The Future of the Internet (2020)
In earlier posts I’ve considered the Horizon reports and the implications of their finding for education.
Just recently another interesting report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been published.
In a report titled The Future of the Internet III, a survey of experts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, and the structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.
The methodology of this report was interesting. Technology stakeholders and critics were asked in an online survey to assess scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the Internet.
The scenarios related to what the internet will be like in 2020.
The report’s primary findings are that
The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing ‘arms race,’ with the ‘crackers’ who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
‘Next-generation’ engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
A few comments on the implications for education:
it seems likely that the developments in virtual reality will be driven by online gaming, with a “back-wash” benefit for education.
a number of respondents said that virtual worlds will revolutionise training and education, in fact all forms of knowledge sharing, and through virtual experimentation. Some reservations were expressed about the possibility of not being able to distinguish between the real and virtual.
interactions using personal devices will, according to some, need to be less conspicuous and intrusive.
it appears we still will not have solved copyright and plagiarism issues.
I did wonder fleetingly how these scenarios compared with the outcomes of Australia’s 2020 Summit held in May this year. As you will see if you read, for example, The Productivity Agenda: education, skills, training, science and innovation, the Australian view of 2020 feels much less ambitious and more down to earth.
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What an excellent summary - thanks Kerrie!
Sneezings gratings etc. etc…
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[…] The Pew report titled The Future of the Internet III said that one of the benefits of online gaming (as in World of Warcraft which has incredibly detailed graphics) for education would be developments in virtual reality. It predicts that virtual worlds will revolutionise training and education. […]
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