It’s dated, but Gary Marx’s 2002 Ten Trends: Educating Children for Tomorrow’s World still serves as a useful shorthand reference for anticipating near term social evolution teachers will likely address. I especially appreciate his topic sentence:
The status quo is a ticket to obsolescence.
Yet, I take issue with his inference that these forecasted trends hold some kind of dominance over schooling. In a way, they’re based in extrapolations from political theories.
For example, Marx suggests that classrooms should rely more on collaboration (a pedagogical adaptation of communitarian theories).
With due respect, collaboration counters a primary fact: individuals learn, not “groups” or other social fictions we call aggregates.
I suspect that collaboration stiffles more individual student learning than it enhances. That would be an interesting hypothesis to test; probably someone has.
Anyway, Gary’s trends serve as useful references for case statements to use mobile PCs such as Tablets, UMPCs, MIDs in classrooms.