is increasing much more dramatically than anything we have previously experienced (Berman & Dorrier, 2016).
The implications of exponential change, and how the changes to come will affect students’ lives, are staggering. For example, exponential development of artificial intelligence makes the arrival of fully intelligent personal assistants foreseeable in the next ten to fifteen years. These assistants will be capable of natural voice interaction, able to learn from experience, and proficient at accessing all the knowledge on the internet. These smart digital personalities will provide young people with personal assistants that will monitor their schedules, interact with others on their behalf, become “friends” that accompany them everywhere, and be powerful tutors that can teach them on every topic imaginable.
Ironically, the human mind’s ability to cope with new developments like these actually hinders its ability to comprehend the magnitude of technological change as it is happening (The Mind Tools Content Team, n.d.; Yamamoto, 2011). This is an important point. When most people think about the future, they naturally make a linear projection of steady change because this kind of vision for progress is much more manageable for people to deal with. But because the world is experiencing exponential change (change that is accelerating), linear projections greatly underestimate the magnitude of change that we will actually see. Exponential projections, like those in the Kelly (2016) quote or those we present in chapter 4 (page 39), often seem too incredible to believe, but in times of exponential change, you must resist the temptation to look at a projected development and say, “That will never happen!” The truth is that when we look at technology through the lens of exponential change, we quickly see that developments that were once thought of as pure science fiction quickly become reality.
Hyperinformation Is Transforming Knowledge
Hyperinformation is the term Ted uses to describe the new ways technology allows us to experience information. First, the internet provides the average person access to an incredible amount of information, much more than any individual has ever had access to. Second, technology makes it easier to find the specific data we desire. However, technology is doing more than transforming the way we get information. It is also transforming the kind of information we get. Instead of just reading traditional text-based information, we can read, see, hear, and touch new digital forms of data. Games and simulations allow us to have virtual experiences like riding on a satellite, seeing inside an atom, watching chemical reactions, and walking beside prehistoric animals. Hyperinformation applies to all these types of information and the sheer volume of it. Access to hyperinformation allows us to move beyond the second-hand experiences of reading about events, places, products, processes, and stories to experiencing them in a way that is, for all practical intents and purposes, firsthand.
Mobile Technology Is Transforming Access to Knowledge
Schools have always been places where experts pass on their knowledge and skills to students. Libraries have long been repositories of a wide array of learning materials. Throughout history, people have physically gone to schools or libraries when they needed to learn something (Andrews, 2016). However, online mobile technology is changing the notion that learning is tied to a physical location. Mobile technology frees learning from the confines of schools and libraries because people can learn wherever they are, whenever they need new information or they need to develop a new skill. We foresee that as the power of connected, mobile technology expands, educators will find it increasingly challenging to adapt the way they teach students. It will be critical that teachers embrace the idea that learning will increasingly happen outside the school building and beyond normal school hours (Richmond, 2015).
Having easy access to knowledge from anywhere is also changing the kinds of skills that people need to succeed in life. Historically, schools have emphasized memorization. Being educated has long been associated with what you know. But when students have access to the totality of human knowledge via an internet-connected, handheld device (a volume of data that no person can memorize), they must understand how to use those data and determine what are useful and valid from what are not. These are the sorts of higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) that empower students to do productive things with the information they find, and we write more on these skills in chapter 3 (page 29).
Smart Technology Is Transforming the Teacher’s Role
Smart technology already surrounds us wherever we go. However, it’s important to understand just what we mean when we refer to smart technology. From cars with driver-assist features, to digital assistants that listen and talk (think Google Home), to the robots that build things, smart machines are a part of our everyday lives. However, we are only just beginning to see the emergence of truly intelligent machines. The cognitive ability of digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri is an indication of where things are headed, and where they are headed is a game changer.
Rapidly, technology platforms are becoming capable of performing many cognitive functions humans do (Gillies, 2017; IBM, n.d.; UBS, n.d.). We will soon interact with smart, digital personalities as naturally as we interact with real people. This intelligent technology will process our requests, retrieve desired information, and perform a multitude of daily tasks for us. Smart machines will also anticipate our needs and do things for us before we even think of asking.
Educators are not going to be exempt from the effects of this new smart technology. We are going to have to deal with the reality that intelligent technology will very soon be capable of performing many tasks that teachers currently do. This does not mean that teachers will lose their jobs. Instead, it means that teachers will have to embrace new roles in instruction (Ostdick, 2016). This is actually a good thing. Smart technology holds the potential to relieve teachers of the drudgery of performing lower-level-information-dissemination tasks in instruction (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). This frees them to focus on the much more challenging and rewarding higher-level tasks of teaching critical thinking and creativity as well as the emotionally complex tasks involved in helping students mature.
Technology Changes How Students Learn
It’s not just a question of how quickly the change of pace is accelerating or how easy it is to access knowledge. The kinds of change we write about in this chapter are not neutral—they profoundly impact people. Technology integration into daily living affects people at fundamental levels, especially children (Bowman, 2017). It changes how they live their lives, the way they expect others to treat them, even the way they think and the things they value. Although technology affects everyone to some degree, it most affects those who are born into it. Students in the digital generations have no experience with the way previous generations did things. Access to hyperinformation is simply what they experience and expect, and they run with it. It even changes how students think and absorb information in fundamental ways. Two important changes educators must consider when contemplating education’s future include how social networking changes life experiences and how technology affects the way students learn.
How Social Networking Changes Life Experiences
Students are always on their phones and other digital devices. They use them to talk with their friends, but they use them for much more than that. They are sharing audiovisual information like sound recordings and videos shot on their phones, YouTube videos, and music files. They are also sharing textual information in text messages, email, personal writings, poems, and research for school projects. They are using their digital devices to compete and collaborate in online games and simulations. They also use social-networking technology to connect with subject-matter experts who give them instruction on topics of interest. In short, social-networking
