will require a different mindset than educators have today.

There are those who espouse standards-based testing, founded on the knowledge of the past, and there are those whose position is firm in the process-based curriculum for the future. This differential is the critical point in the redefinition of education. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, children and youth must develop process skills in problem solving and critical thinking, communication, technical reading and writing, applied technical reasoning, information literacy, using technology as a tool, new personal skills, new mindset skills, and new curricula.

Crucial questions revolve around new strategies related to making changes, to applying what we already know about change, and to bringing research findings to practice quickly. How will we instill a mindset in educators so they will incorporate the potential of present and new technologies into the curriculum quickly? What are the most effective ways of bringing about changes that reflect the new curriculum?

Technology is not another turf, another subject, and another class. It represents a pervasive set of changing tools for learning and teaching. Given the power and potential of new technologies, if we continue to do the "same old thing," and use the "same old" paradigms, then the outcomes, no matter their age, will be less than favorable, much less than possible, and much less than we dream.

Technology is a tidal wave flooding the whole world, not a passing fad. It will not disappear in the next few years.

Computers and their accompanying applications, as well as other technologies, are the basics for children. Schools are not just "getting children ready" for technology use at some later date. In the West children can and are using technology now and they are connecting. It is preparing children for the future.

Old ideas die hard; however, we must not forget the lessons history teaches, or we--and each generation following us--will be relegated to repeating the work and mistakes of the distant or recent past. Educators must move away from entrenched positions. We must not only do things differently, we must do new things and do them quickly, or schools are likely to succumb to businesses that see education as a profitable enterprise. One of the most critical needs at present is that of finding new ways to connect learners and teachers with the results, implications, and procedures of educational research. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

The Evolution to Academic Excellence

In 21st century there is a need to develop a new entity in higher education - one that educates and develops graduates for meeting the challenges of this century. Such an institution must emphasize the creation and development of knowledge into practical, sustainable solutions to today's problems, and the commercialization of those solutions to create wealth. This must be done within a learning community that emphasizes communication and teaming skills leading to creative problem solving and within an environment that emphasizes a sound appreciation of humanity’s ethical and moral principles. Anthony G. Collins, President of Clarkson University, has expressed this in: “The Evolution to Academic Excellence.”

He asserts that with the advent of the industrial revolution during the nineteenth century, some liberal arts institutions added faculties that supported economic growth and spurred business development. At the same time, technological institutes sprang into action to create manufacturing professionals and some colleges even specialized in the art of business itself. After WWII a new emphasis began to emerge on research - the creation of scientific knowledge.

Those who have a vision to track the process of economic development – the connection of science to engineering to business coupled with liberal arts to provide the humanistic elements are best suited to create this type of institution. Ideally this type of institution would have engineering at the core of its being and value interdisciplinary activity rather than a culture that wants to retain disciplinary purity. The very interdisciplinary intellectual capacity and fundamental mathematics and sciences needed for engineering, technology and business degrees create the academic institution of the future.

General Francis Walker, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology once said: “In the present stage of social and industrial change, change almost bewildering in the rapidity of its movement and in the extent of the field over which it is taking place, it is most reasonable to believe that great gaps exist between the public needs and the supply of those needs by the existing institutions of learning. As a result of their freedom from obligation to the general system of education, they not only will be at liberty, but they will be strongly impelled to search out those real needs of the people in the matter of education which are at present unsupplied. It is essential to this function that they should remain in a state of flux; open to all impressions; mobile under all influences; not too soon assuming that they have found their ultimate resting place and have taken on their distinctive character.”

The mission of the institution has to be of graduating and developing students who lead and practice technology. Our focus must be on this “product.” While we must recognize the influence of nanotechnology, we have to fully grasp that “technology” and also the engineering to embrace a new knowledge-age definition that includes biotechnology and info-technology. We have to broaden our vision of technology to include contributions from the life sciences, to embrace the vitality of new disciplines within engineering, and to appreciate how businesses operate with the sophistication of integrated technology systems.

We have not recognized the dramatic changes in demographics - the changing fraction of underrepresented individuals, the geographic shifts in population centers, the socioeconomic profile of our constituents - nor have we fully recognized the need to introduce new majors to draw more women into the technological workforce so that their talents can be developed and utilized. In short, we need to and should be obligated to deliver education that is appealing to a broader range of potential students.

In addition to lagging behind in reacting to changes in student interest, the marketplace, and the demands of employers, we have failed to react to the roles our educational institutions must play in the economy. We must now recognize that the creation of knowledge can no longer be our end goal. We must also develop intellectual property, transferring technology to the marketplace, and become a central part of the economic enterprise that values innovation, creativity and creates wealth. Implicit in this direction is the development of research at all levels of the institution.

Given this unsettling background of an institution dependent upon its external environment, our institutions must revitalize higher learning in order to provide a more comprehensive, unique image that remains true to core mission and values.

The students ought to know that they are the center of the educational process and all academic staff demonstrates an unparalleled commitment to creating a person-to-person connection within our living, research and learning environments. The faculty needs to collaborate, innovate and create knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and educate students to have a particular appreciation for the opportunities that lie at the intersection of traditional disciplines.

Our campus community must stimulate the intellectual environment that attracts a diverse pool of exceptionally talented women and men who will rise to be leaders of the 21st century with the passion to create enterprises that benefit society.

The evolving strengths and vision for the future must intersect precisely with the growing technological needs of the society – a society that must depend upon a workforce capable of creating, adapting and managing technology regardless of discipline of study or natural individual talents.

To fulfill this vision for academic excellence, our educational institutions should uniquely position to further stake their legacy to society based on commitment to technology and leadership in marrying coursework, research and extracurricular pursuits in engineering, business, science, health sciences and arts.

We should create a distinctive place in the higher education order as attainable as we each ought to continue to promote and explore innovative ways to arrange the basic building blocks of traditional fields of study to reflect new avenues for interdisciplinary education, research breakthroughs, and solutions for society.

Our education system is a pack of confusion disorder. Can we transform it for delivering academic excellence as envisioned by Anthony G. Collins? (www.asifjmir.com)