The Future Is Now
The 21st Century has brought about an era of discussions among scholars, political entities and the business community on how to create new models of education while taking advantage of the technology revolution. These discussions began over three decades ago with goals of creating new models of education while taking advantage of the technology revolution. During this time, our society has experienced technological advancements that continues the transition from the Industrial Age, to the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age. Each layer of transformationhas set a new stage of thought on how to provide a modernized education for a given society. In fact, this transition of technological advancement has moved at such a rapid rate that the traditional educational system may have missed the information age all together. In this sphere of transformation, educators must be mindful that the world is changing at a faster rate than ever before. Even the great expansion of the Roman Empire does not compare to the evolution of technologies now being experienced in this generation.1
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Digital age trends
To keep record of the digital age trends, the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative started publishing the "Horizon Report" in 2002. The "Horizon Report" identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. The Horizon Project is dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. In the 2011 executive summary, Critical Challenges were subject to review as the report examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. According to the 2011 report, the Critical Challenges that education currently faces is summed up by the following four statements.
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- "Digital media literacy continues to rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
- Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
- Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
- Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike."2
We can observe from the 2011 "Horizon Report" that a certain level of urgency exists today as never before. The economic community is faced with the examination of current educational practices with the hope of ensuring a brighter future for students. The report solidifies the technological expansion, and the use of interactive global networks, are the networks of learning in the future. These four points of expressed Horizon Report challenges gives a meaningful purpose for educational transformation. This transformation for a need to expand more robust offerings of digital media literacy may cause education minded institutions to inspect traditional practices that will initiate an effort to expand beyond the status quo and kindle a spirit that unites well-designed connected learning environments.
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To further advance these ideas of providing connected learning opportunities, Douglas Kellner posted a report on "New Technologies / New Literacies: Restructuring Education for a New Millennium." In this report Kellner states that, "A dramatic technological revolution, centered on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, has been changing everything from the ways people work, to the ways they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. This technological revolution is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes education a central role in every aspect of life. It poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the new technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing." 3