Here is a draft of a vision of what is possible about learning in the year 2010. All the components exist today. This vision of learning complements a vision of what is likely for schooling in the same year. I’ll post the schooling vision later. Please let me know how my vision relates to yours.
By the year 2010, a public policy debate will exist about who owns rights and duties for learning, each individual for him/her self, or the state.
What appears settled education law will be challenged by proponents of an individual’s constitutional rights to learn anything, anywhere, and anytime whether or not in an approved school curriculum.
It will be apparent to most educated people that they and their family members can acquire through mobile communications almost anything they want, need, or choose to know whenever and wherever they want. Most of the time they will not want or need an intervener to learn something new.
These initiatives will help individuals adapt to globalized intellectual property and competition for tangible resources.
Increased numbers of people individually initiating learning will expose the latent decades old debate over ownership of learning.
In light of these initiatives, the general polity will seek guidance from managers of the formal schooling sector to justify efficiencies of public expenditures for public school learning.
The debate will open a First Amendment discussion about whether learning is free speech. Discussion of other constitutional rights will occur about the extent to which learning is commerce.
These discussions will address the extent to which an individual (or an entity such as a publicly funded and regulated school) has the right to control what any individual selects to learn as well as when, where, and how to learn it.
Challengers will assert they have a right to select what they and their children will learn. Publicly funded education managers will maintain that they know best who should learn what, when, where, and how.
Evolving electronic technology available to the public will support both sides of the issue.
Equally important discussions will address the question of who has the right and duty to demand personal benefits from learning, those offering learning opportunities (such as paid school managers and teachers) or students (those exchanging effort, resources, and time to meet assigned learning criteria) in a learning transaction.
Technology for assessing and comparing personal and social benefits will exist to support both sides of the discussion.
The context for debates about learning ownership already exists. An increasing number of people of all ages initiate all levels of learning by themselves and their families. These people pay to learn on demand while monitoring cost benefits and personal benefits returns.
People will increasingly write individualized learning plans (ILPs) for themselves and their family members. They will use ILPs to guide home study that supplements as well as replaces formal schooling, especially elementary school.
ILPs will help prepare them for rapidly changing entrepreneurship ventures, new employment, and similar intellectual competition. They will also use ILPs to negotiate scheduled learning outcomes in formal organizations, such as in schools and job skill training agencies.
More low cost, commercially available mobile hardware and software offering a wide range of Direct Learning, Direct Instruction to edutainment will fulfill these expectations.
Not for profit and government agencies will increasingly struggle to compete for funding in the shadow of commercially supported individually initiated learning.
Learning on demand will represent a far-sighted commitment to personal growth. It will represent a renewed priority to learning over commitments to formal organizations for learning.
This demand commitment will encourage an almost boundless innovation in every aspect of education, from redesigning learning settings, to increasing learning efficiencies, to replacing personal contact with interactive machines not yet conceived beyond fantasy cartoons.
More parents will expect their children to use mobile media to break fundamental codes for reading, writing, and mathematics before attending school.
More parents will negotiate with educators to accelerate schedule dates for students to acquire specific skills and to meet state standards for academic content in schools.
An increasing number of private schools will enroll students willing to initiate and plan their own learning.
Individually initiated learning (IIL) will exercise curiosity, necessity, and convenience any time, any where about any thing.
Learning on demand will create more entrepreneurship, more personal benefits, more independent resources, and more flexible contributions to lifestyles and to society.
This focus will encourage social independence upon which vibrant social institutions of family, education, polity, religion, and economy reside.
IIL stands for far-sighted commitment to maintain personal responsibility for acquiring information and skills to gain and pay for a distinctive lifestyle of choice (don’t like that word). It will change the model for encouraging and supporting learning.
Learning on demand and individually initiated learning permit an individual to learn at the highest levels without regard to learning rates of others.
Such learning does not stand for relying
1. on incremental group learning,
2. on the knowledge of a small number of school approved experts,
3. on fixed teaching and learning schedules,
4. on government bricks-and-mortar schools as we know them today,
5. on credentialed teachers and cohorts of paid and volunteer supporters, or
6. on deferring learning because someone else has not yet learned it.
In short, learning on demand and individually initiated learning do not stand for learning as usual in formal schooling.
What has been conventional school organization for learning since World War II will not be wrong in 2010. It will be increasingly unnecessary for a growing number of people of all ages.