Wednesday 4 March 2009

Predicting the future - for the foolhardy...

I need to write a few lines on a position statement for the course I am doing. Well, here goes.

“Today's children/pupils are going to be young adults in a different world. What major changes do you expect to see in 5-10 years?”

Global changes - more concern over the environment, over-population and the interdependence of countries and people. Recovery from the financial crisis would have taken place and the lessons that should have been learned will have been forgotten. The global market will have recovered and the World will be even flatter than before. Collaboration and communication tools will be ubiquitous, small, portable and everyday.

Schools will be still be concerned with learning and teaching, still regarding most learning as a collaborative activity where students construct their own learning, but with many opportunities for on-line learning which will individualise the curriculum to some extent. The pressure to maintain our knowledge and understanding of the world through Industrial Age compartmentalisation will have eased and we shall see the breakdown of discreet subject areas and a more global conceptual approach to learning.

Companies which rely on command and control structures will be superseded by those with light units and flatter structures with expertise shared commercially across company boundaries. Daniel Pink's Abundance, Asia and Automation will seem out of date in a world concerned with the non-abundance of food and the flattening beyond just-Asia, but the interconnected-ness of business and services provided from anywhere in the world will reach levels not imagined. The "High concept, High touch" approach will be produced not just in the developed world, but anywhere. The developing world will be challenging the former developed one on all fronts.


What do you think? What will be the major changes in 5 - 10 years time?