For today's students working their way toward becoming the leaders of the coming decade the tools of today, particularly the Internet and the various programs and software that enable us to better communicate and present our ideas, are a key to their success in a highly competitive world. From the standpoint of a student who is back to school after a delay of more than a decade I have the unique view of where education and computers have been and how far they have come. I think that if I had access to the Internet when I was out of high school my success in school would have been to much higher level. The convenience of the World Wide Web would have made finding information gathering so much easier and interaction with my fellow classmates better faciltated. Not to mention the time saved with research and reading. So what does the future hold?
Firstly, the continued expansion of the use of the Internet and the programs that enable users to manipulate it will continue to proliferate. As discussed in class the power of the entities in and surrounding the Internet are growing exponentially year to year. I remember a few years ago that someone said that said that the average home computer had as much power as NASA had in sending the first mission to the moon. Now computing power has risen to the point where we can explore other worlds, so to speak. And as the strength of these tools mounts that exploration will become more and more realistic. Some day experiences in Second Life will be very hard to distinguish between real life and virtual reality. Maybe the underlying themes of all of those sci-fi movies about the future aren't so far fetched.
There are a number of people who utilize programs such as Second Life to make a living. There are folks who communicate with their businesses from countries far away. There are students who cannot get to classrooms who are learning through online interactions. In ten years it is totally possible that, with the likely levels of computing power continuing their exponential climb, that entire corporations will be run from home PC's. And as for Immersive Education, I see this as the initialization of the growing power of learning. An opportunity for students to not only learn but experience the sights and sounds of the texts they are learning. A truly realistic visit to the Eiffel Tower, being chased by a T-Rex, a visit to a live battle during the Civil War. To a degree anything is possible and those possibilities make learning more interesting.
But don't take my word for it. Check out Immersive Education for yourself. Click on any of the pictures in this blog to go to various informative pages regarding this wonderful program or click the link below to see a glimpse of the future of computing and education.
ImmersiveEducation.org
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