What future are we aiming at? This series of 6 posts, Future Vision 2025, describes some of my personal education mission milestones. These are not predictions, they are aspirational. They are framed as significant differences one could see or make by 2025. What’s noticeably different in 2025 when one examines students, parents, teachers, learning, assessment, media & society? How and when these milestones are reached are not addressed. Some milestones are indicated by the emergence of something ‘new’ (at least at robust scale), others by the fading away of something familiar and comfortable.

Studenhighlighted textbookts 2025

Afternoons and nights of laptop in lecturehunching over textbooks with highlighters, cramming facts and formulae, are no longer the dominant study mode – something new has finally supplanted it.

Lecture ‘absorption’ is no longer dominantly a note-taking exercise (by 2015, having gone ‘digital’ courtesy of Moore’s law and wi-fi to distraction-filled laptops).

Students believe in their capacity to achieve mastery over complex subject matter – whatever they set out to learn. Students believe their investment of time will be both efficient and productive. Students have the autonomy to choose the pace and depth of learning as appropriate to their purposes. They see learning as worthwhile and often exciting.

Student expectations of the learning process have expanded beyond the downloading of knowledge and acquisition of skills, to the opportunity to upload high quality “solutions” to real leading-edge problems, including creative works.