August 20th, 2010 by Jesse Moyer
Earlier this month at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, Bill Gates said that students going to college campuses to get an education will be a thing of the past, “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world, it will be better than any single university.” He was also quick to point out that the same will not be true K-12 institutions.
While I think there is a much to be learned from the residential experience of college, I think I actually learned more through my involvement on campus and experiences outside of the classroom than I did from my professors, I also believe the cost alone will make a formal college education prohibitive for many Americans. But that is a blog post for another place and time.
What I question is why K-12 institutions must remain solely place-based institutions. With the emergence of different kinds of Learning Agents, as outlined in the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning, why do students need to spend the entire, or even a majority of the, day in school in order to obtain the education they are interested in?
If a student was interested in the specifics of running a bakery or the art of woodworking, why couldn’t he or she contact a Community Intelligence Cartographerto connect with someone in their own community working in that field? Why couldn’t a student look to their Learning Journey Mentor for information about opportunities beyond school walls that will augment and/or enhance the education they receive within their schools?
While I am beginning to think place-based schools will always have a purpose to serve, for socialization if nothing else, I don’t believe students should be confined to the four walls of a school house anymore than a college student should be confined by the boarders of their campus.
Nicholas Negroponte "Making Kids the Agents of Change"
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