The Future of Tech IS Education!

TECH ENHANCEMENT: 2029

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

An open source, education focused OS based on Linux, LinED was used around the world and developed continuously by legions of users.  You couldn't access the school internet without installing LinED.  Students installed it as a second OS on their computers and many ended up using it as their primary system because of all the free/subsidized software they could get on it.  A student could outfit a LinEd machine with a full suite of media, gaming and productivity software for less than the cost of a single corporate production suite.

When on a school network designed for it, LinED feeds a continuous stream of activity to your school profile.  Percentages of time with certain web pages open, applications running, even data on eye movement when reading a screen.  Students have continual access to their own data, allowing them to self-evaluate around productive use of time.  This feed back loop was one of the key events that broke the cycle of digital irrelevancy in schools and prompted students to use digital tools effectively, rather than having website designers using them as business interests saw fit.  Using LinED encourages digital citizenship, and digital learning, keeping the massive distraction engine of the internet at bay while still offering students access to resources.  This could only happen in an open source environment; users have to own their thought space online.


THE SOFTWARE

Within the LinED environment, students have quick and easy access to cloud based tools for learning.  But as a redundancy, these cloud based systems also install on-machine apps that allow students to minimize bandwidth use while maximizing productivity.  Network failure no longer means a loss of access to information. Students often fail to notice long return times on network/cloud apps because the work is balanced between their desktop machine and the cloud in such a way as to make bandwidth issues irrelevant.

An intelligent and responsive network enables much more efficient use of network resources.  Web access uses a complex algorithm to prioritize traffic, thus affecting loading times.  A student with a high social media activity and low performance in learning metrics find social media pages being deprioritized and loading more slowly, eventually stopping if they continued to allow themselves to be distracted.  Students who develop a balance between personal web use and learning never notice a slow down.  Students who prioritize learning on the network were rewarded by stunningly fast bandwidth.

Teacher grading is automatically synced with the student data and can be continuously checked by all interested parties.  Success not only means greater resource availability, but also offers support staff an opportunity to see class activity in a live environment, and intervene earlier in order to help students achieve an effective balance.

Any student with a LinED system is able to access apps and software at reduced rates, often free.  Students find that their LinED app ecosystem is rich with resources when compared to the private sector.  Even game companies buy into the system, offering reduced cost or free access to gaming environments tied to educational success.  Good students found themselves with free VirtuWoW and other game accounts on Learning+ servers, where they were able to socially network with other like-minded students, often leading to enrichment and collaboration that further supports them in the classroom and beyond.

This has greatly served to change the definition of student.

By developing a coherent feed-back system between education and technology, students (and teachers) find themselves in a blossoming ecosystem of applications, games and social networks that all benefit and spring from learning focus.  The subtext of learning colours all other opportunities, allowing the idea of continuous erudition to flourish within technology.

Developers quickly find that Learning+ communities online contain highly motivated, engaged and creative individuals, who make ideal Beta communities for developing new media and ideas.  They were willing to test and develop where most vanilla, private users merely wanted to use.  The resource begins to feed itself.

Identifying and rewarding life-long learners goes well beyond what is happening in schools, and has prompted a digital renaissance, eventually outpacing the "limited, short-attention-span, internet for quick gain and empty use" model that preceded it.  Developing interrogative digital citizens was key to this Web3.0 revolution.

THE HARDWARE

The mobilization of technology had already begun prior to the network catching up.  With advances in nano-technology which prompted leaps in quantum computing, mobilization went through a brief period of hyper-miniaturization.  Most computers now consist of small, hands-free devices that linked to interactive holographic displays.  A smartphone sized device now represents the computing power of a typical desktop machine from 2015.  With projected keyboards and screens, the smartphone evolves into the nexus for digital contact without having to carry energy and space intensive peripherals.

All of this was conceptualized prior to the takeoff in nano-technology.  Post nano-tech, manufacture has become a relatively straightforward process and the computer, finally, has become truly personal.  Modern computers act symbiotically with their users, recharging from their activity and enhancing their experiences.  The internet is no longer in cyberspace, cyberspace is now all around us.

In a typical classroom students walk into class with their PCs fully powered (recharged from the compression motion on shoes while walking).  The room's holographic projector links to each device, bringing the student online and showing them their own enhanced reality.  The card-like smartphone descendants students carry now are resilient, networked and self contained, redundant, self-charging and intuitively designed to enhance and focus, rather than distract and commoditize, their user's attention.  An app that distracts a user at a critical moment causing injury or damage is legally liable for their distraction.

It has taken many years of intensive reworking to make laws relevant to a cusp-of-a-singularity world.  In most cases, people prepared to step into the singularity do, though many stay behind to shepherd the lost and confused toward the light.

This was almost disastrous initially.  Until the networks and software became individually serving rather than serving marketing interests, the internet was a very dangerous place to be jacked into all the time.  The push for computer control on the roads came after a sharp upspike in accidents when personal holographics first appeared.

It wasn't until systems like LinED, and the vetted software it allowed, and other systems like VirtuOS that recognized that digital permanency meant that marketing couldn't be continuous and distraction was libelous.

Wearing a computer is now akin to putting on trousers, everyone does it one leg at a time, but everyone does it.

22C Ed: Gaming School

Kyle looked at the stairs going up to the next floor, he couldn't unlock the door to them, but he could peer through the small windows to the painted walls and carpeted floors beyond.

He looked down at his student badge, under his name and next to his picture it still said, "n00b learner". Kyle wasn't stupid, not by a long stretch, but he was incredibly lazy and was easily influenced by his peers negatively, though that had been changing recently. He used to spend most of his time trying to needle other students or his teachers. He found this amusing, only a small group of others did, but Kyle had been stuck on the first floor with them for two years now, almost all the rest of his elementary class had gone upstairs. The big 2nd year wasn't enjoying hanging out with the kids any more.

The bell rang on the first floor, the only floor where bells rang, and Kyle trudged off to his next class. The room was painfully white; tables, chairs, walls... the teacher walked in and put her briefcase on the teacher desk. She quickly looked at the scan log on her monitor, noticed who wasn't in class on time and said, "alright, let's begin."

The door closed automatically as she spoke, and anyone still out in the hall was being herded into remedial classes that would also take up their lunches. Very few people skipped or were late; better to just be there.

The lesson today was on writing basic sentences. Kyle knew how to do this, so zoned out during the instruction. Back in grade nine he would have talked over the teacher, thrown things at classmates or otherwise assed about, but standing for the whole class kinda sucked, so he didn't do these things any more. Damien, two seats up, was a bit of a tool, and he wasn't thinking about consequences very well this morning. He whipped a pen at the back of the kid in the front row. His chair seat dropped away immediately, depositing in him on the floor. Bright red in the face he stood up to the class laughing.

Ms Creighton looked at him for a moment and shook her head, "forty minutes is a long time to be standing Damien."

"He started it," Damien mumbled, looking at his feet.

"He still has a seat," Ms Creighton replied with a smirk, and turned back to the use of commas.

It was your typical n00b class, students kept forgetting about consequences and by halfway through half a dozen of them were shifting from one foot to another, while trying to take notes. Three others, including Damien, had decided to trade in lunch for a seat and were off in remedial, learning an awful lot more about sentence structure than they had perhaps intended.

The data being collected was more detailed than Kyle realized. His previous attempts (and improvements) in sentence building where being held up against how he performed today. His galvanic skin response (read through his desk) even gave indicators on how much attention he was paying, and even if he was likely to act up, though the system had a very low probability of that happening.

What Kyle didn't realize is that in the last six months his tardies had fallen to zero (mainly because he didn't want to miss lunch any more), he had no absences and his teacher had noted improvements in engagement across logic, numeracy, literacy, techniracy, kinesthetics and creativity. His scores had been slowly, but steadily improving, indicating a measurable improvement in learning facilities. Ms Creighton knew this, and she was hoping that young man who started the year so badly would ace this activity, as she knew he could; it might be the bump he needed.

With fifteen minutes left in the class Kyle's badge suddenly chimed. It usually only did this when he was late to class or otherwise in trouble. He irritably grabbed it and stared.

"Level 1: Novice Learner"

Creighton stood up immediately with a big smile. "Well done Kyle! The system had you on the cusp, but you've gone over!"

Kyle stood up nervously, his face flushing red. "What do I do?" he stammered.

"They're waiting for you upstairs! Enjoy yourself, and keep improving your learning!"

Kyle walked down the aisle as dozens of eyes followed him, some enviously, which the system made note of. The door opened as he approached and he was out alone in the hallway. Alone in the hallway never happened to n00bs and he almost felt vertigo. He walked stiffly to the doors to the second floor and they slid open as he approached.

"Welcome to the next level," a cool, female voice chimed as he passed through.

By the end of the day, Kyle was beginning to see why almost no one ever came back downstairs. His biggest class had a dozen students in it, as opposed to the forty he'd had in English this morning. Whereas downstairs was antiseptically clean and monotone, the second floor contained rooms in varying shades. Instead of shared desk screens, everyone carried their own computer, could share their content to the white boards, and were encouraged to develop what they had studied in class independently. Instead of six hours of proscribed class, the second floor had four hours of teacher time and two hour of independent study.

From having very limited, measured choice, Kyle suddenly found he could choose to focus his learning in specific areas. The system watched his initial ascension closely, some students needed a firmer hand while they became acclimatized to their new freedoms, though the data suggested that Kyle would not, and he didn't. As the novelty wore off, Kyle found himself wondering why it took him so long to get out of his own way, then he realized it, the system wasn't grading him on what he knew, it was grading him on how well he learned. Until he'd been able to demonstrate some self control, self direction and curiosity, he couldn't focus on all there was to learn; now he could. Instead of worrying about what the idiots in his class were thinking, he had, over the past half year, allowed his own natural curiosity to emerge.

Kyle quickly found Phin, a friend from the neighborhood who had ascended a few weeks earlier.

"Know what the best part is?" Phin said one day as they ate lunch in the smaller, less industrially designed cafeteria on the second floor.

"We're not n00bs any more? The technology access? The fact they the teachers can leave you alone because you've shown you can learn without training wheels?"

Phin laughed and nodded, "true, but not it! The real best part is that after we ascend through intermediate to senior, we get to go to the final floor... and it's supposed to be even better than this!"

Kyle looked across the caf at the doors to the third floor. His imagination took off.

"What could they have up there? Holographics? Hypnotics? Virtual studios?"

"You're such a tech-head," Phin laughed. "Bet they've got all that and more, but they also have the heli-pad, and I've seen Seniors come and go from it."

Phin left the thought of being able to travel on the supersonic 'copters hanging in the air. Both of them looked at each other and a new determination germinated between them. Deep in the core the system made the necessary adjustments. Kyle was improving Phin's approach to learning and Phin was improving Kyle's. Subtle changes were made in the scheduling to match them together and with other students at this stage of development. Teachers looking over the data called it the booster stage. Students at that stage could develop their own learning skills at a much more efficient rate, often over a surprisingly short period of time.

It wouldn't be taking Kyle two years to get up to that next floor this time.